Mark Zuckerberg

“I think if you look at some of the biggest, most important companies over the last 10 years, they're first time founders, you know including Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. So, you know, I don't I don't think repeat founders are always the best founders.”

“And so the way YC is structured is that during the course of the three month program, every Tuesday night we have a dinner where we have a guest speaker and people like Mark Zuckerberg or Brian Chesky Really inspirational founders who have done really cool thi…”

“The other more recent CEO that I'll pick out is Mark Zuckerberg, who I think is absolutely phenomenal. You know, two things about him. One is the confidence that he had particularly around maintaining that CEO role. I think he's become an excellent role model …”

“I think that idea has well and truly been replaced in the U S where it's okay to do that if you want to do that, but it's also okay to stay in charge. So you have, you know, very, very prominent cases like someone like Mark Zuckerberg, for example, or Jack Dor…”

“I think my brother is one of the greatest founders of all time. And has changed the industry.”

“VC is incentivized to build people up. You know, what I mean by that is as an investor, you want to invest in somebody and make them richer than yourself. Example, Peter Thiel investing in the young Mark Zuckerberg put 500,000 dollars into Zuckerberg. Thiel ma…”

“When the company went public on basically desktop revenues and, you know, the market massively changed to mobile and Facebook had done so much investing around mobile in their platform and in their technology and in their advertising that they made this incred…”

“One of the things that really strikes me about both Larry Page and Mark and, you know, a lot of the YC founders like Patrick Collison or founders of Airbnb is they just have a level of conviction that I think ordinary humans just don't have. They believe in th…”

“Mark actually carved into the wall in his apartment, fortune favors the bold”

“I think working with Mark, the thing that really struck me about him and how he runs his organization and what he pushes down through the ranks is we can only do so many things at once. And he's set up his company in a way that, you know, roughly every six mon…”

“The fact that MySpace came before Facebook doesn't in the slightest in the way I think about creation diminish the creative act of all the things that Zuckerberg and others at Facebook have done to make Facebook a great company. So first mover and invention to…”

“I can't imagine anyone would want to trade places with Mark Zuckerberg right now. So, like, that must just be the worst job on the planet, actually. Even though he has so much power, it must be a terrible job.”

“I've been in the room with Zuckerberg. I've watched him fucking lie to the President of the United States about what they know internally versus, like, the claims he spouts out loud.”

“And I think, you know, I went through this transition at Facebook when we went IPO and I had a great role model in Mark where, you know, his decision-making wasn't affected by being public. It was really all about how do we sell people best and how do we sell …”

“And I've been in the room with Zuckerberg. I've watched him fucking lie to the president of the United States about what they know internally versus, like, the claims he spouts out loud.”

“Rather than trying to poke holes in their business idea, I'm trying to figure out, is this person the next Bill Gates, or the next Mark Zuckerberg, and if they are, let me just step out of the way and not mess it up, just try to support them to achieve their p…”

“The thing that makes him so special is his rate of learning. The rate at which Mark absorbs information, processes information, and learns about different topics is just incredible. And, you know, he wasn't always like that. Like, everybody imagines, like, Mar…”

“If you think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg Elon Musk, none of these folks are just trust that the team will get it done. They're getting very involved in little details. And it's much harder to point to examples of incredible consumer technology s…”

“Zuck said something very interesting. He said, one heuristic to know whether you're saying something meaningful is that, like, reasonable people can disagree with it, and the opposite of it is also reasonable. So, like, move fast and break things could be, lik…”

“I mean, I think the lesson for the world is don't bet against him because he is one of the smartest instinctive people I've ever worked with. And he also is very competitive. And I think the one lesson as a leader, I think is that he is the best listener that …”

“He prepared really well every meeting, so you have to send in advance, like a short note about why, what decision you are expecting from him. If you fail to send his document, 24 hours, you know, by the minute before your meeting gets cancelled.”

“Like, for instance, on Threads, he was the one who was like, you guys should just try to build a separate app. And we were really trying to figure out a way to do it in the main app, because it seemed like It would be much more likely to succeed, and he was by…”

“We spent time with Mark Zuckerberg before we went public. It was like a year after his IPO, and he shared these lessons about his IPO, which was very challenging, right? His stock went on 50% after the IPO.”

“I would say I know Elon much more than I know Mark, and it seems like Mark is training really exhaustively, and I think Elon has, I won't go into it because it's not appropriate, medical conditions that would prevent him from winning any kind of match.”

“Of the tech leadership, of Satya Nadella, of Sundar at Google, of Zuck, has been astounding, and it's been correct and forceful in condemning, ah, the animalistic barbarian behavior of Hamas and the terror that they've wrought.”

“There's, there are three tech executives that that got sanctioned at the same time. Yeah, you already interviewed Benioff, who was one of them, it was me, And then, ah, and then Zuckerberg.”

“Mark Zuckerberg was like the most hated nerd in tech for a stint. And now he's come back to fighting Elon Musk in the Colisee and being in VR and everyone going, this guy's ripped and he's kind of cool again.”

“There are a lot of first time founders who are phenomenal. Like I think, you know, you think about Jensen from Nvidia, he's been, I think that's his first startup. It's turned out quite good, right? So that's the sort of thing where you'd also don't want to so…”

“Fuck no. No way. And by the way, it had nothing to do with anything other than they hated Zuckerberg, right?”

“I mean, I think he wrote his S one in one sitting on a mobile phone.”

“Mark once said in a Q and A in internal to Facebook that he said that he, and a lot of the reasons why we do that is because of how secure we are as people. And he would basically say that Something like, I don't know what exact number, but he said like, 80% o…”

“He'll have 350,000 H-one hundreds by the end of this year. That is 14% of the world's H-one hundreds, and he's going to open source the result.”

“I think my read on this is you have you know, one of the best entrepreneurs of our time that has basically all of the right underlying resources for AI. So lots of compute, incredible engineers, you know, billions of users, i.e. Lots of data.”

“And much of that is, is due to the trends we've already seen, which is, you know, the moment you have, you know, people like Zuckerberg that are literally willing to spend billions and billions of dollars commoditizing the model layer,”

“So one, Zuckerberg is one of the best meta strategists And I don't, I deliberately pun on meta, but meta strategists, like, kind of like, what is the game we're playing, you know, of any technology leader on the planet? Like, I learned from him on this, he's s…”

“I think obviously the public market should have responded differently because I think he is a great, you know, kind of metastrategist, and his, you know, kind of turn into AI who's going to matter fundamentally here is a hundred percent correct.”

“If you don't think that like the, you know, sort of Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, et cetera, analogy is not going to be the Musks, the Zuckerbergs, the, you know, sort of Bezos is that almost certainly, you know, sort of will be, you know, the case over the course …”

“The worst decision Meta probably made was Not being more publicly celebratory of Mark personally and Meta generally. I think Meta allowed, because the company was so focused on execution internally, it didn't spend that much time worrying about its reputation …”

“Mark was always in founder mode, you know. I remember once he, like, commented on a diff. Somebody was making a change to the composer on the web, and he commented on the diff and was like, I don't like this change. It was like a, You know, he's like an entry-…”

“You know, I never talked to Elon Musk before, but he kind of wanted to give me some advice on how to handle the situation. I talked to Zuck, Mark Benioff.”

“I think that's absolutely true. And there's incentives. Incentives are not always nefarious. Sometimes it's just your view of the world is biased by the things that you want to believe.”

“And if releasing a fully closed source model brings, makes them more competitive, I think they will. I think it's more than 35%.”

“It is almost impossible for most public companies to actually spend the cash there they're generating. So Zuck's got a triple down here because he's getting also a hall pass. The market's saying it's okay to spend everything, right?”

“He listens in meetings more than he talks by a lot. He asks smart people to give him input before he makes decisions. He goes out and spends an awful lot of time learning. I think his superpower is learning.”

“He is incredibly deep into understanding the work. Like, he does not coast, you know. When he started getting into AI, just the depth of the question that he'd ask, he just gets really interested in the topic and goes super deep, and that then just informs eve…”

“It's CO spite about how they were forced to run companies in 20, 21. I think there's versions and I'm a big Sheryl Sandberg fan, but I think Zuck is spiteful. He was forced to run The company in a, in, in a certain way. I know a lot, I mean, Owen from Intercom…”

“Mark Zuckerberg deserves to go for it. Like, he's, it's his business. He built the damn business. Like, I don't think you really have much to say to be like, oh, don't bet on the guy. And by the way, he kind of has to because his competitors are doing the same…”

“It's incredible, like, why don't, it's amazing that people are listening to some random research firm versus listening to people like Stan Druckenmiller, Howard Marks, Ken Griffin, Steve Cohen, like, Mark Benioff, people like Mark Zuckerberg you know, Jensen W…”

“I remember when Facebook had to go into Japan, Japanese cultural norms were that all the Japanese social networks back then were incognito. You couldn't, for some reason, maybe saving face or something. You could not share your real name or your photo. So ever…”

“Mark, I think is Mark Zuckerberg is probably the best. I would say distribution genius in the world.”

“I would say the best technical CEO, Larry Page, the best growth-centric CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, The best design-centric CEO, Jack Dorsey, and the best physical world operational CEO, the most likely to be Jeff Bezos next, Tony Xu.”

“He's, like, listening and absorbing everything that people are saying around him, and he's going to be on a vertical learning curve like crazy, because he doesn't have the ego need to just, like, say things. He can just, like, absorb. And, of course, it turned…”

“Some of the best founders in history have no trace of trauma in their background that I can tell. And I'll just give you two examples. You know, Zuckerberg is one who, you know, grew up in a classic upper middle class, you know, New Jersey household, very, you…”

“Zuck also has proven that he is the number one acquirer in the world. Like, no one acquires as well as Meta.”

“If Zuck expired, Meta's stock price would increase.”

“What Meta doesn't have is what Palantir has, which Palantir has the Alex Karp effect. Alex is really good at pumping up the PE ratio of the stock, and Zuck, I agree, is the opposite.”