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Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2007.

importance of being young, and being technical & building things

being technical

• first 10 people at facebook were technical
  
• first CSR wrote code to automate the process - gave him leverage
  
• coding gets you into a position of leverage - work can be utilized beyond raw effort

focus on iteration

• empower people who do the building (technical folks)
  
• get rid of layers between build and customers
  

Facebook's mission - "trying to make the world a more open place"

being young

• less clutter in life (mortgage, responsibilities, etc) - leaves room to be idealistic
  
• allows you to focus on what's important
  

Facebook is currently handling 1.5 billion page views a day

• can only do that because they are a deeply technical company
  
• even management is technical
  

Mark takes a moment to promote the Facebook development platform

• makes facebook provide "friend infrastructure" to the internet
  
• their openness here, if they do it right, could be really freakin' huge
  

facebook is a technology company, not a media company. guides how the hire (technical), and how they direct their efforts. Guides the culture of the company.

facebook is getting people to share a lot more data, because it gives control of the audience - you can share photos just to your org, school, etc.

work w/ people you have a high trust, high bandwidth communication with

Ali Partovi - Founder, iLike
Hadi Partovi - President, iLike

Ali and Hadi Partovi at Startup School 2007.

Is my idea a winner? better metric is the team or group of people

• can i easily explain what the customers need in one or two sentences?
  
• does the business scale - can you double your revenue w/o also doubling costs?
  
• am i creating added value? book - "co-opitiion" size of pie when i'm in the game, vs. when not in the game -- that is the added value.
  
• will the users naturally recruit new users?
  
• network effect - will the value delivered to each customer increase as # of customers increase?
  
• passion - is the entrepreneur passionate about the idea?
  

Do's:

1. listen to customers, identify with them. critical to actually listen to them yourself.
   
2. rank top problems most critical to success - rank top people, assign top people to top problems (for bigger companies). delegating effectively
   
3. make frugality and profitability part of your culture. avoid a luxurious environment. cut spending anywhere you can.
   
4. move quickly. make decisions fast! avoid committees. avoid 12-month development projects.
   
5. have a strong CEO. best sales person, outward person as CEO.
   
6. FOCUS - can't afford to be spread thin when company is small.
   
7. hire great people. judging people is most important skill you can learn in business.
   

Don'ts:

• be distracted by the press; don't make decisions based upon press coverage. value is to help with recruiting or to aid with strategic partners.
  
• don't take your company culture for granted - natural flow is for organizations to become political. want to start thinking about this at the early days, to keep it going.
  
• don't be greedy in business negotiations. let other company have bigger piece of pie, in return for speed
  
• don't ignore your gut feel about an employee or candidate
  
• forget to have fun.