Mark Zuckerberg

When Facebook was getting started, nothing used real identity – everything was anonymous or pseudonymous – and I thought that real identity should play a bigger part than it did.

Working with a lot of people at the same time is a task. I really like making stuff and getting stuff done. One of the things I really liked about Facebook was that I could always move so quickly. I wrote the original application in, like, nine days at the end of January.

If I could snap my fingers and do one thing in science, I would get more funding for basic science. But the level of funding that needs to be done is not on the order of millions, like the cost of the Breakthrough Prizes. It’s billions to tens of billions.

I started the site when I was 19. I didn’t know much about business back then.

All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school – my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people’s faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.

Our strategy is very horizontal. We’re trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically, we’re trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social, whether it’s on the web or mobile or other devices. So inherently, our whole approach has to be a breadth-first approach rather than a depth-first one.

Our mission is to connect every person in the world. You don’t do that by having a service people pay for.

We just think that there are all these different ways that people want to share, and that compressing them all into a single blue app is not the right format of the future.

I think a lot of the time there isn’t such a black-and-white difference between what’s a platform and what’s an app. It’s really just like the most important apps become platforms.

It’s, like, even in journeys like Facebook, we’ve had some very serious ups and downs.

We have a rule that if you check in code, you have to maintain it. So I mostly code on the side. I don’t check in code anymore.

After launching the first version of Facebook for a few thousand users, we would discuss how this should be built for the world. It wasn’t even a thought that maybe it could be us. We always thought it would be someone else doing it.

Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.

One of the things that we’re trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren’t all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.

We’re a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones – apart from the iPhone – can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we’d only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn’t do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into ‘Facebook phones.’ That’s what Facebook Home is.

The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5.

Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn’t really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn’t until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.

We want to make it so that anyone, anywhere – a child growing up in rural India who never had a computer – can go to a store, get a phone, get online, and get access to all of the same things that you and I appreciate about the Internet.

I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.