My number one piece of advice is: you should learn how to program.
Mark ZuckerbergRead
So many businesses get worried about looking like they might make a mistake, they become afraid to take any risk. Companies are set up so that people judge each other on failure. I am not going to get fired if we have a bad year. Or a bad five years. I don’t have to worry about making things look good if they’re not. I can actually set up the company to create value.
Interpretation
The fear of failure prevents businesses from taking necessary risks for growth.
In this quote, Mark Zuckerberg emphasizes that many businesses become paralyzed by the fear of making mistakes, which stifles innovation and growth. He advocates for a culture that prioritizes value creation over the fear of judgment for failures, suggesting that leaders should foster an environment where calculated risks are encouraged for long-term success.
In practice
In a business seminar discussing leadership and innovation, this quote can illustrate the importance of risk-taking.
My number one piece of advice is: you should learn how to program.
I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the side, and we've funded ever since by putting ads on the side.
People can be really smart or have skills that are directly applicable, but if they don't really believe in it, then they are not going to really work hard.
Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services.
The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'
Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.
Wherever we are seeing something getting used, that to us is an early indicator that there might be something that people want. And then let's figure out how to make that great. And then let's go figure out monetization.
If you go to a venture firm, what you're doing is you're buying money from them in exchange for equity. They have a commodity that they're selling and they have to differentiate themselves.
In business, if you realize you've made a bad decision, you change it.
You say: "I'm a blue sky thinker." Investor thinks: "You have no business model, and you don't know how to ship."
Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.
My half-baked reading of history is that we continue to go through these waves of entrepreneurial explosion followed by merger mania and consolidation. Out of that come big sluggish companies that eventually collapse under the weight of what they've created, and are killed off by the next wave of entrepreneurs.
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