20 ms·

Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

341 points by jameshk 10y ago

bsbechtel 10y ago
Link to Scribd is broken.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  It's working now - https://www.scribd.com/document/321383212/How-to-Build-the-Future-Mark-Zuckerberg https://www.scribd.com/document/321383212/How-to-Build-the-F...
muninn_ 10y ago
If it involves Facebook, tracking, advertising, Mark Zuckerberg, or the like than no thanks.
- ninv 10y ago
  It is sad that Facebook is "the most influential companies in the history of the world". Targeted advertisement! just sad.
- ljk 10y ago
  agreed, but it's then
- mandeepj 10y ago
  It is not just advertising. It is the click farms that facebook has deployed. If you have not spent money to advertise on facebook then please do not down vote. Update 1: Sources (Sorry, I missed them earlier) - 1. Self experience. 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    > It is the click farms that facebook has deployed. Please provide a source when making a claim like this.
lubujackson 10y ago
Link to Scribd is down but I copied the text visible in the embed. Here you go: Interviewer: Welcome to How to Build the Future. Today our guest is Mark Zuckerberg. Mark, you have one of the most influential companies in the history of the world, so we are especially excited that you are here. Mark: I'm not sure where to go from there. Interviewer: Why don't we start with just the early days of Facebook? Tell us what it was like when you started it. Mark: Sure. So for me, the thing that I was really fascinated by and always have been is people and how people work. When I was in college, I studied psychology and computer science, and one of the things that you learn when you study psychology is that there are all these parts of the brain which are geared just towards understanding people, understanding language, how to communicate with each other, understanding facial expressions, emotions, processing. Yet when I looked out at the Internet in 2004, which was when I was getting started, you can find almost anything else that you wanted. You could find news, movies, music, reference materials, but the thing that mattered the most to people, which as other people and understanding what's going on with them, just wasn't there. And I think what was going on was that all that other content was just out there able to be indexed by search engines and other services, but in order to understand what's going on with people, you needed to build tools that made it so that they could express what was going on with themselves. I wanted to figure out what courses to take, so I built this little website, Course Match, that just made it so that you could enter what courses you were taking, and you could click on them and see who else was in them, and it did all these correlations. It told you people who took this course were likely to enjoy this course too. And the thing that just struck me from the beginning is people would just spend hours clicking through. Here are the courses that people are taking, and, wow, isn't it interesting that this person is interested in these things? It was just text, right? There was nothing that was super interesting there, but that just struck me as people have this deep thirst to understand what's going on with those around them. And there were probably 10 other things like that that I built when I was at Harvard before I actually got around to building the first version of Facebook that kind of added a lot of these things together. Interviewer: Did you think Facebook was going to be a company when you started? Mark: I built the first version of Facebook because it's something that my friends and I wanted to use at Harvard, a directory and a way to connect with the other people around us, and I didn't think at all that it was going to be a company. I remember very specifically the night that we launched the first version. I went out to get pizza with a couple of my friends who now work here. And I remember really clearly we were talking about how one day we thought that someone was going to build a community like this for the world and that that would be some company, but it clearly wasn't going to be us. It just, it wasn't even... Interviewer: It didn't even occur. Mark: Yeah, no. I mean it wasn't even an option that we considered that it might be us. We just weren't focused on building a company back then. We were just building something that we thought would be useful at our school. Interviewer: So as you look back, is there something that made Facebook different from the other projects that you had built that allowed it to turn into this, the company it is today? Mark: Well, for one, I think we kept going [laughs], so the others, Course Match and just the other different crowd source tools, they kind of served their purpose and then we were done, whereas with Facebook there was just such...people loved it and had such an intensity of using it. I think within a couple of weeks two-thirds of students at Harvard were using it. And all these other students at MIT and other local universities were writing in asking us if we could open up a Facebook at their school, so we kind of just followed that. Again, I didn't set out and my roommates didn't set out to build a service that we were going to turn into a company, but we just kind of followed what people wanted, and that led us to expand it to all these other schools and eventually beyond schools and to...at some point, once we'd hired a bunch of people, we decided to turn it into a company and go for this mission of connecting the world, but that's not where we started.
deleted 10y ago
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aestetix 10y ago
Does this include Internet.org, the "wolf in sheep's clothing" of technology initiatives?
asurty 10y ago
is this available as a podcast?
- katm 10y ago
  It's on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ycombinator/how-to-build-the-future-mark-zuckerberg https://soundcloud.com/ycombinator/how-to-build-the-future-m...
  - flinty 10y ago
    Weird, searching for ycombinator https://soundcloud.com/akharris https://soundcloud.com/akharris this podcast comes up and not the one linked on soundcloud above
elmar 10y ago
Peter Thiel view on the $1B offer from Yahoo Starts at 1:15 https://youtu.be/54NIcx3HJSE?t=75 https://youtu.be/54NIcx3HJSE?t=75
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
artf 10y ago
Am I the only one who see a some kind of deep emptiness in Mark's eyes?
- ninv 10y ago
  Yes sir.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  I don't see it. I think it may be just because he's looking intently at Sam (the interviewer) and the camera is on Sam's left, and so it's filming his eyes edge-on.
- zpallin 10y ago
  He's talking about understanding facial expressions... and I'm reading his, and for some reason he just looks like he is about to cry the whole time. Not sure if it's because he is emotionally positive about the things he is talking about, or upset about something. I get like that sometimes when I speak about things that mean a lot to me, so maybe that's what's happening. It's hard to tell, because I don't know him personally.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- callesgg 10y ago
  Nah but i do think it seams like he is terrified of being caught. Caught for what? I don't know. It is merely a feeling i get watching parts of the interview. It might have something to do with him shaking his head slightly side to side most of the time.
- shklnrj 10y ago
  He is a great CEO and to me seems to be having some form of Asperger's.
- dang 10y ago
  A comment like this, posted glibly to an internet forum, crosses into personal attack. That's not allowed on HN, so please don't do that.
dkarapetyan 10y ago
Sigh. Mark Zuckerberg is not the fellow to listen to if you want to build the future. He's only managed to re-invent the past. AOL, MySpace, FriendFeed, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. edit: Folks are getting a bit philosophical so I'll clarify. There are better models to look up to if you want to invent the future: Bret Victor, Elon Musk, Alan Kay, Richard Feynman, etc. Each of those people did invent the future or is currently in the process of actually doing it. Study the great minds, not the great businesses and business practitioners.
- colechristensen 10y ago
  But that's all the future or the present or anything is... Iterating on old ideas. There aren't any new ideas, creativity isn't pulling things from the ether, it's looking at old things in new ways. Geocities was an iteration on having your own webserver, myspace was the new geocities, facebook was the new myspace, $x is the new facebook ... it's just continuing on and on. Netflix is the same on-demand video that had been available forever in pay-per-view, etc. but it was just a little bit different and a little bit better and it has destroyed several old business models because of it (cable tv, video rental stores, broadcast tv, etc.) A car is just a nice horseless carriage which is just a more comfortable way to get around by horse which is just walking with help. Human being are just complicated ways for strings of nucleic acid to replicate themselves.
  - visarga 10y ago
    > Human being are just complicated ways for strings of nucleic acid to replicate themselves. And from that evolved mechanisms for learning, consciousness, culture and technology. Amazing creative power in such a "small" task. I think the drive for survival is the root cause of all the other reinforcement signals that drive the brain development, such as the need for food, sex, sleep, companionship, learning and so on. Shaped under the influence of these reward systems, the brain evolves to create the subjective, intelligent and ineffable experience we all know we have but can't properly explain.
    - colechristensen 10y ago
georgeglue1 10y ago
I'm not sure what to think about Mark's non-answer to: "So can you tell us about some of the hardest parts in the history of the early history of Facebook?" (He basically says the hardest point was not selling for $1 billion, and that it was a non-issue months later.)
- _RPM 10y ago
  Probably he can't talk about it without lawyers first, because remember, Mark isn't a single founder.
- wfoweoi 10y ago
  Well, as he clarified, the hard part was the management team quitting. But I think it's hard to be vulnerable when you reach that level of prominence... anything he says will be scrutinized and potentially be quoted for years to come, and will affect not only himself but everyone who works at Facebook. Even if you want to be authentic, there are powerful social forces which make you careful in what you say.
- fbdinglebore 10y ago
  He also left out the part where investor-genius Peter Thiel was pressuring him very hard to sell Facebook to Yahoo. Peter Thiel almost cost Zuck one of the biggest mistakes in business history. Another inconvenient fact that goes unsaid.
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    Was is it a mistake? What's the probability of massive success there? In 1000 universes with FB, how many times would FB take off like that? Groupon's looking silly for not selling at 6BN, at least as a company. (I think they personally made out ok?)
  - mulcahey 10y ago
    Here's how Peter Thiel wrote that event in Zero to One: > “When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn’t. A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.”
meeper16 10y ago
Oh shit. Not somebody that called his users dumb f*cks, cut and pasted myspace and is the next AOL. Bring us the founders of Google, a company that is orders of magnitude more valuable in revenue, users and more importantly, real technology.
earthpalm 10y ago
Worlds shittiest founder and less than the founders of Friendster and Geocieties. And, way less than AOL, which was bargained for $360B illion to Time Warner. It's worth noting that purchasing users that intersect with Instagram (with 50M MAUs) with cheap stock is not a business strategy.
aresant 10y ago
The TL;DR of how Zuck wants to build FB's future w/his quotes: 1) "Connectivity, so getting everyone in the world on the Internet." 2) "The next one is AI. I think that that's just going to unlock so much potential in so many different domains." 3) "[The next computing platform] - I think that's going to be virtual reality and augmented reality." For all the flack that Zuck is getting in this thread he lays out a pretty concise vision of what he needs to do to continue the FB's juggernaut run.
- metaphorm 10y ago
  um...his vision of the future is 1980s Sci-Fi novels?
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  Connectivity, AI, VR? You don't have to be a billionaire to see those being important. Hopefully we'll have a more benevolent entity than Facebook bringing us into that future.
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    You don't, but it helps make it real when you can acquire the best minds in that space.
    - duaneb 10y ago
      That's another way of saying you can reinforce delusion with money. It's only positive if it's right.
  - mpbm 10y ago
    Benevolence is over rated. Competitive self-interest is at least verifiably productive.
- jazzyk 10y ago
  You call the above high-level, vague (and mostly obvious) predictions - "a precise vision"?
meeper16 10y ago
You are correct. He cut and pasted MySpace then spammed beyond anyones belief to voyeristically spy on chicks he could not get while at Harvard. Facebook will go the way of Compuserve, AOL, TheGlobe, Geocities, Friendster, MySpace. Too boot, the founding team called their users dumb fucks? How does a company like this even exist. Google is orders of magnitude more valuable in terms of real technology and real revenue. Some privileged Harvard kid figured out how to create the worlds biggest Black Swan, aka Bubble, based on shallow shit.
- askafriend 10y ago
  Please leave HN if you are going to post emotionally charged, baseless, unfounded, irrational thoughts. I've learned nothing from your comment and I'm worse off for having read it.
  - meeper16 10y ago
    Citations are not baseless: https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=mark+zuckerberg+users+dumb+fucks&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=mar... See the revenue here: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/key-statistics?p=GOOG https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/key-statistics?p=GOOG You should leave HN for trying to suppress truth and free speech. If you disagree with someone copying and pasting myspace, essentially, and then calling their users "dumb fucks" you need to leave HN, now. In principle, you do not call fellow humans "dumb fucks". No decent human being disagrees with this.
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299805 and marked it off-topic.
throwaway29292 10y ago
He gave away, or atleast appeared to give, 99% of his wealth away. I can think of better PR stunts for much less money. He is still a net positive person for me, who inspires me more than most others.
- o0-0o 10y ago
  He gave his own facebook stock to his own charity. If you've ever owned a corporation, you know just how cynical, contriving, and conceitful that move is.
  - type0 10y ago
    Was it a real charity or non-profit e.g. fund?
    - dikiaap 10y ago
      Should be
  - stepanhruda 10y ago
    If you're giving away so many billion, you might as well oversee yourself how they are going to be spent. What sketchiness do you see here? It was already his money.
    - lossolo 10y ago
      He still could oversee it in non-profit organization. This is not an argument at all.
      - stepanhruda 10y ago
        Non-profits are regulated so it's transparent what they do with the money other people give them. In this case, it's Mark's own money. Even if he executed the sketchiest imaginable scheme, he's only wasting his own money. He is free to start a commercial company with it instead, but he decided the goal should be to do some good. The time this will become a problem is the second the company accepts money from other people. Then I will join in picking up pitchforks.
devy 10y ago
> I heard this story recently that at this conference where > someone has built a machine learning application where you > can take a picture of a lesion on someone's skin, and it can > detect instantly whether it's skin cancer with the accuracy > of the best dermatologists and doctors in the world. So who > doesn't want that, right? I wonder what that app is? Is it SkinVision[1] or IBM's proprietary medical techonology from T.J Watson Research Center[2]? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299930 [2]: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2860758/ibm-detects-skin-cancer-more-quickly-with-visual-machine-learning.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2860758/ibm-detects-ski...
- a3_nm 10y ago
  > So who doesn't want that, right? What about privacy? Doctors in my country (France) are legally obliged to respect the privacy of their patients and the confidentiality of medical data. A third-party cloud service, not so much. Edit: To be more precise, I'm not saying that medical apps can't be done right. I'm just disagreeing with the implication that an efficient medical app is automatically a good thing.
  - teej 10y ago
    Erm, in the United States we have HIPAA which directly makes "a third-party cloud service" "legally obliged to respect the privacy of their patients and the confidentiality of medical data". Besides, using AI doesn't have to mean using centralized cloud architecture.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - welanes 10y ago
    Similar apps have been around a while - http://www.wired.com/2015/09/social-network-doctors-swap-gross-pics-patients/ http://www.wired.com/2015/09/social-network-doctors-swap-gro... > And finally, if you’re worried about your own gnarly ER visit showing up on Figure 1, the app is very careful about patient privacy. Every time anyone uploads an image, the first thing they do is fill out a consent form. Figure 1 has an algorithm that automatically obscures faces, and tools that let the user erase any pixels containing names, dates, or any other identifying details.
meeper16 10y ago
Are you an idiot? Combine fecesbook with twitter, aol, myspace, linkedin, etc. and they are an order of magnitude less valuable than Google. Google did not start by being a voyeristic social network that anyone could copy and paste.
- sctb 10y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines. We're happy to unban accounts if you email hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll comment civilly and substantively in the future.
arthpalme 10y ago
Garbage
pcmaffey 10y ago
Fyi, the parent of the OP (http://themacro.com/future/ http://themacro.com/future/) has a header image that breaks on mobile.
arthpalme 10y ago
Garbage
arthpalme 10y ago
He's a dumb fuck.
o0-0o 10y ago
There is no way on Earth that we get to these dreams on the financing of a company that makes money off advertising sugar water and diabetes drugs at the same time. Hypocrites much?
- andrewcoover 10y ago
  That same argument can be used against Google, Amazon, or just about any company that builds a platform.
  - xorblurb 10y ago
    Then it shall be used. And we shall be sad about that. And we are not talking about building a platform. Facebook is hardly a platform. We are talking about advertising.
d_burfoot 10y ago
Is Sam consciously mirroring Mark's body language and style of dress, or is that just a weird coincidence?
- shklnrj 10y ago
  Actually Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel has extremely similar body language and facial expressions.
- mturmon 10y ago
  The symmetry of the staging adds another uncanny element: the frontal camera angles and the identical chairs add on top of the similarity in dress. And you're right, the similar affect of the two -- the earnestness, the forward posture telegraphing intensity, the lack of humor -- all together, it is off-putting. Later in the interview, Sam leans back which seems to break this unpleasant symmetry.
  - Gargoyle 10y ago
    The poor staging and lighting are responsible for most of what people are reacting negatively to in terms of body language and appearance. Terrible location for an interview for a number of reasons. They do seem intensely earnest, but both of them always do in the interviews I've seen. I personally don't see that as a negative in this sort of context, however.
- ebertx 10y ago
  Maybe they have the same PR/charisma coaches.
tedmiston 10y ago
Refreshing advice: Work on a problem you care about and don't worry about the rest until it's working. > Sam: So you were 19 when you started Facebook. One question we hear a lot at Y Combinator is, "I'm 19 today. I really want to do whatever I can to make the world better. What should I do?" > Mark: I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about, work on it, but don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working, and I think that...if you look at the data of the very best companies that have gotten built, I actually think a tremendous percent of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into some local minimum a lot of the time. A local maximum, sorry.
- deleted 10y ago
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- deleted 10y ago
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- zouhair 10y ago
  And also be extremely lucky.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    The good part is that if you are working on something you care about, you won't be as upset when you fail if you were building something just to become the next Zuck. This does contrast with pg's story, however.
    - joshuacc 10y ago
      > The good part is that if you are working on something you care about, you won't be as upset This probably varies from person to person, but failing at something I care about would make me much more upset than failing at something I didn't really care about.
      - 10y ago
tedmiston 10y ago
"I think Peter [Thiel] was the person who told me this really pithy quote, 'In a world that's changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.'"
meeper16 10y ago
Start a company by calling your users dumb fucks. Then make it so that it copies MySpace, a shit-fest. Then make it so that you can spy on girls. Thumbs up on that life plan. Shitty life plans work for the privileged.
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300076 and marked it off-topic.
limsup 10y ago
His low point was when Yahoo offered to buy FB for a billion dollars. Dark times.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Yea, sounds truly awful. Let me get the violins out.
- roymurdock 10y ago
  "The part that was painful wasn't turning down the offer, it was the fact that after that, huge amounts of the company quit because they didn't believe in what we were doing...the whole management team was gone in about a year after that."
  - hawkice 10y ago
    Making a choice that led to the entire management team leaving is tough, no doubt. Making any massively unpopular decision that leads to some of the smartest people working with you to actively flee your enterprise would be hard for anyone. That being said, there is something to be said about how this comment was made. Because the hard part wasn't turning down the offer. It wasn't even dealing with the outcome of an unpopular choice per se -- hard to imagine these people thought "acquired by Yahoo" was the road to product success, even back then. It was dealing with the outcome of telling people they'd have to wait, possibly forever, to see their efforts rewarded (it took them 6 more years to IPO, with Zuckerberg famously devaluing the stock of early contributors along the way). Noticing the lack of trust (possibly in both directions) _is_ a dark time, but it's hard to come to that conclusion when these things are referenced so obliquely ('people left' isn't a dark time, it's business).
    - mpbm 10y ago
      "Dark time" strongly implies a subjective experience. Maybe Mark meant that was an event he personally experienced as intensely dark. That's more or less the same situation that the TV show Silicon Valley used to stress out their founder. He's got something with potential and an offer to buy it for more money than he's ever thought about before. What do you do? Maybe go throw up in the bushes? How would it feel when you make your decision and then most of your team leaves? What if they're right and you ruined everything? That scenario is dramatic enough when you get to watch it happen to someone else. Living through it could easily be "dark."
thisisbad 10y ago
Is the photo below the future? Zuckerberg zombies living in a virtual Plato's Cave. http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/02/22/16/3173A83C00000578-0-image-a-1_1456157751384.jpg http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/02/22/16/3173A83C0000057...
honkhonkpants 10y ago
I'm sure the hardest part was backstabbing all his partners.
- bitchypat 10y ago
  Could have been the easiest part too.
- joering2 10y ago
  For someone that calls their users "dumb fuckers", I wholeheartedly doubt it.
- dang 10y ago
  That's neither civil nor substantive. Please don't comment like that here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299823 and marked it off-topic.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
prodigyboi 10y ago
It's somewhat comforting to know that Facebook relies on the learn startup framework to constantly experiment and innovate.
earthpalm 10y ago
Is this a joke? social networks are worthless, like a-hole, geocities and friendster. Stay away from the scammers. They are the next black swan.
tn13 10y ago
Election campaigners of Trump/Hillary would cringe at this video. Zuck's body language looks bad because of the chair their are using. It is slanted and Zuck is sitting straight. It makes him look less relaxed (like a job interview). Same with Sam Altman. Complete lack of emotions in Zuck's eyes. It might be part of his personality but it makes him look very detached from what he is talking about.
- sappapp 10y ago
  Here is a direct link the to recording hosted on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ycombinator/how-to-build-the-future-mark-zuckerberg https://soundcloud.com/ycombinator/how-to-build-the-future-m...
- gerby 10y ago
  I can relate to Mark having to disconnect from emotion or feeling in business. It's a very personal thing for me that I don't really want to get into, but it has to do with being consciously aware of free choices.
  - tn13 10y ago
    I am not judging Zuck at all. I am just saying it is a pretty bad way to showing a leader.
earthpalm 10y ago
He could have been more lucky if he did not call his users "dumb fucks".
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300306 and marked it off-topic, and banned the account for repeated trolling in the thread. If you want to commit to commenting only civilly and substantively in the future, you can email hn@ycombinator.com and we can unban the account.
shklnrj 10y ago
Is someone else surprised that Peter Thiel invested in Facebook when it had 100000 users and Mark Zuckerberg said that he planned to go back to college? What are the chances of that happening with a product today?
- qaq 10y ago
  Today people get an order of magnitude bigger rounds with 0 users :)
  - shklnrj 10y ago
    Hmm...that can happen, but does that happen for a 19 year old college guy? That happens today but mostly with experienced founders.
    - qaq 10y ago
      After FB any 19 year old with a product that has 100K users and is growing at a rate of FB I would guess would be showered with money (I am not a VC so my guess might be very wrong).
      - shklnrj 10y ago
        I guess so. Even I am not sure though :) I would love it if someone can provide some data on the inside of such deals with numbers :)
KasianFranks 10y ago
The Kardashian of Founders.
lossolo 10y ago
Seeing how he behaved while getting to his success i don't think he should be idealized. I would rather listen to what Elon Musk has to say about future than Mark Zuckerberg.
- readhn 10y ago
  I completely agree. Elon actually built something useful.
- l33tbro 10y ago
  Elon is coming up in the series. Hopefully up in a few weeks.
jomamaxx 10y ago
No mention of MySpace? Because that was a pretty big deal back in the day. The Lycos or Excite of Social ... Without MySpace, I'm not sure if FB would be. Oh - and remember 'Friendster' ? :)
fbdinglebore 10y ago
> And just to make this point, how far into Facebook did it actually become a company? > I don't know. I think it became a formal Delaware company when Peter Thiel invested about six months in. Isn't this an outright lie? He sure stammered over his answer. He's joked himself about the fact that Edwardo incorporated Facebook as a Florida LLC originally. This is how history gets rewritten to be more streamlined... The fact is Zuckerberg was extremely ambitious about starting a company and had many attempts. That Florida LLC could've been dissolved easily if Facebook had failed. There's no downside to incorporating really.
- jeevestobs 10y ago
  There's details of this on page two of this Business Insider article. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-booted-his-co-founder-out-of-the-company-2012-5?page=2 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-booted-hi... "His plan: Reduce Saverin's stake in TheFacebook.com by creating a new company, a Delaware corporation, to acquire the old company (the Florida LLC formed in April), and then distribute new shares in the new company to everybody but Saverin."
bozoUser 10y ago
Two things that need to be highlighted: I came looking for a video that would talk about building the future and I am surprised Sam & Mark spent lot of time talking about FB origins and other things related to FB and talk future only for the last few minutes. Its almost palpable the cold nature of the interview, they don`t shake hands nor greet each other as someone else noted the conversation seems very detached to say the least.
- elmar 10y ago
  Why shades of Asperger’s Syndrome are the secret to building a great tech company https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/04/03/why-shades-of-aspergers-syndrome-are-the-secret-to-building-a-great-tech-company/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/04/0...
- mpbm 10y ago
  Why would their body language have anything to do with the content you were hoping for? Yeah, the title is a bit more grandiose than just "Sam interviews Mark." I thought it was good. It's a huge topic that has hundreds of thought leaders so it's not like you should be expecting something mind blowing. For me, it was valuable because the whole "building the future" thing is still very much rooted in existing institutions. Outside of Silicon Valley, everybody "knows" that if you want to do something really big you need a government or corporation to do it. Everybody believes it's impossible for one person or a small team to create an impact. It's good to remind people that Facebook is changing the world, but it started in a way that lots of people could start.
readhn 10y ago
Why is M. Zuckerberg qualified to tell us how or to build us our future? Because he built brain dead website where people waste their precious time and lives? Building facebook - glorified yellowpages - is somehow a sign of high knowledge or achievement these days?
- tribune 10y ago
  Building a $350B tech company from nothing in 12 years might be a sign of "high knowledge or achievement"...
  - zump 10y ago
    Because stock price == value.
harscoat 10y ago
Calling BS on Mark, with FB new sponsored links in FB feed... this is total Business, not solving my problem or making my life better. To make the world a better place, Mark should have worked for FriendFeed.
- mpbm 10y ago
  It's disingenuous to claim that because a new feature isn't making your life better means he's failing at making the whole world better. Maybe you're one of those 10-100K experiments where some engineer pushed something out to see if it worked. Maybe a new feature boosts revenue so they can build solar-powered internet planes that bring entire cities a connection. Maybe it's just noise and isn't actually relevant.
oliv__ 10y ago
.
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't comment like this here.
jey 10y ago
Anyone have a link to the transcript that's not trapped inside scribd? Really, just plain HTML would've been fine, but instead it's trapped in a PDF that's trapped inside Scribd!
- tedmiston 10y ago
  I downloaded the plain text, stripped the line wraps, and put it on Genius. http://genius.com/Mark-zuckerberg-how-to-build-the-future-mark-zuckerberg-annotated http://genius.com/Mark-zuckerberg-how-to-build-the-future-ma...
toephu2 10y ago
Founders of successful companies don't spend their time reading about how other founders became successful. When Zuckerberg was 19 do you think he spent all his time reading interviews about billionaire startup founders? Thinking that copying their traits, following their do's and don'ts and imitating them will lead to success? No, he spent his time working on the product. That and being lucky. Some of these people lucked out more than others, and because of that they get famous, get interviewed and spiel out some B.S. about how to be successful as if everyone could do it (and that they 'made it' because of intelligence, skill, and hard work).
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  Indeed but it seems to be human nature to constantly look for prophets and seek advice on the one true way to live?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Absolutely correct. Zuckerberg lucked into Facebook after stealing the concept from a client. Zuck's self-esteem would be destroyed if he had this same honest evaluation of himself, so he has to tell himself that he made it due to his unusually high work ethic, intelligence, or other personal traits.
  - mangahero 10y ago
    This is true. He did steal this concept and then create it. The execution made tons of money.
  - downandout 10y ago
    Probably the biggest thing I've learned through hard experience is that great ideas by themselves have very little value. At this point it's irrelevant whether he copied the idea from his client(s), or from Friendster or MySpace. Out of pure luck, Zuck's version appealed to the masses enough to get them to register for the site and use the contact importer. After that, skill took over - Zuck knew that if a high enough percentage of users allowed the site to spam their contacts, growth to billions of users was a mathematical certainty. This is instructive for many startups. You don't need amazing or even original ideas. You do need to have growth features in place that, if users choose to use them, will make world domination an inevitable conclusion. Then it's just a matter of optimizing until a high enough percentage of users use that feature. If you are successful at this, you will have perpetual growth.
sparkzilla 10y ago
All these comments, yet no mention of how Zuckerberg stole the project from the Winklevoss twins? My, the memory hole is really working great.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  It was shocking me too. You're not alone though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12302303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12302303
tim333 10y ago
After turning down the YHOO offer: > ...It was the fact that after that, huge amounts of the company quit because they didn't believe in what we were doing. If you look at the management team that we had... >Interviewer: Did that whole management team leave? >Mark: The whole management team was gone within about a year after that. That's an eye opener. Guess most people are in it for short term cash. I bet a lot of them regret leaving now.
dineshp2 10y ago
Interesting interview, but I felt Sam could have asked more probing questions (for the lack of a better phrase) and I don't mean the controversies from the early days of Facebook. What was the thinking behind acquiring WhatsApp for such a large amount of money and how will they monetize the platform? How is WhatsApp going to be an important part of the future? Facebook's mission is to connect the world, but in the case of Free Basics, they violated net neutrality principles which is clearly not in the best interest of the users. Mark Zuckerberg also mentions that he finds it frustrating that people talk about AI turning against humanity, which is one of the things that Elon Musk, Sam and OpenAI are trying to educate the population about. Maybe a discussion about that could have been included in the interview. If any of the mods are reading this, maybe there could be some way that future interviews can include questions from HN? We could have a discussion about the questions that the HN community wants to ask, and the mods can pick out the questions that generate the most interest from the community?
- HiroshiSan 10y ago
  Seems like a lot of those questions and deeper probing were off the table before the interview even started. Considering Sam Altman was doing the interview and the content was geared towards ycombinator, it was very startup focused.
brendyn 10y ago
Σ$0.02: Perhaps a way to contribute to the world would be to figure out how to get rid of Facebook: https://stallman.org/facebook.html https://stallman.org/facebook.html Σ$0.04: Mark Zuckerberg mentions talk on the threat of AI as fear mungering, however, https://intelligence.org/ https://intelligence.org/ (MIRI) argues that advanced AI is a legitimate existential threat. Note that when MIRI speaks of "AI", they are not talking about fancy neural networks, but the fact that since humans are no where near any kind of upper bound on intelligence, and the space of possible Turing machines and self modifying algorithms is overwhelmingly large, plus reams of other arguments you , humans will eventually be able to produce computer programs with the capability of destroying civilisation. N.B: This is my brief summary of what their stance seems to be, and isn't a direct quotation or paraphrasing of MIRI's official opinion.

341 points by jameshk 10y ago

bsbechtel 10y ago

Link to Scribd is broken.

tedmiston 10y ago
It's working now - https://www.scribd.com/document/321383212/How-to-Build-the-Future-Mark-Zuckerberg https://www.scribd.com/document/321383212/How-to-Build-the-F...

muninn_ 10y ago

If it involves Facebook, tracking, advertising, Mark Zuckerberg, or the like than no thanks.

ninv 10y ago
It is sad that Facebook is "the most influential companies in the history of the world". Targeted advertisement! just sad.
ljk 10y ago
agreed, but it's then
mandeepj 10y ago
It is not just advertising. It is the click farms that facebook has deployed. If you have not spent money to advertise on facebook then please do not down vote. Update 1: Sources (Sorry, I missed them earlier) - 1. Self experience. 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
- tedmiston 10y ago
  > It is the click farms that facebook has deployed. Please provide a source when making a claim like this.

lubujackson 10y ago

Link to Scribd is down but I copied the text visible in the embed. Here you go: Interviewer: Welcome to How to Build the Future. Today our guest is Mark Zuckerberg. Mark, you have one of the most influential companies in the history of the world, so we are especially excited that you are here. Mark: I'm not sure where to go from there. Interviewer: Why don't we start with just the early days of Facebook? Tell us what it was like when you started it. Mark: Sure. So for me, the thing that I was really fascinated by and always have been is people and how people work. When I was in college, I studied psychology and computer science, and one of the things that you learn when you study psychology is that there are all these parts of the brain which are geared just towards understanding people, understanding language, how to communicate with each other, understanding facial expressions, emotions, processing. Yet when I looked out at the Internet in 2004, which was when I was getting started, you can find almost anything else that you wanted. You could find news, movies, music, reference materials, but the thing that mattered the most to people, which as other people and understanding what's going on with them, just wasn't there. And I think what was going on was that all that other content was just out there able to be indexed by search engines and other services, but in order to understand what's going on with people, you needed to build tools that made it so that they could express what was going on with themselves. I wanted to figure out what courses to take, so I built this little website, Course Match, that just made it so that you could enter what courses you were taking, and you could click on them and see who else was in them, and it did all these correlations. It told you people who took this course were likely to enjoy this course too. And the thing that just struck me from the beginning is people would just spend hours clicking through. Here are the courses that people are taking, and, wow, isn't it interesting that this person is interested in these things? It was just text, right? There was nothing that was super interesting there, but that just struck me as people have this deep thirst to understand what's going on with those around them. And there were probably 10 other things like that that I built when I was at Harvard before I actually got around to building the first version of Facebook that kind of added a lot of these things together. Interviewer: Did you think Facebook was going to be a company when you started? Mark: I built the first version of Facebook because it's something that my friends and I wanted to use at Harvard, a directory and a way to connect with the other people around us, and I didn't think at all that it was going to be a company. I remember very specifically the night that we launched the first version. I went out to get pizza with a couple of my friends who now work here. And I remember really clearly we were talking about how one day we thought that someone was going to build a community like this for the world and that that would be some company, but it clearly wasn't going to be us. It just, it wasn't even... Interviewer: It didn't even occur. Mark: Yeah, no. I mean it wasn't even an option that we considered that it might be us. We just weren't focused on building a company back then. We were just building something that we thought would be useful at our school. Interviewer: So as you look back, is there something that made Facebook different from the other projects that you had built that allowed it to turn into this, the company it is today? Mark: Well, for one, I think we kept going [laughs], so the others, Course Match and just the other different crowd source tools, they kind of served their purpose and then we were done, whereas with Facebook there was just such...people loved it and had such an intensity of using it. I think within a couple of weeks two-thirds of students at Harvard were using it. And all these other students at MIT and other local universities were writing in asking us if we could open up a Facebook at their school, so we kind of just followed that. Again, I didn't set out and my roommates didn't set out to build a service that we were going to turn into a company, but we just kind of followed what people wanted, and that led us to expand it to all these other schools and eventually beyond schools and to...at some point, once we'd hired a bunch of people, we decided to turn it into a company and go for this mission of connecting the world, but that's not where we started.

deleted 10y ago

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aestetix 10y ago

Does this include Internet.org, the "wolf in sheep's clothing" of technology initiatives?

asurty 10y ago

is this available as a podcast?

katm 10y ago
It's on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ycombinator/how-to-build-the-future-mark-zuckerberg https://soundcloud.com/ycombinator/how-to-build-the-future-m...
- flinty 10y ago
  Weird, searching for ycombinator https://soundcloud.com/akharris https://soundcloud.com/akharris this podcast comes up and not the one linked on soundcloud above

elmar 10y ago

Peter Thiel view on the $1B offer from Yahoo Starts at 1:15 https://youtu.be/54NIcx3HJSE?t=75 https://youtu.be/54NIcx3HJSE?t=75

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

artf 10y ago

Am I the only one who see a some kind of deep emptiness in Mark's eyes?

ninv 10y ago
Yes sir.
nostrademons 10y ago
I don't see it. I think it may be just because he's looking intently at Sam (the interviewer) and the camera is on Sam's left, and so it's filming his eyes edge-on.
zpallin 10y ago
He's talking about understanding facial expressions... and I'm reading his, and for some reason he just looks like he is about to cry the whole time. Not sure if it's because he is emotionally positive about the things he is talking about, or upset about something. I get like that sometimes when I speak about things that mean a lot to me, so maybe that's what's happening. It's hard to tell, because I don't know him personally.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
callesgg 10y ago
Nah but i do think it seams like he is terrified of being caught. Caught for what? I don't know. It is merely a feeling i get watching parts of the interview. It might have something to do with him shaking his head slightly side to side most of the time.
shklnrj 10y ago
He is a great CEO and to me seems to be having some form of Asperger's.
dang 10y ago
A comment like this, posted glibly to an internet forum, crosses into personal attack. That's not allowed on HN, so please don't do that.

dkarapetyan 10y ago

Sigh. Mark Zuckerberg is not the fellow to listen to if you want to build the future. He's only managed to re-invent the past. AOL, MySpace, FriendFeed, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. edit: Folks are getting a bit philosophical so I'll clarify. There are better models to look up to if you want to invent the future: Bret Victor, Elon Musk, Alan Kay, Richard Feynman, etc. Each of those people did invent the future or is currently in the process of actually doing it. Study the great minds, not the great businesses and business practitioners.

colechristensen 10y ago
But that's all the future or the present or anything is... Iterating on old ideas. There aren't any new ideas, creativity isn't pulling things from the ether, it's looking at old things in new ways. Geocities was an iteration on having your own webserver, myspace was the new geocities, facebook was the new myspace, $x is the new facebook ... it's just continuing on and on. Netflix is the same on-demand video that had been available forever in pay-per-view, etc. but it was just a little bit different and a little bit better and it has destroyed several old business models because of it (cable tv, video rental stores, broadcast tv, etc.) A car is just a nice horseless carriage which is just a more comfortable way to get around by horse which is just walking with help. Human being are just complicated ways for strings of nucleic acid to replicate themselves.
- visarga 10y ago
  > Human being are just complicated ways for strings of nucleic acid to replicate themselves. And from that evolved mechanisms for learning, consciousness, culture and technology. Amazing creative power in such a "small" task. I think the drive for survival is the root cause of all the other reinforcement signals that drive the brain development, such as the need for food, sex, sleep, companionship, learning and so on. Shaped under the influence of these reward systems, the brain evolves to create the subjective, intelligent and ineffable experience we all know we have but can't properly explain.
  - colechristensen 10y ago

georgeglue1 10y ago

I'm not sure what to think about Mark's non-answer to: "So can you tell us about some of the hardest parts in the history of the early history of Facebook?" (He basically says the hardest point was not selling for $1 billion, and that it was a non-issue months later.)

_RPM 10y ago
Probably he can't talk about it without lawyers first, because remember, Mark isn't a single founder.
wfoweoi 10y ago
Well, as he clarified, the hard part was the management team quitting. But I think it's hard to be vulnerable when you reach that level of prominence... anything he says will be scrutinized and potentially be quoted for years to come, and will affect not only himself but everyone who works at Facebook. Even if you want to be authentic, there are powerful social forces which make you careful in what you say.
fbdinglebore 10y ago
He also left out the part where investor-genius Peter Thiel was pressuring him very hard to sell Facebook to Yahoo. Peter Thiel almost cost Zuck one of the biggest mistakes in business history. Another inconvenient fact that goes unsaid.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Was is it a mistake? What's the probability of massive success there? In 1000 universes with FB, how many times would FB take off like that? Groupon's looking silly for not selling at 6BN, at least as a company. (I think they personally made out ok?)
- mulcahey 10y ago
  Here's how Peter Thiel wrote that event in Zero to One: > “When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn’t. A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.”

meeper16 10y ago

Oh shit. Not somebody that called his users dumb f*cks, cut and pasted myspace and is the next AOL. Bring us the founders of Google, a company that is orders of magnitude more valuable in revenue, users and more importantly, real technology.

earthpalm 10y ago

Worlds shittiest founder and less than the founders of Friendster and Geocieties. And, way less than AOL, which was bargained for $360B illion to Time Warner. It's worth noting that purchasing users that intersect with Instagram (with 50M MAUs) with cheap stock is not a business strategy.

aresant 10y ago

The TL;DR of how Zuck wants to build FB's future w/his quotes: 1) "Connectivity, so getting everyone in the world on the Internet." 2) "The next one is AI. I think that that's just going to unlock so much potential in so many different domains." 3) "[The next computing platform] - I think that's going to be virtual reality and augmented reality." For all the flack that Zuck is getting in this thread he lays out a pretty concise vision of what he needs to do to continue the FB's juggernaut run.

metaphorm 10y ago
um...his vision of the future is 1980s Sci-Fi novels?
aaron-lebo 10y ago
Connectivity, AI, VR? You don't have to be a billionaire to see those being important. Hopefully we'll have a more benevolent entity than Facebook bringing us into that future.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  You don't, but it helps make it real when you can acquire the best minds in that space.
  - duaneb 10y ago
    That's another way of saying you can reinforce delusion with money. It's only positive if it's right.
- mpbm 10y ago
  Benevolence is over rated. Competitive self-interest is at least verifiably productive.
jazzyk 10y ago
You call the above high-level, vague (and mostly obvious) predictions - "a precise vision"?

meeper16 10y ago

You are correct. He cut and pasted MySpace then spammed beyond anyones belief to voyeristically spy on chicks he could not get while at Harvard. Facebook will go the way of Compuserve, AOL, TheGlobe, Geocities, Friendster, MySpace. Too boot, the founding team called their users dumb fucks? How does a company like this even exist. Google is orders of magnitude more valuable in terms of real technology and real revenue. Some privileged Harvard kid figured out how to create the worlds biggest Black Swan, aka Bubble, based on shallow shit.

askafriend 10y ago
Please leave HN if you are going to post emotionally charged, baseless, unfounded, irrational thoughts. I've learned nothing from your comment and I'm worse off for having read it.
- meeper16 10y ago
  Citations are not baseless: https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=mark+zuckerberg+users+dumb+fucks&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=mar... See the revenue here: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/key-statistics?p=GOOG https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/key-statistics?p=GOOG You should leave HN for trying to suppress truth and free speech. If you disagree with someone copying and pasting myspace, essentially, and then calling their users "dumb fucks" you need to leave HN, now. In principle, you do not call fellow humans "dumb fucks". No decent human being disagrees with this.
sctb 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299805 and marked it off-topic.

throwaway29292 10y ago

He gave away, or atleast appeared to give, 99% of his wealth away. I can think of better PR stunts for much less money. He is still a net positive person for me, who inspires me more than most others.

o0-0o 10y ago
He gave his own facebook stock to his own charity. If you've ever owned a corporation, you know just how cynical, contriving, and conceitful that move is.
- type0 10y ago
  Was it a real charity or non-profit e.g. fund?
  - dikiaap 10y ago
    Should be
- stepanhruda 10y ago
  If you're giving away so many billion, you might as well oversee yourself how they are going to be spent. What sketchiness do you see here? It was already his money.
  - lossolo 10y ago
    He still could oversee it in non-profit organization. This is not an argument at all.
    - stepanhruda 10y ago
      Non-profits are regulated so it's transparent what they do with the money other people give them. In this case, it's Mark's own money. Even if he executed the sketchiest imaginable scheme, he's only wasting his own money. He is free to start a commercial company with it instead, but he decided the goal should be to do some good. The time this will become a problem is the second the company accepts money from other people. Then I will join in picking up pitchforks.

devy 10y ago

> I heard this story recently that at this conference where > someone has built a machine learning application where you > can take a picture of a lesion on someone's skin, and it can > detect instantly whether it's skin cancer with the accuracy > of the best dermatologists and doctors in the world. So who > doesn't want that, right? I wonder what that app is? Is it SkinVision[1] or IBM's proprietary medical techonology from T.J Watson Research Center[2]? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299930 [2]: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2860758/ibm-detects-skin-cancer-more-quickly-with-visual-machine-learning.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2860758/ibm-detects-ski...

a3_nm 10y ago
> So who doesn't want that, right? What about privacy? Doctors in my country (France) are legally obliged to respect the privacy of their patients and the confidentiality of medical data. A third-party cloud service, not so much. Edit: To be more precise, I'm not saying that medical apps can't be done right. I'm just disagreeing with the implication that an efficient medical app is automatically a good thing.
- teej 10y ago
  Erm, in the United States we have HIPAA which directly makes "a third-party cloud service" "legally obliged to respect the privacy of their patients and the confidentiality of medical data". Besides, using AI doesn't have to mean using centralized cloud architecture.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- welanes 10y ago
  Similar apps have been around a while - http://www.wired.com/2015/09/social-network-doctors-swap-gross-pics-patients/ http://www.wired.com/2015/09/social-network-doctors-swap-gro... > And finally, if you’re worried about your own gnarly ER visit showing up on Figure 1, the app is very careful about patient privacy. Every time anyone uploads an image, the first thing they do is fill out a consent form. Figure 1 has an algorithm that automatically obscures faces, and tools that let the user erase any pixels containing names, dates, or any other identifying details.

meeper16 10y ago

Are you an idiot? Combine fecesbook with twitter, aol, myspace, linkedin, etc. and they are an order of magnitude less valuable than Google. Google did not start by being a voyeristic social network that anyone could copy and paste.

sctb 10y ago
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines. We're happy to unban accounts if you email hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll comment civilly and substantively in the future.

arthpalme 10y ago

Garbage

pcmaffey 10y ago

Fyi, the parent of the OP (http://themacro.com/future/ http://themacro.com/future/) has a header image that breaks on mobile.

arthpalme 10y ago

Garbage

arthpalme 10y ago

He's a dumb fuck.

o0-0o 10y ago

There is no way on Earth that we get to these dreams on the financing of a company that makes money off advertising sugar water and diabetes drugs at the same time. Hypocrites much?

andrewcoover 10y ago
That same argument can be used against Google, Amazon, or just about any company that builds a platform.
- xorblurb 10y ago
  Then it shall be used. And we shall be sad about that. And we are not talking about building a platform. Facebook is hardly a platform. We are talking about advertising.

d_burfoot 10y ago

Is Sam consciously mirroring Mark's body language and style of dress, or is that just a weird coincidence?

shklnrj 10y ago
Actually Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel has extremely similar body language and facial expressions.
mturmon 10y ago
The symmetry of the staging adds another uncanny element: the frontal camera angles and the identical chairs add on top of the similarity in dress. And you're right, the similar affect of the two -- the earnestness, the forward posture telegraphing intensity, the lack of humor -- all together, it is off-putting. Later in the interview, Sam leans back which seems to break this unpleasant symmetry.
- Gargoyle 10y ago
  The poor staging and lighting are responsible for most of what people are reacting negatively to in terms of body language and appearance. Terrible location for an interview for a number of reasons. They do seem intensely earnest, but both of them always do in the interviews I've seen. I personally don't see that as a negative in this sort of context, however.
ebertx 10y ago
Maybe they have the same PR/charisma coaches.

tedmiston 10y ago

Refreshing advice: Work on a problem you care about and don't worry about the rest until it's working. > Sam: So you were 19 when you started Facebook. One question we hear a lot at Y Combinator is, "I'm 19 today. I really want to do whatever I can to make the world better. What should I do?" > Mark: I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about, work on it, but don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working, and I think that...if you look at the data of the very best companies that have gotten built, I actually think a tremendous percent of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into some local minimum a lot of the time. A local maximum, sorry.

deleted 10y ago
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zouhair 10y ago
And also be extremely lucky.
- noobermin 10y ago
  The good part is that if you are working on something you care about, you won't be as upset when you fail if you were building something just to become the next Zuck. This does contrast with pg's story, however.
  - joshuacc 10y ago
    > The good part is that if you are working on something you care about, you won't be as upset This probably varies from person to person, but failing at something I care about would make me much more upset than failing at something I didn't really care about.
    - 10y ago

tedmiston 10y ago

"I think Peter [Thiel] was the person who told me this really pithy quote, 'In a world that's changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.'"

meeper16 10y ago

Start a company by calling your users dumb fucks. Then make it so that it copies MySpace, a shit-fest. Then make it so that you can spy on girls. Thumbs up on that life plan. Shitty life plans work for the privileged.

sctb 10y ago
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300076 and marked it off-topic.

limsup 10y ago

His low point was when Yahoo offered to buy FB for a billion dollars. Dark times.

ryandrake 10y ago
Yea, sounds truly awful. Let me get the violins out.
roymurdock 10y ago
"The part that was painful wasn't turning down the offer, it was the fact that after that, huge amounts of the company quit because they didn't believe in what we were doing...the whole management team was gone in about a year after that."
- hawkice 10y ago
  Making a choice that led to the entire management team leaving is tough, no doubt. Making any massively unpopular decision that leads to some of the smartest people working with you to actively flee your enterprise would be hard for anyone. That being said, there is something to be said about how this comment was made. Because the hard part wasn't turning down the offer. It wasn't even dealing with the outcome of an unpopular choice per se -- hard to imagine these people thought "acquired by Yahoo" was the road to product success, even back then. It was dealing with the outcome of telling people they'd have to wait, possibly forever, to see their efforts rewarded (it took them 6 more years to IPO, with Zuckerberg famously devaluing the stock of early contributors along the way). Noticing the lack of trust (possibly in both directions) _is_ a dark time, but it's hard to come to that conclusion when these things are referenced so obliquely ('people left' isn't a dark time, it's business).
  - mpbm 10y ago
    "Dark time" strongly implies a subjective experience. Maybe Mark meant that was an event he personally experienced as intensely dark. That's more or less the same situation that the TV show Silicon Valley used to stress out their founder. He's got something with potential and an offer to buy it for more money than he's ever thought about before. What do you do? Maybe go throw up in the bushes? How would it feel when you make your decision and then most of your team leaves? What if they're right and you ruined everything? That scenario is dramatic enough when you get to watch it happen to someone else. Living through it could easily be "dark."

thisisbad 10y ago

Is the photo below the future? Zuckerberg zombies living in a virtual Plato's Cave. http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/02/22/16/3173A83C00000578-0-image-a-1_1456157751384.jpg http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/02/22/16/3173A83C0000057...

honkhonkpants 10y ago

I'm sure the hardest part was backstabbing all his partners.

bitchypat 10y ago
Could have been the easiest part too.
joering2 10y ago
For someone that calls their users "dumb fuckers", I wholeheartedly doubt it.
dang 10y ago
That's neither civil nor substantive. Please don't comment like that here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299823 and marked it off-topic.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

prodigyboi 10y ago

It's somewhat comforting to know that Facebook relies on the learn startup framework to constantly experiment and innovate.

earthpalm 10y ago

Is this a joke? social networks are worthless, like a-hole, geocities and friendster. Stay away from the scammers. They are the next black swan.

tn13 10y ago

Election campaigners of Trump/Hillary would cringe at this video. Zuck's body language looks bad because of the chair their are using. It is slanted and Zuck is sitting straight. It makes him look less relaxed (like a job interview). Same with Sam Altman. Complete lack of emotions in Zuck's eyes. It might be part of his personality but it makes him look very detached from what he is talking about.

sappapp 10y ago
Here is a direct link the to recording hosted on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ycombinator/how-to-build-the-future-mark-zuckerberg https://soundcloud.com/ycombinator/how-to-build-the-future-m...
gerby 10y ago
I can relate to Mark having to disconnect from emotion or feeling in business. It's a very personal thing for me that I don't really want to get into, but it has to do with being consciously aware of free choices.
- tn13 10y ago
  I am not judging Zuck at all. I am just saying it is a pretty bad way to showing a leader.

earthpalm 10y ago

He could have been more lucky if he did not call his users "dumb fucks".

sctb 10y ago
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300306 and marked it off-topic, and banned the account for repeated trolling in the thread. If you want to commit to commenting only civilly and substantively in the future, you can email hn@ycombinator.com and we can unban the account.

shklnrj 10y ago

Is someone else surprised that Peter Thiel invested in Facebook when it had 100000 users and Mark Zuckerberg said that he planned to go back to college? What are the chances of that happening with a product today?

qaq 10y ago
Today people get an order of magnitude bigger rounds with 0 users :)
- shklnrj 10y ago
  Hmm...that can happen, but does that happen for a 19 year old college guy? That happens today but mostly with experienced founders.
  - qaq 10y ago
    After FB any 19 year old with a product that has 100K users and is growing at a rate of FB I would guess would be showered with money (I am not a VC so my guess might be very wrong).
    - shklnrj 10y ago
      I guess so. Even I am not sure though :) I would love it if someone can provide some data on the inside of such deals with numbers :)

KasianFranks 10y ago

The Kardashian of Founders.

lossolo 10y ago

Seeing how he behaved while getting to his success i don't think he should be idealized. I would rather listen to what Elon Musk has to say about future than Mark Zuckerberg.

readhn 10y ago
I completely agree. Elon actually built something useful.
l33tbro 10y ago
Elon is coming up in the series. Hopefully up in a few weeks.

jomamaxx 10y ago

No mention of MySpace? Because that was a pretty big deal back in the day. The Lycos or Excite of Social ... Without MySpace, I'm not sure if FB would be. Oh - and remember 'Friendster' ? :)

fbdinglebore 10y ago

> And just to make this point, how far into Facebook did it actually become a company? > I don't know. I think it became a formal Delaware company when Peter Thiel invested about six months in. Isn't this an outright lie? He sure stammered over his answer. He's joked himself about the fact that Edwardo incorporated Facebook as a Florida LLC originally. This is how history gets rewritten to be more streamlined... The fact is Zuckerberg was extremely ambitious about starting a company and had many attempts. That Florida LLC could've been dissolved easily if Facebook had failed. There's no downside to incorporating really.

jeevestobs 10y ago
There's details of this on page two of this Business Insider article. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-booted-his-co-founder-out-of-the-company-2012-5?page=2 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-booted-hi... "His plan: Reduce Saverin's stake in TheFacebook.com by creating a new company, a Delaware corporation, to acquire the old company (the Florida LLC formed in April), and then distribute new shares in the new company to everybody but Saverin."

bozoUser 10y ago

Two things that need to be highlighted: I came looking for a video that would talk about building the future and I am surprised Sam & Mark spent lot of time talking about FB origins and other things related to FB and talk future only for the last few minutes. Its almost palpable the cold nature of the interview, they don`t shake hands nor greet each other as someone else noted the conversation seems very detached to say the least.

elmar 10y ago
Why shades of Asperger’s Syndrome are the secret to building a great tech company https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/04/03/why-shades-of-aspergers-syndrome-are-the-secret-to-building-a-great-tech-company/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/04/0...
mpbm 10y ago
Why would their body language have anything to do with the content you were hoping for? Yeah, the title is a bit more grandiose than just "Sam interviews Mark." I thought it was good. It's a huge topic that has hundreds of thought leaders so it's not like you should be expecting something mind blowing. For me, it was valuable because the whole "building the future" thing is still very much rooted in existing institutions. Outside of Silicon Valley, everybody "knows" that if you want to do something really big you need a government or corporation to do it. Everybody believes it's impossible for one person or a small team to create an impact. It's good to remind people that Facebook is changing the world, but it started in a way that lots of people could start.

readhn 10y ago

Why is M. Zuckerberg qualified to tell us how or to build us our future? Because he built brain dead website where people waste their precious time and lives? Building facebook - glorified yellowpages - is somehow a sign of high knowledge or achievement these days?

tribune 10y ago
Building a $350B tech company from nothing in 12 years might be a sign of "high knowledge or achievement"...
- zump 10y ago
  Because stock price == value.

harscoat 10y ago

Calling BS on Mark, with FB new sponsored links in FB feed... this is total Business, not solving my problem or making my life better. To make the world a better place, Mark should have worked for FriendFeed.

mpbm 10y ago
It's disingenuous to claim that because a new feature isn't making your life better means he's failing at making the whole world better. Maybe you're one of those 10-100K experiments where some engineer pushed something out to see if it worked. Maybe a new feature boosts revenue so they can build solar-powered internet planes that bring entire cities a connection. Maybe it's just noise and isn't actually relevant.

oliv__ 10y ago

dang 10y ago
Please don't comment like this here.

jey 10y ago

Anyone have a link to the transcript that's not trapped inside scribd? Really, just plain HTML would've been fine, but instead it's trapped in a PDF that's trapped inside Scribd!

tedmiston 10y ago
I downloaded the plain text, stripped the line wraps, and put it on Genius. http://genius.com/Mark-zuckerberg-how-to-build-the-future-mark-zuckerberg-annotated http://genius.com/Mark-zuckerberg-how-to-build-the-future-ma...

toephu2 10y ago

Founders of successful companies don't spend their time reading about how other founders became successful. When Zuckerberg was 19 do you think he spent all his time reading interviews about billionaire startup founders? Thinking that copying their traits, following their do's and don'ts and imitating them will lead to success? No, he spent his time working on the product. That and being lucky. Some of these people lucked out more than others, and because of that they get famous, get interviewed and spiel out some B.S. about how to be successful as if everyone could do it (and that they 'made it' because of intelligence, skill, and hard work).

dkarapetyan 10y ago
Indeed but it seems to be human nature to constantly look for prophets and seek advice on the one true way to live?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cookiecaper 10y ago
Absolutely correct. Zuckerberg lucked into Facebook after stealing the concept from a client. Zuck's self-esteem would be destroyed if he had this same honest evaluation of himself, so he has to tell himself that he made it due to his unusually high work ethic, intelligence, or other personal traits.
- mangahero 10y ago
  This is true. He did steal this concept and then create it. The execution made tons of money.
- downandout 10y ago
  Probably the biggest thing I've learned through hard experience is that great ideas by themselves have very little value. At this point it's irrelevant whether he copied the idea from his client(s), or from Friendster or MySpace. Out of pure luck, Zuck's version appealed to the masses enough to get them to register for the site and use the contact importer. After that, skill took over - Zuck knew that if a high enough percentage of users allowed the site to spam their contacts, growth to billions of users was a mathematical certainty. This is instructive for many startups. You don't need amazing or even original ideas. You do need to have growth features in place that, if users choose to use them, will make world domination an inevitable conclusion. Then it's just a matter of optimizing until a high enough percentage of users use that feature. If you are successful at this, you will have perpetual growth.

sparkzilla 10y ago

All these comments, yet no mention of how Zuckerberg stole the project from the Winklevoss twins? My, the memory hole is really working great.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
It was shocking me too. You're not alone though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12302303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12302303

tim333 10y ago

After turning down the YHOO offer: > ...It was the fact that after that, huge amounts of the company quit because they didn't believe in what we were doing. If you look at the management team that we had... >Interviewer: Did that whole management team leave? >Mark: The whole management team was gone within about a year after that. That's an eye opener. Guess most people are in it for short term cash. I bet a lot of them regret leaving now.

dineshp2 10y ago

Interesting interview, but I felt Sam could have asked more probing questions (for the lack of a better phrase) and I don't mean the controversies from the early days of Facebook. What was the thinking behind acquiring WhatsApp for such a large amount of money and how will they monetize the platform? How is WhatsApp going to be an important part of the future? Facebook's mission is to connect the world, but in the case of Free Basics, they violated net neutrality principles which is clearly not in the best interest of the users. Mark Zuckerberg also mentions that he finds it frustrating that people talk about AI turning against humanity, which is one of the things that Elon Musk, Sam and OpenAI are trying to educate the population about. Maybe a discussion about that could have been included in the interview. If any of the mods are reading this, maybe there could be some way that future interviews can include questions from HN? We could have a discussion about the questions that the HN community wants to ask, and the mods can pick out the questions that generate the most interest from the community?

HiroshiSan 10y ago
Seems like a lot of those questions and deeper probing were off the table before the interview even started. Considering Sam Altman was doing the interview and the content was geared towards ycombinator, it was very startup focused.

brendyn 10y ago

Σ$0.02: Perhaps a way to contribute to the world would be to figure out how to get rid of Facebook: https://stallman.org/facebook.html https://stallman.org/facebook.html Σ$0.04: Mark Zuckerberg mentions talk on the threat of AI as fear mungering, however, https://intelligence.org/ https://intelligence.org/ (MIRI) argues that advanced AI is a legitimate existential threat. Note that when MIRI speaks of "AI", they are not talking about fancy neural networks, but the fact that since humans are no where near any kind of upper bound on intelligence, and the space of possible Turing machines and self modifying algorithms is overwhelmingly large, plus reams of other arguments you , humans will eventually be able to produce computer programs with the capability of destroying civilisation. N.B: This is my brief summary of what their stance seems to be, and isn't a direct quotation or paraphrasing of MIRI's official opinion.