Mark Zuckerberg Quotations

The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

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.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

Facebook is really about communicating and telling stories... We think that people can really help spread awareness of organ donation and that they want to participate in this to their friends. And that can be a big part of helping solve the crisis that's out there.

Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On engagement, we're already seeing that mobile users are more likely to be daily active users than desktop users. They're more likely to use Facebook six or seven days of the week.

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They're keeping up with their friends and family, but they're also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They're connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It's almost a disadvantage if you're not on it now.

We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that's something we're proud of.

Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

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.

This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.

Our goal is not to build a platform; it's to be cross all of them.

Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn't have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. 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.

I don't have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.

No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn't create that - society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that's good.

Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer questions that people have, like, what sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York lately and liked? These are queries you could potentially do with Facebook that you couldn't do with anything else, we just have to do it.

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.

Advertising works most effectively when it's in line with what people are already trying to do.

I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.

The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'

By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more transparent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 think that more flow of information, the ability to stay connected to more people makes people more effective as people. And I mean, that's true socially. It makes you have more fun, right. It feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life.

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.

The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.

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.

A lot of times, I run a thought experiment: 'If I were not at Facebook, what would I be doing to make the world more open?'

My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person.

I actually do think you're seeing this trend towards organizations just caring more about their brand and engaging. And so I think Home Depot will want to humanize itself. I think that's a lot of why companies are starting blogs, are just giving more insight into what's going on with them.

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.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that's always existed.

What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they're proud of.

I started the site when I was 19. I didn't know much about business back then.

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 hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don't pretend that if Facebook didn't exist, that this wouldn't even be possible. Of course, it would have.

When most people ask about a business growing, what they really mean is growing revenue, not just growing the number of people using a service. Traditional businesses would view people using your service that you don't make money from as a cost.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us.

We have a rule that if you check in code, you have to maintain it. So I mostly code on the side. I don't check in code anymore.

We have a very open culture at the company, where we foster a lot of interaction between not just me and people but between everyone else. It's an open floor plan. People have these desks where no one really has an office. I mean, I have a room where I meet with people. But it has all glass, so everyone can see into it and see what's going on.

The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.

People don't care about what someone says about you in a movie--or even what you say, right? They care about what you build.

The main Facebook usage is so big. About 20 percent of the time people spend on their phone is on Facebook.

A lot of people are focused on taking over the world or doing the biggest thing and getting the most users. I think part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely.

We're very focused on making News Feed really good, making our photos experience really good, making messaging really good, and creating great location apps. That's the nature of a platform business of our scale. Most companies that are relevant to us will have some overlaps in some competitive way.

I wear the same outfit or, at least, a different copy of it almost every day.

If you're always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.

One of my big regrets is that Facebook hasn't had a major chance to shape the mobile operating system ecosystem.

What really motivates people at Facebook is building something that's worthwhile, that they're going to be proud to show to friends and family.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I'm generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we're providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we're doing so well on so many of these things. I think it's important to have gratitude for that.

I feel that the best companies are started not because the founder wanted a company but because the founder wanted to change the world... If you decide you want to found a company, you maybe start to develop your first idea. And hire lots of workers.

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people's faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

It's really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn't how we've approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.

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.

A frustration I have is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model with somehow being out of alignment with your customers. I think it's the most ridiculous concept.

Mobile is a lot closer to TV than it is to desktop.

I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

For the first time we're allowing developers who don't work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That's a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.

The only meat I eat is from animals I've killed myself.

This is our commitment to users and the people who use our service, is that Facebook's a free service. It's free now. It will always be free. We make money through having advertisements and things like that.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people's capacity to build and maintain relationships.

Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn't really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn't until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.

I do everything on my phone as a lot of people do.

We're running the company to serve more people.

It used to be the case, like you'd switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn't keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.

People at Facebook are fairly used to the press being nice to us or not nice to us.

I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person. It's a pretty good test.

Our goal is to make it so there's as little friction as possible to having a social experience.

Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn't have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he's getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.

Our mission is to connect every person in the world. You don't do that by having a service people pay for.

You get a reputation for stability if you are stable for years.

About half my time is spent on business operation type stuff.

Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.

Really, who you are is defined by the people who you know - not even the people that you know, but the people you spend time with and the people that you love and the people that you work with. I guess we show your friends in your profile, but that's kind of different from the information you put in your profile.

Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.

I believe we have to nip Ebola in the bud before it spreads through Africa and to other countries.

I just want to make sure when I have kids, I can spend time with them. That's the whole point.

I like making things. I don't like getting my picture taken.

I'm trying to make the world a more open place.

It wasn't until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.

It's a juicy thing to say we're building a phone, which is why people want to write about it. But it's so clearly the wrong strategy for us.

It's against all of our policies for an application to ever share information with advertisers.

It's, like, even in journeys like Facebook, we've had some very serious ups and downs.

Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5.

The majority of people who don't have Internet, don't have the Internet because they don't know why they want to use the Internet.

The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open.

Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.