Facebook

“So we made what was a pretty hard decision at the time, which was basically no new features for two years, which is kind of a crazy thing.”

“You have to repeat your mission and your purpose and the values you care about over and over and over and over. And sometimes you're like, doesn't everyone know this? It doesn't matter. Starting out your meetings with this is the Facebook mission. This is the …”

“Often when companies need to take Like two years or so to rewrite their whole app or software for a new platform. They believe that they can't slow down feature development. So they do two things at the same time. They try to design a new product while rewriti…”

“He famously turned down a seventy five million dollar buyout offer in 2005. Followed by a 1.5 billion offer in 2006.”

“He invested in LinkedIn. He invested in Facebook. He invested in Pandora. He personally returned two and a half billion dollars to Greylock's funds.”

“All startups go through a valley of the shadow. All of them, PayPal, LinkedIn, things that I've done personally, things that I've invested in, Facebook, Airbnb, all have valleys of the shadow where you're like, why did we think this was a good idea?”

“We planned to have two servers running this to judge interest, and basically within 30 minutes we realized two servers wasn't gonna be enough, so we immediately doubled it, and then we doubled it again, and then we doubled it again until our entire server farm…”

“Every successful founding team at Google, Facebook, wherever, spawns its own little network, and there's nothing magical about the networks in Silicon Valley. They can take root just about anywhere that you have a few successful entrepreneurs willing to pay it…”

“I'd argue these common spaces are just as vital to Silicon Valley as the headquarters of Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn.”

“On a day-to-day basis, a lot of the decisions that I'm making are like, okay, is this going to destroy the company? Because if not, then like, let them test it, right? I mean, it's, if the cost of the test isn't going to be Super high, then in general we're go…”

“And giving people the tools to be able to go get that data without having to argue whether their idea is good through layers of management before testing something frees people up to move quicker.”

“I did think that someone was going to build a global social platform. I just thought that there was no chance it was going to be us.”

“I think more than any single product that we're working on at this point, that focus on learning quickly is the strategy of the company.”

“I'm much more motivated by making sure that we have the biggest impact on the world than by building a business or making sure we don't fail. I have more fear in my life that we aren't going to maximize the opportunity that we have Than that we messed somethin…”

“At any given point in time, there isn't just one version of Facebook running, there are probably 10,000.”

“We'd seen this funny dynamic where, you know, we talked about how we started it at Harvard, and then we'd launch at Yale, and then all the people at Harvard would be like, oh, come on, like them? And then it's like at every step along the way, you go from Yale…”

“Even if not every single release is perfect, I think you're going to end up doing better over a year or two than you would be if you just waited to get feedback for a year of all your ideas.”

“And I remember we explicitly talked about One day we might start a company. And this was after we'd started Facebook. So the clear implication was one day we were going to create a company, but this was obviously not the company that we were going to create.”

“I mean, we were like, on average, like six people for that first year. We only hired up to 13 right before we got acquired. So whenever people are like, ah, 13, I'm like, actually, it was more like five or six.”

“So we went out and we got all these influencers who were photographers and designers to sign up, and I think we had a hundred people sign up. And the day we launched, they started posting all their photos to Twitter and to Facebook, and we figured out the vira…”

“We took our data and our findings to Facebook. We gave them to Dave Morin, and we said, hey, check this out. And in turn, he gave us the Events API key that nobody else had for Facebook Connect. So we built the bridge for event creators to be able to just one …”

“I think that I know, because I live in it every day, you can waste an ungodly amount of money on influencers, on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, on Spotify just as easily as you can in a newspaper or billboard or radio.”

“When I make Facebook content, I'm thinking about parents. Because I know the demo's going to be older. Those are going to be different videos that I'm putting into TikTok where I know they're going to be youngsters. The words and the videos and slang and every…”

“Meanwhile, LinkedIn is acting like Facebook in 2015, where on LinkedIn, if you post about floral arrangements, or why you're a good option for a corporate floral, or just a one-off Valentine's Day thing, it is more likely that you will get organic reach. On Li…”

“For example, on the Facebook side, they say, well, what people click en masse demonstrates their actual preferences, what they actually like, and so we have a democratic platform that promotes what people click on. It's a reflection of actual behavior and pref…”

“I don't think their agents and so forth are that good yet, but the kind of the notion of, like, how do you tie the AI stuff into the advertising system and have an alternative, really compelling advertising system How do you continue to do engagement with the …”

“Like it isn't going to be the David and Goliath where David invents his new thing, AI, and it kind of resets the apple carts of the Goliaths that are appropriately bought into AI, which, you know, is intensely Microsoft and Google and, you know, some Amazon an…”

“Some of the bold bets, you know, I personally don't think work out as well. Oculus and, you know, the kind of the meta as they focus, but he's a constant infinite learner and takes bold bets.”

“We were, had protests all around the country, and 350,000 people, and within a couple of weeks signed a Facebook petition to boycott Whole Foods Market. Hundreds of letters were sent to our board of directors demanding that I be fired.”

“I think I wanted to prove that I'm smart or prove that I'm successful or prove that Facebook when they fired me and then when mint fired me, like I can do it. And I think this book was probably, probably some of that, like, hey, I want some level of attention …”

“I got fired by Facebook from Zuckerberg directly.”

“If Google was cheaper or Facebook was more efficient or people could do marketing themselves, like there wouldn't be AppSumo. There wouldn't be Airbnb if you could just promote your home yourself.”

“We made a Facebook page for liquid death long before we ever had real product. And we made a 1500 dollar funny video that got a couple million views. The page had like 80,000 followers.”

“One of the clever things that Friendster created, for those who don't know what the heck I'm talking about, this is way pre-Facebook. It's even pre-MySpace. Part of what it did to get people to put in a picture was it put a little gray question mark.”

“I would remove section two 30 for all algorithmically elevated content.”

“Their advertisers were spending at the time, it was early, over a billion dollars with fail, with Facebook through our platform, right?”

“Companies like Scopely, which we were a seed investor that sold for five billion in cash, companies like eToro, and like, and originally, like, we were investors in Facebook, and Tumblr”

“We were the fastest at the time, like the fast growing company to reach fifty million in like annual recurring revenue. It took us three years on the back of Facebook.”

“For the last 10 years, Instagram is an agentic AI creating a TV show for you about your life and your friends and what you should care about and think about, and it includes what products you should be aware of. That is a decade old AI agent, right? It really …”

“We offered to buy the Facebook for a million and a half dollars, which was a lot for us.”