Mark Zuckerberg

People love photos. Photos originally weren’t that big a part of the idea for Facebook, but we just found that people really like them, so we built out this functionality.

Our role is to be a platform for making all of these apps more social, and it’s kind of an extension of what we see happening on the web, with the exception of mobile, which I think will be even more important than the web in a few years – maybe even sooner.

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.

There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don’t usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

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

If you grew up, and you never had a computer, and you’ve never used the Internet, and someone asked you if you wanted to buy a data plan, your response would be ‘What’s a data plan, and why would I want to use this?’

The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it’s actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions… If people feel like they don’t have control over how they’re sharing things, then we’re failing them.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

I do everything on my phone as a lot of people do.

I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.

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

Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

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.

When we are thinking about stuff like embeds, we are not thinking about how we are competing with YouTube. We are thinking about how are we going to make it more useful for people to share stuff on Facebook.

There’s a level of service that we could provide when we’re just at Harvard that we can’t provide for all of the colleges, and there’s a level of service that we can provide when we’re a college network that we wouldn’t be able to provide if we went to other types of things.

Facebook and Instagram are both really popular with teens, both in the U.S. and globally across the world. I think what you’re starting to see is that there are all these different ways that people want to share and communicate.

We help Chinese companies grow their customers abroad. They use Facebook ads to find more customers. For example, Lenovo used Facebook ads to sell its new phone. In China, I also see economic growth. We admire it.

On engagement, we’re already seeing that mobile users are more likely to be daily active users than desktop users. They’re more likely to use Facebook six or seven days of the week.

Our role is to be a platform for making all of these apps more social, and it’s kind of an extension of what we see happening on the web, with the exception of mobile, which I think will be even more important than the web in a few years – maybe even sooner.

Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.