Mark Zuckerberg

Issues about violating people’s privacy don't seem to be surmountable, I’m not willing to risk insulting anyone.

I remember your internal post about how Instagram was our threat and not Google+. You were basically right. One thing about startups though is you can often acquire them. (private message to colleague on April 9, 2012 when Instagram was purchased)

To a certain extent, the website is unfortunate because it oversimplifies things. Everybody’s concept of having a friend is different. It can definitely blur the relationships that exist between people. But in the end, I think that Facebook can only reinforce preexisting communities.

It’s not unusual for us to receive an email from somebody saying, “I spend all of my time on your website and now I have less of a social life than I had before.” We would much rather have people meet people through the website and go out and party than stay at home on a Friday night reading other people’s profiles. And it’s surprising, but we have actually received far less complaints about stalking than we otherwise would have expected.

Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at HarvardZuckerberg: Just askZuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.Zuckerberg: I don't know why.Zuckerberg: They "trust me"Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks

It is better to buy than compete. (from a 2008 email)

I understood that some parts were still a little sketchy and I wanted some more time to think about whether or not this was really appropriate to release to the Harvard community.

I think that some decisions that we made early on to localize the website and keep it separate for each college on the network kept it really useful, because people could only see people from their local college and friends outside. That made it so people were comfortable sharing information that they probably wouldn't otherwise, which made it useful in the long term for people to look up information about other people on the site.

My goal is to not have a job. Making cool things is just something I love doing, and not having someone tell me what to do or a timeframe in which to do it is the luxury I am looking for in my life.

Understanding who you serve is always a very important problem, and it only gets harder the more people that you serve. We try to pay a lot of attention to this by a combination of very rigorous quantitative and qualitative feedback. But if you’re serving 1.2 billion people, it’s very hard.