December 02, 2024
As the company of Facebook grew, we faced a lot of challenges. One of them was explaining our company’s mission, history, and culture to new employees. Over the years, a lot of formative company discussions and debates had happened in Facebook Groups, over email, or in person. Those who had been present at the time had context, but for new employees that information was difficult to find, even if you knew what you were looking for. We wanted to try to package a lot of those stories and ideas in one place to give to all employees.
After years of sporadically checking eBay, I found a copy. It arrived at our office a few weeks ago.
Determined to create a better digital version, I reached out to a few public libraries and universities in NYC. One gave me access to their $150,000 DT-BC100 scanner.
[…]
So here it is, the highest quality publicly available version of the Little Red Book, preserved for anyone curious about how great companies scale culture and ideas.
Facebook was not originally created to be a company.
It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.
Changing how ideas spread changes how society functions, changes how people speak, changes how people live, changes how people tell stories, changes how people fall in live, changes who people consider friends, changes who people consider strangers, changes what being alone means.
People sharing more—even if just with their close friends or families—creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others.
Connection is the fundamental unit of society. And increasing the number of ways people can connect, and the number of people they can connect to, is a powerful tool for good. It blurs lines. It alters perspectives. It humanizes. Because when everyone is considered an “us,” there’s a lot less “us vs. them.”
Historically, those who controlled the media controlled the message. If you’re the only one with a printing press, you control what people read. Same with radio. Same with TV.
But what happens when everyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? When the playing field is level? When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to. Influence can no longer be owned. It must be earned.
It sounds cool, doesn’t it? Like some sort of vigilante justice for people who take too many pretzels from the micro kitchen. Yeah, it’s not that. It’s about sharing stuff on the internet.
Zuckerberg’s Law: The amount each person shares doubles each year.
That means each year, the amount of information shared by humanity is increasing at an exponential rate. That is massive. That is almost unfathomable.
BUT
As the amount of content is growing wildly, the amount of time people spend consuming content has not changed. There are no more hours in the day. So there’s a lot, lot, lot more content and nowhere for it to go.
That means there are two massive opportunities.
One massive opportunity lies in creating more ways for people to share more things. It stands to reason that the demand for better, easier, and new ways to share will grow proportionally as people share more and more of their daily lives. We’ve already seen this proven true as mobile phones have become more and more powerful. The sheer amount of things people can share and ways they can share those things is staggering.
The second massive opportunity lies in figuring out how to deliver this huge amount of new information to the right people in the right ways—giving people things they are interested in, in ways they can understand and consume quickly.
And historically, that’s what friends are for. There’s always been way more information in the world than time to consume it. Human networks evolved naturally as a way to help sort through it. That’s why we are drawn to friends with similar interests. Our friends are our news sources, as well as our filters. They bring us stories that interest us because our interests are similar.
The digital world isn’t that much different. There’s just a lot more information to sort through, and a lot more friends talking at once. But we believe that personal connections and social networks will always be the key to both enabling people to share more of their lives and allowing them to get valuable information from this mass of data.
Build products around people, not data.
Because data doesn’t care about you. Data won’t bring you soup when you’re sick or take you to a bar when you get dumped.
But people are surprising. People can think for themselves. Give people something exciting, and they will keep building on what you have given them.
And that gets even more excited when you give people a way to connect to more people.
That’s amazing.
That’s a lot.
That means each Facebook engineer is responsible for approximately 433,000 people using Facebook.
6 out of 7 people in the world are not on Facebook.
That’s a lot more.
6,000,000,000 more.
There is no point in having a 5-year plan in this industry. With each step forward, the landscape you’re walking on changes. So we have a pretty good idea of where we want to be in six months, and where we want to be in 30 years. And every six months, we take another look at where we want to be in 30 years to plan out the next six months.
It’s a little bit shortsighted and a little bit not. But any other approach guarantees everything you release is already obsolete.
Excerpt from “The Path Matters” by Boz. Posted on Sunday, May 10, 2009 at 9:57pm
The path Facebook took to connecting the world was not the shortest and that has made all the difference. By starting small and expanding out-ward we built a community. By integrating networks that had originally been separate we had to focus on privacy. By throwing open the floodgates of growth in increments rather than all at once we were able to focus on keeping a consistent design and building scalable infrastructure. These things are now part of the DNA of our company and they affect everything we build.
At each point in the punctuated growth of our user base we have had to refine our product to make it more general and more universal. We react to their feedback and usage of the product. At the same time, our user base is itself evolving not only in composition but also in their comfort level with new technologies. People are sharing content today at a level that would have been unthinkable when this company started, so our technologies and others also shape their sensibilities. In other words, if we had tried to jump straight to the end state, we would have never gotten it right.
In technology we are constantly looking to the future and trying to see things the way they could be. Once we have a vision we want to work towards we tend to choose the shortest path to get to that place. On projects of sufficiently narrow scope this is clearly the right thing to do.
When it comes to strategy, however, our success has come from not concerning ourselves with the entire path to the goal but rather focusing primarily on the next step in that direction. By taking one step at a time and iterating we are able to adapt quickly to a constantly changing landscape and bring our users along for the ride.
We aren’t done yet.
Every success shows up more things we want to do. It opens up bigger opportunities. Bigger challenges. Opportunities to take bigger risks.
But that’s natural. Do something hard and you want to do something harder. Accomplish that and you start seriously considering doing something impossible …
And let them share everything they want.
How?
The Hacker Way is about pushing boundaries. Testing limits. Doing stuff people didn’t realize could be done. Figuring out how to do more with less—sometimes with nothing. It’s a prison shiv, not a Ginsu knife. MacGyver, not Bond. It’s function over form and survival of the fittest. It rarely asks for permission. Or validation. But sometimes it asks for a fire extinguisher. It’s putting peanut butter and jelly on a tortilla because you’re out of bread. Effectiveness over elegance. It’s the belief that there is always a way.
(Front of sign: A painting of the Facebook like hand)
(Back of sign: The Sun microsystems logo)
This sign came with the building—it just didn’t say Facebook yet. Instead of getting a new one, we flipped it over and painted it.
The back still says the name of a different technology company, one that came before us, left as a reminder that if we fail, someday somebody might replace us.
One of our engineers wanted to make something that could take all the most interesting things from the history of your Facebook profile and make them easy to look at. So when the next Hackathon came around he gave it a shot. It failed. Then at the next Hackathon he tried again. It failed again. But the third Hackathon’s a charm right? Wrong. That failed too.
So when he found out another Hackathon was coming up, he did what any unreasonable person would do. He sent out an email recruiting strangers to work on this insanely difficult idea. And that’s when he found someone else who had been failing at the same thing. And that’s when things started working.
After a night of hacking, a team of strangers had a working prototype for “Memories.” It was cool enough to become an approved project, so they started building. Then, before they knew it, it went live. It didn’t happen on purpose. Someone at Facebook accidentally launched every active project to every single user in the world for 15 minutes. It was quickly fixed, but people had seen it. ANd one thing became clear. People thought it was cool. They wanted it.
And 10 months later they got it. The name had just changed from “Memories” to “Timeline.”
The Hacker Way is fixing a problem when you see it using the means you have at your disposal. The Hacker Way is fixing the problem of pedestrian inefficiency between Facebook offices by making your own crosswalk. The Hacker Way is not embraced by the City of Palo Alto Police Department.
Yeah Ok, So Facebook Punk’d Us
Michael Arrington
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
So we’ve had our fun with Facebook over the years (Why We’re Sueing Facebook for $25 Million In Statutory Damages, Republican PR Director Calls Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg “totally full of sh*t”, Randi Threatens a Bar Bouncer). But in general these things are supposed to flow one way – we mess with them, they take it gracefully.
Today that changed. They punk’d us, and we fell for it. Hard.
Earlier today TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid noticed something new on Facebook. When viewing any photo, it showed a “Fax This Photo” link on the bottom right of the screen. Ridiculous? Yes. But everyone in the TechCrunch network saw it. He fired off an email to Facebook at 5:05 pm. When they didn’t respond, he posted at 5:29: Facebook Now Lets You Fax Your Photos. I Have No Idea Why Anyone Would Want To Do This.
Things went downhill from there.
At 5:47 Facebook PR emailed and said “We already faxed you a statement on this??? Didn’t you get it?”
Then they emailed again at 5:51, saying:
Hey Jason,
We’ve been testing this product since 1992, and we are thinking that we will be launching this “innovative” feature at TechCrunch 50.
What do you think??? Uh oh. Our nose hairs started to twitch.
Then we asked a bunch of people outside of our network. Not a single other people said they saw the fax-a-photo feature.
Definitely not a good sign.
Jason then called Facebook PR. Jaime Schopflin took the call and, apparently, couldn’t stop laughing for five minutes. Between laughs while catching her breath she mentioned something about this being a joke, that nobody but us could see it, and that they were placing bets around the office on how long before we noticed it and posted. And something else about teaching us to contact them before posting. So, bottom lin, don’t expect to see this feature actually launch. Unless you come to work for TechCrunch, I guess. We still see it.
You won this round, Facebook. Enjoy your victory.
Oh, by the way, the feature works.
Facebook is written in PHP. As a programming language, PHP is good because it’s simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. The downside is it uses a lot of memory, which can mean slowness.
That’s the advantage of C++. It isn’t nearly as hard on memory. Unfortunately, coding C++ takes longer, is harder to learn, and most importantly, the entire code base of Facebook was written in PHP, making it pretty much impossible to go through and rewrite it by hand.
Besides, even if we did, it would mean all of our PHP-trained engineers would need to learn an entirely new programming language.
Ugh.
So that was the rock. The hard place was that at the rate we were growing, both in users and adding features to the site, PHP was slowing us down. And as we grew more, it would only slow us down more.
Then someone wondered: Why learn a new programming language when you can write code?
And that’s what they did. It started in a Hackathon, then it became a full-blown project. Ten months later it was in testing. Six months after that, 90% of Facebook’s web traffic we served using the HipHop source code transformer.
What do you do when you’re a small new division in Facebook trying to make a name for yourself? How do you prove that your team is fun and innovative and that other engineers should want to work on it?
This is a story of underdogs, napkins, and how the games got a bigger war room.
The games team was new. They needed people. But even if they got people, they wouldn’t have a place to put them because they were relegated to the tiniest of war rooms. It was so small even the name “war room” seemed oversized. Battle room, or skirmish room or mild disagreement room would have probably been more accurate.
But instead of complaining (okay, maybe they complained a little) they acted.
They bravely drew something on a napkin and bravely approached Zuck with said napkin at a Hackathon, and bravely got what might have been approved or might have been him just thinking it was a joke.
Regardless, that weekend the games team showed up to an empty office with a pile of wood.
The plan was as simple. Since there was no more floor space they could take over, they would take to the sky.
By Sunday, it was completed and the result of this dubiously sanctioned effort was glorious. The newly built, two-story-tall conference room loomed over the office. And it got them the attention they wanted (including attention from people in facilities with a better knowledge of California’s building codes), and it became one of those things you just had to show anyone who was visiting.
So, remember. Take pride in everything you do. Because here, what you build in a weekend could be shown to Katy Perry, Oprah, Kanye West, and a former vice president who knows a thing or two about inventing things.
Stay up until 6 in the morning and do something that’s not your job.
Why?
Because getting things done quickly is fun. Making things is fun.
Especially when you know that people will pay attention to what you make—people with the means to put what you make in front of a global audience.
So let’s say it’s a couple of years ago and you’re an engineer who has the idea, “What if Facebook let you send personal videos to your friends?” Well, you could make a PowerPoint presentation and schedule some meetings and try to convince everyone that it’s a good idea. Or you could just go to the next Hackathon and get a couple of people to help you make a prototype overnight.
Because, who knows? Maybe when 6:00am comes around, you’ll have made a prototype of something that will change the world. And 48 hours later, you’ll have a complete product that was just an idea two days ago.
Excerpt from “Stay focused and keep hacking” by Pedram Keyani.
Posted on Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 10:22am
Every couple of months, a few hundred of our engineers unleash their talents in epic, all-night coding sessions, and often end up with products that hit the internal and external versions of the site within weeks. These are Facebook Hackathons, and since the first “official” Hackathon in 2007, they’ve remained one of the most exciting opportunities people here have to make a major impact in a short period of time.
Hackathons are a chance for engineers, and anyone else in the company, to transform the spark of an idea into a working prototype and get other people excited about its potential.
We’re a culture of builders, and Hackathons are our time to take any idea—big or small, sane or crazy—and build it into something real for people to react to. Instead of worrying if their idea will scale for more than 900 million people, people are able to focus on getting their basic project up and running so the broader team can quickly iterate to make it better.
Projects are often driven by cross-functional teams, with everyone from engineers to lawyers to UX.
There are only two rules: you have to work on something outside your day job, and if it’s your first Hackathon, you have to hack. Everyone keeps working until around 6:00am or when they pass out—whichever comes first.
After each Hackathon, we keep the momentum going by holding a prototype forum where everyone who built a project can present it to the company.
Some of our most-loved products started at Hackathons, got props at prototype forum, and made it to your computers and phones, including Video, the Like button, Chat, Hip Hop for PHP, and even Timeline.
Hackathons are so valuable because they are a time when we’re able to think past the next day or week and just build without constraints. This time-pressured environment forces us to make mistakes and be comfortable with the messy, error-prone side of creating things.
Hackathon is also completely bottom up from organization to participation. No one owns Hackathon, which I address below, and no one dictates the projects that everyone works on.
Everyone in the company has complete autonomy to work on what they want to explore.
It’s important to realize that Hackathon belongs to all of us and is a living part of our culture that needs to be maintained. Because, it is our ideas, not our titles, that determine the products and features that shape the course of our company.
Greatness and comfort rarely coexist.
Excerpt from email
RE: Update to Audi Event
From: Mark Zuckerberg
To: paloaltofb
Date: Friday, September 18, 2009 9:40am
Our philosophy on perks is that we want to provide services that are utilitarian and help people with things they need in order to help them focus on our long-term goals. Everyone needs to eat. Everyone needs to do laundry. Everyone needs health services. Everyone needs to get to work. If we can make these parts of our lives easier, then it helps us focus on what we’re trying to accomplish at work and it makes us all more productive.
We should draw the line at productivity and convenience though. We are not in the practice of providing random perks, colorful bouncy balls or access to luxury cars. Sometimes we make mistakes since we’re all moving quickly, but if you see us doing any of these things you should question openly why we’re wasting our money.
We push people. We expect our people to be a little bit better and a little bit faster than we think we are. Sometimes it seems impossible.
But high standards are a job perk.
We make things that touch millions of people. We don’t expect it to be easy.
We expect you to change the world.
Being able to solve problems is nowhere near as important as being able to pick the right problems to solve.
Focus on solving big problems.
Focus on helping the most people.
Focus on impact.
Products that don’t exist rarely change the world. And until it ships, it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter how amazing it is or how clever it is if no one ever gets to use it.
Ship it.
Fast is better than slow.
While slow is adding unnecessary embellishments, fast is out in the world. And that means fast can learn from experience while slow can only theorize.
Those who ship quickly can improve quickly.
So fast doesn’t just win the race. It gets a head start for the next one.
Building beats talking. It beats being a full-time employee. It beats being well dressed or well spoken or well known. It beats being popular. It beats being in Mark’s inner circle.
The goal is simple: Build things that solve big problems.
If you can’t do that, none of those other things matter either.
The playing field is level.
If you build it, you will win.
Don’t be afraid of looking stupid or of getting in trouble.
Don’t be afraid of getting fired.
Stop waiting for permission.
If it’s the right thing to do, and you know how to do it, go for it. Make something cool.
Fear is an indicator that what you are doing matters. It means you’re doing something right. It makes you work harder. Stay up later. It’s proof that what you are doing is interesting.
We should be a little bit afraid of everything we ship.
Otherwise, we’re cowards.
There’s always a solution. Usually a lot. If what you’re doing isn‘t working, try thinking about the problem in a different way.
Maybe you’re too smart. Think dumber.
Maybe you’re too complex. Think simpler.
Forget about doing things the right way. Do what works.
Try something new.
Then try something else.
Facebook is not a sacred institution. We don‘t want to be. So don’t be afraid to have an opinion.
The goal should always be to make the best product. Not everyone will agree on the best way to do that, and that’s fine. Do what you think is best, and if someone disagrees with you, argue your case. Just don’t be a jerk.
And yes, Zuck founded the company and he’s the CEO, but remember, he’s also just a dude. Don’t waste your time trying to do what you think he’d like. Or what you think he’s thinking. Or what you think he might have said that one time when you were walking behind him on your way to the bathroom. You were hired to have your opinion. Not his.
Excerpt from “Act!” by Blake Ross.
Posted on Tuesday, July 12, 2011 at 1:01pm
You have all sorts of options for effecting change in the company:
If you really feel strongly about something, sprint the straightest path you can from your point of view to an engineer shipping the code that makes it reality. When you sit around and debate it in Ideas, you risk not only wasting your own time but also building a company culture where your coworkers believe that the right way to respond to an existential threat is to talk, talk, talk about it.
We hire the best, smartest people to solve insanely hard problems.
That means you’re good at what you do. That means the person next to you is good at what they do too.
So don’t hide things. Be open. Show off what you’re working on*. Talk. Let other people throw in their opinion. It doesn’t matter who they are or what department they work in. It doesn’t matter how senior they are. Everyone here wants to make good products. And they also probably know something you don’t. At the very least, they can offer a fresh perspective.
So listen to their opinion. Then feel free to disregard it.
*to people who work here, not TechCrunch. ಠ_ಠ
Subject: Please Resign
From: Mark Zuckerberg
To: fbstaff
Date: Wednesday, September 22, 2010 11:44am
Confidential—Do Not Share
Hey everyone,
Lots of you saw the TechCrunch story over the weekend claiming that we’re building a mobile phone. We’re not building a phone and I spoke at length at the Q&A on Friday about what we’re actually doing—building ways to make all phones and apps more social.
It is frustrating and destructive that anyone here thought it was okay to say this to anyone outside the company. This was an act of betrayal. The fact that the story was inaccurate doesn’t make it any better. I’ve had to personally spend a lot of time over the last few days—as have a lot of other people—cleaning up the damage from this mess. Even now, we’re in a more precarious position with companies in the mobile space who should be our partners because they now think we’re competitors. They think we’re building a phone to compete with them rather than building integrations to make their phones better.
So I’m asking whoever leaked this to resign immediately. If you believe that it’s ever appropriate to leak internal information, you should leave. If you don’t resign, we will almost certainly find out who you are anyway.
We are a company that promotes openness and transparency, both in the world at large and here internally at Facebook. That’s culturally important to us and I’m committed to keeping it. But the cost of an open culture is that we all have to protect the confidential information we share internally. If we don’t, we screw over everyone working their asses off to change the world. And leaks like this make everyone a little less willing to share information more broadly and undermine the culture we’re fighting to build, especially as we grow. I want people to continue to be able to ask difficult questions at our Q&As and have a strong dialog because they’re confident those discussions will be kept within Facebook.
Let’s commit to maintaining complete confidentiality about the company—no exceptions. If you can’t handle that, then just leave. We have too much social good to build to have to deal with this.
Mark
We are constantly making it possible for people to share more of their lives. Sometimes that makes them a little nervous. Add to that the ever-changing nature of our site, which isn’t exactly comforting either.
We are asking people to put their personal lives in our hands, and they do, because of the value we give them.
But just because people trust us with their lives doesn’t mean they trust us.
We have to re-earn it with every decision we make.
Excerpt from Stefano J. Attardi.
Posted on Friday, October 18, 2013, at 10:24am.
It is dangerous to think that everything can be measured, because that will lead you to believe that anything that which eludes measurement isn’t real. Emotions, feelings are real. People are not a deterministic black box that responds predictably to independent and repeatable stimuli. People think. People talk. People feel.
People feel the love that a craftsperson puts into their product. The quality that can only come from sweating the details that only a few will see. The delight that happens when all the tiny pieces come together to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. The pride that comes from being able to say “this is my best work”, and not “this is what worked best”.
Building a sustainable brand and business means winning the hearts of people, not just their compulsive clicks. It may sound cheesy, but if you want people to fall in love with what you build, you have to love them first. Love means giving without expecting anything in return. Doing something because it feels right, not because it furthers your goals.
(People over pixels)
Data has another limit: it doesn’t guide your product strategy. If your goal is to move numbers, that’s what you will accomplish. You will not come up with the next groundbreaking product or paradigm-shifting idea. You will not build the next Instagram, the next Snapchat, the next iPhone, or even the next Facebook. Someone else will.
Innovation requires feeling in your gut what the future should look like, building that vision, and having the conviction to see it through—sometimes even in the face of discouraging numbers.
A company with a vision and goals that go beyond moving numbers is more likely to innovate, and also more likely to earn people’s trust and respect. People respect a company with principles it will never question, promises it will never break, tests it will never run. A vision and values free you from having to second guess every decision you make.
The riskiest thing is to take no risk.
When you don’t realize what you can’t do, you can do some pretty cool stuff.
Remember, people don’t use Facebook because they like us.
They use it because they like their friends.
but
…
Everything we build should facilitate human connection.
This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember themselves.
— Socrates to Plato, speaking against the new practice of writing
The printed book is a thing of paper and in a short time will decay entirely. But the scribe commending letters to parchment extends his own and the letters’ lifespan for ages. And he enriches the Church, conserves the faith, destroys heresies, repels vice, teaches morals and helps grow virtue.
— Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes
What was this telegraph to do? Would it transmit letters and newspapers? Under what power in the constitution did Senators propose to erect this telegraph? He was not aware of any authority except under the clause for the establishment of post roads. And besides the telegraph might be made very mischievous, and secret information after communicated to the prejudice of merchants.
Sen. George McDuffie, The Congressional Globe (28th Congress, second session)
Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.
Boston Post editorial from 1865
I have anticipated radio’s complete disappearance … confident that the unfortunate people, who must now subdue themselves to listening in, will soon find a better pastime for their leisure.
H.G. Wells in “The Way the World is Going,” 1925
Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.
Darryl F. Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946
Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Clifford Stoll, Newsweek, Feb. 26, 1995
Excerpt from “Entering the world of fairytales, fantasy, and distractions”
by Pedram Keyani. Posted on Monday, April 23, 2012 at 2:36pm.
Every analyst, news commentator, and blogger is going to stake their reputation that we are the next big thing, the next big flop, the company that is going to change the world, the company that is going to destroy the relationships, etc. Some people are going to say this is the company for the next 100 years and others are going to call it a house of cards. Guess what!?! This isn’t their story to write, it’s ours. Every day it is our blood, sweat and tears that has made Facebook a core part of so many people’s lives and it is us that will make it succeed or fail. No one else has this power and the second you let your emotions and motivation get caught up in news reports or our stock price is the moment you hand over a very special power to outsiders who have no real interest in our mission.
I tell myself to not get fooled by thinking the news articles and the stock price reflect the value of what we are building or our prospects moving forward. We are building something that is adding so much value in the world and if we can stay focused and execute on that vision, we will build a long standing company that changes the world. Stay focused, keep shipping, ignore the rest. It’s not going to be easy but nothing this is worthwhile ever is.
Tech companies are not poets.
Excerpt from Note
Follow Up: More Thoughts on Quality
by Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday,
To: paloaltofb
Date: Friday, September 18, 2009 9:40am
People love Facebook for the need it fills in their life. No words we can say could convince people to have that strong of a connection to us if our products didn’t deliver that value. Similarly, no words we can say could convince people that their frustrations and issues with our products aren’t real. Simply put, if we want to improve what people think about Facebook, we just have to fix the pain points they’re experiencing.
We are no longer under the radar. Everyone would love to see us fail. See us humbled. Everyone is gunning for us.
But that doesn’t mean we should stop acting like underdogs. That’s what got us here. We should just make sure we use the new advantages we have to our advantage.
Is this a technology company?
We solve problems.
Solve enough problems for enough people on a big enough scale, and you might think you look like a humanitarian. And that’s a good thing.
But we are a technology company. We have to make money to succeed. And that’s a good thing too.
But making money alone will not make us succeed at our mission. The things we build will.
We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.
Excerpt from email
RE: Update to Audi Event
From: Mark Zuckerberg
To: paloaltofb
Date: Friday, September 18, 2009 9:40am
For all that we’ve accomplished so far, we’re only a fraction of the way toward connecting everyone and realizing our full potential. We have the rare opportunity to build something truly great, but to do that we need to stay focused on what matters. Right now what matters is getting more people onto Facebook, making our product faster and simper, building a solid framework for our ad system and platform, and building the best organization by hiring great people and making everyone here even better.
It would be easy to get complacent and think we’ve won every time we bring ourselves to a new level, but all that does is just decrease the chance we’ll get to the next level after that. It would have been easy to have sold the company early on for $1 billion when we had less than 5% of our current users, but then we never would have gotten to where we are now. We’re looking to have a level of impact on the world that is unmatched by any other company, and in order to do that we can’t sit around and act like we’ve made it. We need to constantly remind ourselves that we haven’t won and that we need to keep making bold moves and keep fighting or we risk peaking and fading away.
“Embracing change” isn’t enough. It has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. The internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.
The exciting thing is what something could become, not what it is. And the sooner something goes into the world, the sooner it can start being better.
So done is still better than perfect.
But done is never finished.
Today’s 404 page is tomorrows’s breakthrough.
It’s the nature of the internet.
I’ll find something to put here
This journey 1% finished
2014 v 1.3
Brought to you by your friends at the Facebook Analog Research Library
December 02, 2024
As the company of Facebook grew, we faced a lot of challenges. One of them was explaining our company’s mission, history, and culture to new employees. Over the years, a lot of formative company discussions and debates had happened in Facebook Groups, over email, or in person. Those who had been present at the time had context, but for new employees that information was difficult to find, even if you knew what you were looking for. We wanted to try to package a lot of those stories and ideas in one place to give to all employees.
After years of sporadically checking eBay, I found a copy. It arrived at our office a few weeks ago.
Determined to create a better digital version, I reached out to a few public libraries and universities in NYC. One gave me access to their $150,000 DT-BC100 scanner.
[…]
So here it is, the highest quality publicly available version of the Little Red Book, preserved for anyone curious about how great companies scale culture and ideas.
Facebook was not originally created to be a company.
It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.
Changing how ideas spread changes how society functions, changes how people speak, changes how people live, changes how people tell stories, changes how people fall in live, changes who people consider friends, changes who people consider strangers, changes what being alone means.
People sharing more—even if just with their close friends or families—creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others.
Connection is the fundamental unit of society. And increasing the number of ways people can connect, and the number of people they can connect to, is a powerful tool for good. It blurs lines. It alters perspectives. It humanizes. Because when everyone is considered an “us,” there’s a lot less “us vs. them.”
Historically, those who controlled the media controlled the message. If you’re the only one with a printing press, you control what people read. Same with radio. Same with TV.
But what happens when everyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? When the playing field is level? When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to. Influence can no longer be owned. It must be earned.
It sounds cool, doesn’t it? Like some sort of vigilante justice for people who take too many pretzels from the micro kitchen. Yeah, it’s not that. It’s about sharing stuff on the internet.
Zuckerberg’s Law: The amount each person shares doubles each year.
That means each year, the amount of information shared by humanity is increasing at an exponential rate. That is massive. That is almost unfathomable.
BUT
As the amount of content is growing wildly, the amount of time people spend consuming content has not changed. There are no more hours in the day. So there’s a lot, lot, lot more content and nowhere for it to go.
That means there are two massive opportunities.
One massive opportunity lies in creating more ways for people to share more things. It stands to reason that the demand for better, easier, and new ways to share will grow proportionally as people share more and more of their daily lives. We’ve already seen this proven true as mobile phones have become more and more powerful. The sheer amount of things people can share and ways they can share those things is staggering.
The second massive opportunity lies in figuring out how to deliver this huge amount of new information to the right people in the right ways—giving people things they are interested in, in ways they can understand and consume quickly.
And historically, that’s what friends are for. There’s always been way more information in the world than time to consume it. Human networks evolved naturally as a way to help sort through it. That’s why we are drawn to friends with similar interests. Our friends are our news sources, as well as our filters. They bring us stories that interest us because our interests are similar.
The digital world isn’t that much different. There’s just a lot more information to sort through, and a lot more friends talking at once. But we believe that personal connections and social networks will always be the key to both enabling people to share more of their lives and allowing them to get valuable information from this mass of data.
Build products around people, not data.
Because data doesn’t care about you. Data won’t bring you soup when you’re sick or take you to a bar when you get dumped.
But people are surprising. People can think for themselves. Give people something exciting, and they will keep building on what you have given them.
And that gets even more excited when you give people a way to connect to more people.
That’s amazing.
That’s a lot.
That means each Facebook engineer is responsible for approximately 433,000 people using Facebook.
6 out of 7 people in the world are not on Facebook.
That’s a lot more.
6,000,000,000 more.
There is no point in having a 5-year plan in this industry. With each step forward, the landscape you’re walking on changes. So we have a pretty good idea of where we want to be in six months, and where we want to be in 30 years. And every six months, we take another look at where we want to be in 30 years to plan out the next six months.
It’s a little bit shortsighted and a little bit not. But any other approach guarantees everything you release is already obsolete.
Excerpt from “The Path Matters” by Boz. Posted on Sunday, May 10, 2009 at 9:57pm
The path Facebook took to connecting the world was not the shortest and that has made all the difference. By starting small and expanding out-ward we built a community. By integrating networks that had originally been separate we had to focus on privacy. By throwing open the floodgates of growth in increments rather than all at once we were able to focus on keeping a consistent design and building scalable infrastructure. These things are now part of the DNA of our company and they affect everything we build.
At each point in the punctuated growth of our user base we have had to refine our product to make it more general and more universal. We react to their feedback and usage of the product. At the same time, our user base is itself evolving not only in composition but also in their comfort level with new technologies. People are sharing content today at a level that would have been unthinkable when this company started, so our technologies and others also shape their sensibilities. In other words, if we had tried to jump straight to the end state, we would have never gotten it right.
In technology we are constantly looking to the future and trying to see things the way they could be. Once we have a vision we want to work towards we tend to choose the shortest path to get to that place. On projects of sufficiently narrow scope this is clearly the right thing to do.
When it comes to strategy, however, our success has come from not concerning ourselves with the entire path to the goal but rather focusing primarily on the next step in that direction. By taking one step at a time and iterating we are able to adapt quickly to a constantly changing landscape and bring our users along for the ride.
We aren’t done yet.
Every success shows up more things we want to do. It opens up bigger opportunities. Bigger challenges. Opportunities to take bigger risks.
But that’s natural. Do something hard and you want to do something harder. Accomplish that and you start seriously considering doing something impossible …
And let them share everything they want.
How?
The Hacker Way is about pushing boundaries. Testing limits. Doing stuff people didn’t realize could be done. Figuring out how to do more with less—sometimes with nothing. It’s a prison shiv, not a Ginsu knife. MacGyver, not Bond. It’s function over form and survival of the fittest. It rarely asks for permission. Or validation. But sometimes it asks for a fire extinguisher. It’s putting peanut butter and jelly on a tortilla because you’re out of bread. Effectiveness over elegance. It’s the belief that there is always a way.
(Front of sign: A painting of the Facebook like hand)
(Back of sign: The Sun microsystems logo)
This sign came with the building—it just didn’t say Facebook yet. Instead of getting a new one, we flipped it over and painted it.
The back still says the name of a different technology company, one that came before us, left as a reminder that if we fail, someday somebody might replace us.
One of our engineers wanted to make something that could take all the most interesting things from the history of your Facebook profile and make them easy to look at. So when the next Hackathon came around he gave it a shot. It failed. Then at the next Hackathon he tried again. It failed again. But the third Hackathon’s a charm right? Wrong. That failed too.
So when he found out another Hackathon was coming up, he did what any unreasonable person would do. He sent out an email recruiting strangers to work on this insanely difficult idea. And that’s when he found someone else who had been failing at the same thing. And that’s when things started working.
After a night of hacking, a team of strangers had a working prototype for “Memories.” It was cool enough to become an approved project, so they started building. Then, before they knew it, it went live. It didn’t happen on purpose. Someone at Facebook accidentally launched every active project to every single user in the world for 15 minutes. It was quickly fixed, but people had seen it. ANd one thing became clear. People thought it was cool. They wanted it.
And 10 months later they got it. The name had just changed from “Memories” to “Timeline.”
The Hacker Way is fixing a problem when you see it using the means you have at your disposal. The Hacker Way is fixing the problem of pedestrian inefficiency between Facebook offices by making your own crosswalk. The Hacker Way is not embraced by the City of Palo Alto Police Department.
Yeah Ok, So Facebook Punk’d Us
Michael Arrington
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
So we’ve had our fun with Facebook over the years (Why We’re Sueing Facebook for $25 Million In Statutory Damages, Republican PR Director Calls Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg “totally full of sh*t”, Randi Threatens a Bar Bouncer). But in general these things are supposed to flow one way – we mess with them, they take it gracefully.
Today that changed. They punk’d us, and we fell for it. Hard.
Earlier today TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid noticed something new on Facebook. When viewing any photo, it showed a “Fax This Photo” link on the bottom right of the screen. Ridiculous? Yes. But everyone in the TechCrunch network saw it. He fired off an email to Facebook at 5:05 pm. When they didn’t respond, he posted at 5:29: Facebook Now Lets You Fax Your Photos. I Have No Idea Why Anyone Would Want To Do This.
Things went downhill from there.
At 5:47 Facebook PR emailed and said “We already faxed you a statement on this??? Didn’t you get it?”
Then they emailed again at 5:51, saying:
Hey Jason,
We’ve been testing this product since 1992, and we are thinking that we will be launching this “innovative” feature at TechCrunch 50.
What do you think??? Uh oh. Our nose hairs started to twitch.
Then we asked a bunch of people outside of our network. Not a single other people said they saw the fax-a-photo feature.
Definitely not a good sign.
Jason then called Facebook PR. Jaime Schopflin took the call and, apparently, couldn’t stop laughing for five minutes. Between laughs while catching her breath she mentioned something about this being a joke, that nobody but us could see it, and that they were placing bets around the office on how long before we noticed it and posted. And something else about teaching us to contact them before posting. So, bottom lin, don’t expect to see this feature actually launch. Unless you come to work for TechCrunch, I guess. We still see it.
You won this round, Facebook. Enjoy your victory.
Oh, by the way, the feature works.
Facebook is written in PHP. As a programming language, PHP is good because it’s simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. The downside is it uses a lot of memory, which can mean slowness.
That’s the advantage of C++. It isn’t nearly as hard on memory. Unfortunately, coding C++ takes longer, is harder to learn, and most importantly, the entire code base of Facebook was written in PHP, making it pretty much impossible to go through and rewrite it by hand.
Besides, even if we did, it would mean all of our PHP-trained engineers would need to learn an entirely new programming language.
Ugh.
So that was the rock. The hard place was that at the rate we were growing, both in users and adding features to the site, PHP was slowing us down. And as we grew more, it would only slow us down more.
Then someone wondered: Why learn a new programming language when you can write code?
And that’s what they did. It started in a Hackathon, then it became a full-blown project. Ten months later it was in testing. Six months after that, 90% of Facebook’s web traffic we served using the HipHop source code transformer.
What do you do when you’re a small new division in Facebook trying to make a name for yourself? How do you prove that your team is fun and innovative and that other engineers should want to work on it?
This is a story of underdogs, napkins, and how the games got a bigger war room.
The games team was new. They needed people. But even if they got people, they wouldn’t have a place to put them because they were relegated to the tiniest of war rooms. It was so small even the name “war room” seemed oversized. Battle room, or skirmish room or mild disagreement room would have probably been more accurate.
But instead of complaining (okay, maybe they complained a little) they acted.
They bravely drew something on a napkin and bravely approached Zuck with said napkin at a Hackathon, and bravely got what might have been approved or might have been him just thinking it was a joke.
Regardless, that weekend the games team showed up to an empty office with a pile of wood.
The plan was as simple. Since there was no more floor space they could take over, they would take to the sky.
By Sunday, it was completed and the result of this dubiously sanctioned effort was glorious. The newly built, two-story-tall conference room loomed over the office. And it got them the attention they wanted (including attention from people in facilities with a better knowledge of California’s building codes), and it became one of those things you just had to show anyone who was visiting.
So, remember. Take pride in everything you do. Because here, what you build in a weekend could be shown to Katy Perry, Oprah, Kanye West, and a former vice president who knows a thing or two about inventing things.
Stay up until 6 in the morning and do something that’s not your job.
Why?
Because getting things done quickly is fun. Making things is fun.
Especially when you know that people will pay attention to what you make—people with the means to put what you make in front of a global audience.
So let’s say it’s a couple of years ago and you’re an engineer who has the idea, “What if Facebook let you send personal videos to your friends?” Well, you could make a PowerPoint presentation and schedule some meetings and try to convince everyone that it’s a good idea. Or you could just go to the next Hackathon and get a couple of people to help you make a prototype overnight.
Because, who knows? Maybe when 6:00am comes around, you’ll have made a prototype of something that will change the world. And 48 hours later, you’ll have a complete product that was just an idea two days ago.
Excerpt from “Stay focused and keep hacking” by Pedram Keyani.
Posted on Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 10:22am
Every couple of months, a few hundred of our engineers unleash their talents in epic, all-night coding sessions, and often end up with products that hit the internal and external versions of the site within weeks. These are Facebook Hackathons, and since the first “official” Hackathon in 2007, they’ve remained one of the most exciting opportunities people here have to make a major impact in a short period of time.
Hackathons are a chance for engineers, and anyone else in the company, to transform the spark of an idea into a working prototype and get other people excited about its potential.
We’re a culture of builders, and Hackathons are our time to take any idea—big or small, sane or crazy—and build it into something real for people to react to. Instead of worrying if their idea will scale for more than 900 million people, people are able to focus on getting their basic project up and running so the broader team can quickly iterate to make it better.
Projects are often driven by cross-functional teams, with everyone from engineers to lawyers to UX.
There are only two rules: you have to work on something outside your day job, and if it’s your first Hackathon, you have to hack. Everyone keeps working until around 6:00am or when they pass out—whichever comes first.
After each Hackathon, we keep the momentum going by holding a prototype forum where everyone who built a project can present it to the company.
Some of our most-loved products started at Hackathons, got props at prototype forum, and made it to your computers and phones, including Video, the Like button, Chat, Hip Hop for PHP, and even Timeline.
Hackathons are so valuable because they are a time when we’re able to think past the next day or week and just build without constraints. This time-pressured environment forces us to make mistakes and be comfortable with the messy, error-prone side of creating things.
Hackathon is also completely bottom up from organization to participation. No one owns Hackathon, which I address below, and no one dictates the projects that everyone works on.
Everyone in the company has complete autonomy to work on what they want to explore.
It’s important to realize that Hackathon belongs to all of us and is a living part of our culture that needs to be maintained. Because, it is our ideas, not our titles, that determine the products and features that shape the course of our company.
Greatness and comfort rarely coexist.
Excerpt from email
RE: Update to Audi Event
From: Mark Zuckerberg
To: paloaltofb
Date: Friday, September 18, 2009 9:40am
Our philosophy on perks is that we want to provide services that are utilitarian and help people with things they need in order to help them focus on our long-term goals. Everyone needs to eat. Everyone needs to do laundry. Everyone needs health services. Everyone needs to get to work. If we can make these parts of our lives easier, then it helps us focus on what we’re trying to accomplish at work and it makes us all more productive.
We should draw the line at productivity and convenience though. We are not in the practice of providing random perks, colorful bouncy balls or access to luxury cars. Sometimes we make mistakes since we’re all moving quickly, but if you see us doing any of these things you should question openly why we’re wasting our money.
We push people. We expect our people to be a little bit better and a little bit faster than we think we are. Sometimes it seems impossible.
But high standards are a job perk.
We make things that touch millions of people. We don’t expect it to be easy.
We expect you to change the world.
Being able to solve problems is nowhere near as important as being able to pick the right problems to solve.
Focus on solving big problems.
Focus on helping the most people.
Focus on impact.
Products that don’t exist rarely change the world. And until it ships, it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter how amazing it is or how clever it is if no one ever gets to use it.
Ship it.
Fast is better than slow.
While slow is adding unnecessary embellishments, fast is out in the world. And that means fast can learn from experience while slow can only theorize.
Those who ship quickly can improve quickly.
So fast doesn’t just win the race. It gets a head start for the next one.
Building beats talking. It beats being a full-time employee. It beats being well dressed or well spoken or well known. It beats being popular. It beats being in Mark’s inner circle.
The goal is simple: Build things that solve big problems.
If you can’t do that, none of those other things matter either.
The playing field is level.
If you build it, you will win.
Don’t be afraid of looking stupid or of getting in trouble.
Don’t be afraid of getting fired.
Stop waiting for permission.
If it’s the right thing to do, and you know how to do it, go for it. Make something cool.
Fear is an indicator that what you are doing matters. It means you’re doing something right. It makes you work harder. Stay up later. It’s proof that what you are doing is interesting.
We should be a little bit afraid of everything we ship.
Otherwise, we’re cowards.
There’s always a solution. Usually a lot. If what you’re doing isn‘t working, try thinking about the problem in a different way.
Maybe you’re too smart. Think dumber.
Maybe you’re too complex. Think simpler.
Forget about doing things the right way. Do what works.
Try something new.
Then try something else.
Facebook is not a sacred institution. We don‘t want to be. So don’t be afraid to have an opinion.
The goal should always be to make the best product. Not everyone will agree on the best way to do that, and that’s fine. Do what you think is best, and if someone disagrees with you, argue your case. Just don’t be a jerk.
And yes, Zuck founded the company and he’s the CEO, but remember, he’s also just a dude. Don’t waste your time trying to do what you think he’d like. Or what you think he’s thinking. Or what you think he might have said that one time when you were walking behind him on your way to the bathroom. You were hired to have your opinion. Not his.
Excerpt from “Act!” by Blake Ross.
Posted on Tuesday, July 12, 2011 at 1:01pm
You have all sorts of options for effecting change in the company:
If you really feel strongly about something, sprint the straightest path you can from your point of view to an engineer shipping the code that makes it reality. When you sit around and debate it in Ideas, you risk not only wasting your own time but also building a company culture where your coworkers believe that the right way to respond to an existential threat is to talk, talk, talk about it.
We hire the best, smartest people to solve insanely hard problems.
That means you’re good at what you do. That means the person next to you is good at what they do too.
So don’t hide things. Be open. Show off what you’re working on*. Talk. Let other people throw in their opinion. It doesn’t matter who they are or what department they work in. It doesn’t matter how senior they are. Everyone here wants to make good products. And they also probably know something you don’t. At the very least, they can offer a fresh perspective.
So listen to their opinion. Then feel free to disregard it.
*to people who work here, not TechCrunch. ಠ_ಠ
Subject: Please Resign
From: Mark Zuckerberg
To: fbstaff
Date: Wednesday, September 22, 2010 11:44am
Confidential—Do Not Share
Hey everyone,
Lots of you saw the TechCrunch story over the weekend claiming that we’re building a mobile phone. We’re not building a phone and I spoke at length at the Q&A on Friday about what we’re actually doing—building ways to make all phones and apps more social.
It is frustrating and destructive that anyone here thought it was okay to say this to anyone outside the company. This was an act of betrayal. The fact that the story was inaccurate doesn’t make it any better. I’ve had to personally spend a lot of time over the last few days—as have a lot of other people—cleaning up the damage from this mess. Even now, we’re in a more precarious position with companies in the mobile space who should be our partners because they now think we’re competitors. They think we’re building a phone to compete with them rather than building integrations to make their phones better.
So I’m asking whoever leaked this to resign immediately. If you believe that it’s ever appropriate to leak internal information, you should leave. If you don’t resign, we will almost certainly find out who you are anyway.
We are a company that promotes openness and transparency, both in the world at large and here internally at Facebook. That’s culturally important to us and I’m committed to keeping it. But the cost of an open culture is that we all have to protect the confidential information we share internally. If we don’t, we screw over everyone working their asses off to change the world. And leaks like this make everyone a little less willing to share information more broadly and undermine the culture we’re fighting to build, especially as we grow. I want people to continue to be able to ask difficult questions at our Q&As and have a strong dialog because they’re confident those discussions will be kept within Facebook.
Let’s commit to maintaining complete confidentiality about the company—no exceptions. If you can’t handle that, then just leave. We have too much social good to build to have to deal with this.
Mark
We are constantly making it possible for people to share more of their lives. Sometimes that makes them a little nervous. Add to that the ever-changing nature of our site, which isn’t exactly comforting either.
We are asking people to put their personal lives in our hands, and they do, because of the value we give them.
But just because people trust us with their lives doesn’t mean they trust us.
We have to re-earn it with every decision we make.
Excerpt from Stefano J. Attardi.
Posted on Friday, October 18, 2013, at 10:24am.
It is dangerous to think that everything can be measured, because that will lead you to believe that anything that which eludes measurement isn’t real. Emotions, feelings are real. People are not a deterministic black box that responds predictably to independent and repeatable stimuli. People think. People talk. People feel.
People feel the love that a craftsperson puts into their product. The quality that can only come from sweating the details that only a few will see. The delight that happens when all the tiny pieces come together to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. The pride that comes from being able to say “this is my best work”, and not “this is what worked best”.
Building a sustainable brand and business means winning the hearts of people, not just their compulsive clicks. It may sound cheesy, but if you want people to fall in love with what you build, you have to love them first. Love means giving without expecting anything in return. Doing something because it feels right, not because it furthers your goals.
(People over pixels)
Data has another limit: it doesn’t guide your product strategy. If your goal is to move numbers, that’s what you will accomplish. You will not come up with the next groundbreaking product or paradigm-shifting idea. You will not build the next Instagram, the next Snapchat, the next iPhone, or even the next Facebook. Someone else will.
Innovation requires feeling in your gut what the future should look like, building that vision, and having the conviction to see it through—sometimes even in the face of discouraging numbers.
A company with a vision and goals that go beyond moving numbers is more likely to innovate, and also more likely to earn people’s trust and respect. People respect a company with principles it will never question, promises it will never break, tests it will never run. A vision and values free you from having to second guess every decision you make.
The riskiest thing is to take no risk.
When you don’t realize what you can’t do, you can do some pretty cool stuff.
Remember, people don’t use Facebook because they like us.
They use it because they like their friends.
but
…
Everything we build should facilitate human connection.
This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember themselves.
— Socrates to Plato, speaking against the new practice of writing
The printed book is a thing of paper and in a short time will decay entirely. But the scribe commending letters to parchment extends his own and the letters’ lifespan for ages. And he enriches the Church, conserves the faith, destroys heresies, repels vice, teaches morals and helps grow virtue.
— Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes
What was this telegraph to do? Would it transmit letters and newspapers? Under what power in the constitution did Senators propose to erect this telegraph? He was not aware of any authority except under the clause for the establishment of post roads. And besides the telegraph might be made very mischievous, and secret information after communicated to the prejudice of merchants.
Sen. George McDuffie, The Congressional Globe (28th Congress, second session)
Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.
Boston Post editorial from 1865
I have anticipated radio’s complete disappearance … confident that the unfortunate people, who must now subdue themselves to listening in, will soon find a better pastime for their leisure.
H.G. Wells in “The Way the World is Going,” 1925
Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.
Darryl F. Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946
Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Clifford Stoll, Newsweek, Feb. 26, 1995
Excerpt from “Entering the world of fairytales, fantasy, and distractions”
by Pedram Keyani. Posted on Monday, April 23, 2012 at 2:36pm.
Every analyst, news commentator, and blogger is going to stake their reputation that we are the next big thing, the next big flop, the company that is going to change the world, the company that is going to destroy the relationships, etc. Some people are going to say this is the company for the next 100 years and others are going to call it a house of cards. Guess what!?! This isn’t their story to write, it’s ours. Every day it is our blood, sweat and tears that has made Facebook a core part of so many people’s lives and it is us that will make it succeed or fail. No one else has this power and the second you let your emotions and motivation get caught up in news reports or our stock price is the moment you hand over a very special power to outsiders who have no real interest in our mission.
I tell myself to not get fooled by thinking the news articles and the stock price reflect the value of what we are building or our prospects moving forward. We are building something that is adding so much value in the world and if we can stay focused and execute on that vision, we will build a long standing company that changes the world. Stay focused, keep shipping, ignore the rest. It’s not going to be easy but nothing this is worthwhile ever is.
Tech companies are not poets.
Excerpt from Note
Follow Up: More Thoughts on Quality
by Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday,
To: paloaltofb
Date: Friday, September 18, 2009 9:40am
People love Facebook for the need it fills in their life. No words we can say could convince people to have that strong of a connection to us if our products didn’t deliver that value. Similarly, no words we can say could convince people that their frustrations and issues with our products aren’t real. Simply put, if we want to improve what people think about Facebook, we just have to fix the pain points they’re experiencing.
We are no longer under the radar. Everyone would love to see us fail. See us humbled. Everyone is gunning for us.
But that doesn’t mean we should stop acting like underdogs. That’s what got us here. We should just make sure we use the new advantages we have to our advantage.
Is this a technology company?
We solve problems.
Solve enough problems for enough people on a big enough scale, and you might think you look like a humanitarian. And that’s a good thing.
But we are a technology company. We have to make money to succeed. And that’s a good thing too.
But making money alone will not make us succeed at our mission. The things we build will.
We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.
Excerpt from email
RE: Update to Audi Event
From: Mark Zuckerberg
To: paloaltofb
Date: Friday, September 18, 2009 9:40am
For all that we’ve accomplished so far, we’re only a fraction of the way toward connecting everyone and realizing our full potential. We have the rare opportunity to build something truly great, but to do that we need to stay focused on what matters. Right now what matters is getting more people onto Facebook, making our product faster and simper, building a solid framework for our ad system and platform, and building the best organization by hiring great people and making everyone here even better.
It would be easy to get complacent and think we’ve won every time we bring ourselves to a new level, but all that does is just decrease the chance we’ll get to the next level after that. It would have been easy to have sold the company early on for $1 billion when we had less than 5% of our current users, but then we never would have gotten to where we are now. We’re looking to have a level of impact on the world that is unmatched by any other company, and in order to do that we can’t sit around and act like we’ve made it. We need to constantly remind ourselves that we haven’t won and that we need to keep making bold moves and keep fighting or we risk peaking and fading away.
“Embracing change” isn’t enough. It has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. The internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.
The exciting thing is what something could become, not what it is. And the sooner something goes into the world, the sooner it can start being better.
So done is still better than perfect.
But done is never finished.
Today’s 404 page is tomorrows’s breakthrough.
It’s the nature of the internet.
I’ll find something to put here
This journey 1% finished
2014 v 1.3
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