Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.
This was the title of Zuckerberg's blog post in reaction to people freaking out over the News Feed. It was something he would have to say in one form or another through the years as people tried to get comfortable with what Facebook was doing.
I don't know why ... they 'trust me' ... dumb f*cks
When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs. I started building this when I was around 19 years old, and along the way, a lot of stuff changed. We went from building a service in a dorm room to running a service that 500 million people use.
I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
next slide will load in 15 secondsSkip AdSkip AdOur mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by giving people the power to share whatever they want and be connected to whoever they want, no matter where they are.
We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users.
This is Zuckerberg addressing Beacon, an ad network that published what you were doing outside of Facebook on your News Feed. Ironically, Facebook is pretty much doing this now with its ad network.
Zuckerberg's grand vision for Facebook's effect on all industries
In 2010, Zuckerberg laid out his grand vision for how Facebook would change a lot of industries:
"Anything that involves content or specific expertise in an area – games, music, movies, TV, news, anything in media, anything e-commerce, any of this stuff.
Over the next five years, those verticals are going to be completely re-thought. There are going to be some really good businesses built.
Our view is that we should play a role in helping to re-form and re-think all those industries, and we'll get value proportional to what we put in. In gaming, we get some percentage of the value of those companies through ads and credits. But that's all because we're helping them.
If we're helpful to other industries in building out what would be a good solution then there will be some way we get value from that. "
The idea of the social graph is that if you mapped out all the connections between people in the world it would form this graph, and that’s what we’re doing at Facebook. Once you’ve done that, you can start building services on them and enable this broader platform, build games, etc. A lot of people have characterized the social graph as something that we own or control, but we don’t.
This is from his All Things D interview, and it's a good explanation of the "social graph," which is one of the defining Facebook concepts.
Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services. And we think this is a good way to build something.
This quote comes from Facebook's IPO. It is the single best distillation of Zuckerberg's attitude towards the business of Facebook. He wants Facebook to exist as a fantastic product for users. From there, he'll figure out how it can make money.
next slide will load in 15 secondsSkip AdSkip AdAfter Facebook's stock flopped in the public markets: "It doesn't help. But look, Facebook has not been an uncontroversial company in the past. This is not the first up and down we've had."
This week I got an iPhone. This weekend I got four chargers so I can keep it charged everywhere I go and a land line so I can actually make phone calls.
On not doing native mobile apps: "It's one of the biggest mistakes, if not the biggest strategic mistake we made. We're coming out of that."
We're not going to build a phone. It's not the right strategy for us to build one integrated system...Let's say we sell 10 million units -- that would be 1 percent of users. Who cares for us?
When people are writing nice stuff about us, it's important to get in front of the company and say, 'Don't believe all this.' When they write negative stuff, it's important to get in front of the company and say, 'Don't believe all this.'
next slide will load in 15 secondsSkip AdSkip AdI have this fear of getting locked into doing things that are not the most impactful things you can do.
This quote comes from Zuckerberg speaking to people at startup school Y Combinator. Part of his message here is that you shouldn't blindly commit to doing something. He built Facebook for fun and it became a business. If he had locked himself into building a business, then Facebook might not have developed in the way that it did and become as big as it is today. So his message here is to remain flexible in your approach and don't get locked in to one thing over another.
BONUS: "I mean, I wear the same thing every day, right? I mean, it's literally, if you could see my closet..."
Okay, maybe this one isn't "career defining," but it's still funny. And true!