Zuck Interview

Start at 43:30: - http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298692604

Thought this was a really transparent and authentic interview with Zuckerberg @ YCombinator. The main take-aways:

1. If you don't do what you love, solve a problem that you think genuinely exists, you'll never maintain the tenacity to succeed. 
2. If you only do something a bit better than someone else is doing it, how much can you win?
3. As a manager, you'll have a tension between centralizing vs decentralizing functions (eg. marketing). Creating 'growth groups' has allowed FB to avoid pitfalls of environmentalism.  (sounds like the Strategic Product Management function)
4. You don't need to be in the Valley to succeed - it helps if you know nothing. (Waterloo + communitech?)

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My notes:
Most companies mess up by moving too slowly, and trying to be too precise.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk. (100% of putts left short don't go in)

Old skool: Index and content served to a lot of people -> caching, scale systems
Social: different fundamental experience. memcache (open source project)

Having the poeple who make product decisions, also understanding the technical issues is fundamentally important.

Everything is better with social: Emotional and informational efficiency - matchedup with better stuff.

Doing this because it's awesome and should exist.

Thing about engineering, you never do the same thing twice, you just abstract it.

3-4-5 is the unit of a team- 50 is too big

growth groups - first insights: main features of FB is your friends are there. two levels: strategically - grow scale company, and better experience. Didn't Just leave it to chance - wanted to build a competence in growing, scaling, AND finding friends most easily. key things that drive engagement - drop box started one, many other companies did. eg discovery; didn't have great analystics around engagement. Needed 10 friends.

acquisitions- saw true colors of poeople around me. Saw that some just wanted the money.

dropio - ceo lead timeline project at FB. Decided he'd have a bigger impact at facebook than in his old company.

FB at it's essence are the products we build.


Theil: advice as founder, not money manager. Don Graham: had washington post in his company for generations -> build companies for long term.

most inspiring, surprising thing: can be so bad at so many things, but if you stay focused on providing value to your customers, and you're do so unique, then you'll get through it.

Self selection bias; do stuff that you're passionate about -> leads to company. Companies that work are those where the founders are passionate about what they're doing.

The last 5 of social networking has been about getting peeople connected. the next 5 will be: what are those things that now that people are connected? We're at, or close to that tippinging (you can or can't build on a social graph, can or can't ship CDROMs eg aol).

Things build outside of the valley seem to be on a longer term cadence.

Need to do something totally different, because if you do somehting a little bit better than someone else, how much can you really win?