Born Monday 14 May 1984
Occupation: Businessman
Nationality: American
In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people's perspectives... I really try and live the mission of the company and... keep everything else in my life extremely simple.
The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.
I started the site when I was 19. I didn't know much about business back then.
We're running the company to serve more people.
People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people - and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don't care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that - building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.
There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don't usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.
Our goal is not to build a platform; it's to be cross all of them.
When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power.
All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school - my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.
I mean, we've built a lot of products that we think are good, and will help people share photos and share videos and write messages to each other. But it's really all about how people are spreading Facebook around the world in all these different countries. And that's what's so amazing about the scale that it's at today.
Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they're thinking and have their voice be heard.
The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.
The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it's actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions... If people feel like they don't have control over how they're sharing things, then we're failing them.
I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that's always existed.
The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'
I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.
I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more transparent.
A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.