edit: Folks are getting a bit philosophical so I'll clarify. There are better models to look up to if you want to invent the future: Bret Victor, Elon Musk, Alan Kay, Richard Feynman, etc. Each of those people did invent the future or is currently in the process of actually doing it. Study the great minds, not the great businesses and business practitioners.
Iterating on old ideas. There aren't any new ideas, creativity isn't pulling things from the ether, it's looking at old things in new ways.
Geocities was an iteration on having your own webserver, myspace was the new geocities, facebook was the new myspace, $x is the new facebook ... it's just continuing on and on.
Netflix is the same on-demand video that had been available forever in pay-per-view, etc. but it was just a little bit different and a little bit better and it has destroyed several old business models because of it (cable tv, video rental stores, broadcast tv, etc.)
A car is just a nice horseless carriage which is just a more comfortable way to get around by horse which is just walking with help.
Human being are just complicated ways for strings of nucleic acid to replicate themselves.
And from that evolved mechanisms for learning, consciousness, culture and technology. Amazing creative power in such a "small" task. I think the drive for survival is the root cause of all the other reinforcement signals that drive the brain development, such as the need for food, sex, sleep, companionship, learning and so on. Shaped under the influence of these reward systems, the brain evolves to create the subjective, intelligent and ineffable experience we all know we have but can't properly explain.
Google was probably the 20th search engine. They make most of their money selling ads.
Microsoft just rebuilt CP/M and bought many of their big apps.
It's what you do after you build a great business that matters.
Exxon makes tons of money but is likely irrelevant to the future.
Building facebook - glorified yellowpages - is somehow a sign of high knowledge or achievement these days?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299823 and marked it off-topic.
You exist because your ancestors reproduced. That's it. The traits that they had happened to result in reproduction given their life experiences. A "drive for survival" happens to be one of these traits that shows up often and for easy-enough to understand reasons, but it just happens to be one of the traits that exists in the population.
The environment shapes what reproduces, but it's messy and prone to random circumstance.
We're all the result of a billions of years old monte-carlo simulation.
Commercializing stuff is great and all but there is no point in pretending it is the same or equal to the kind of innovative work that consistently happens at research universities and arguably a lot of the future is invented there even if it is not commercialized.
Also what are these dozens of other projects Facebook is currently innovating on? I do see a lot of duplicated effort across google, facebook, apple, and microsoft when it comes to AI research though. This is why I don't quite get how people can argue for commercial innovation and market efficiency all in the same sentence or paragraph when there is obvious and clear evidence to the contrary.
> Sam: So you were 19 when you started Facebook. One question we hear a lot at Y Combinator is, "I'm 19 today. I really want to do whatever I can to make the world better. What should I do?"
> Mark: I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about, work on it, but don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working, and I think that...if you look at the data of the very best companies that have gotten built, I actually think a tremendous percent of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into some local minimum a lot of the time. A local maximum, sorry.
Airbnb example comes to mind where all the founders exhausted all their credit cards to fund user acquisitions and when that did not work kept trying other innovative means to keep the company afloat. If they would have followed this advice, there would not have been an AirBnB.
I agree with the part that says " entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about" and keep pursuing it with perseverance. Because then companies like AirBnB are built. Just saying.
That company just seems to be an outlier in multiple categories.
[1] http://youtu.be/nrWavoJsEks at about 7:00
--R.W. Hamming
I'm very much convinced that nearly everybody on this site who claims to want to make the world "a better place" just want to start their startup, earn their money and financial freedom, and tell themselves "they made the world a better place".
Snarky as fuck, yes indeed. I'm just beyond tired hearing all this bullshit, at least be honest with yourselves. If this does not apply to you, then it doesn't. If it does, please rethink your goals in life.
This does contrast with pg's story, however.
There is definitely luck in nature's random movements. But the entrepreneur small purposeful movements add up over time and overcome nature.
This takes the mythical man month to a whole new level :)
"In four months Barnaby wrote 137,000 lines of bullet-proof assembly language code. Rubenstein later checked with some friends from IBM who calculated Barnaby’s output as 42-man years."
1) "Connectivity, so getting everyone in the world on the Internet."
2) "The next one is AI. I think that that's just going to unlock so much potential in so many different domains."
3) "[The next computing platform] - I think that's going to be virtual reality and augmented reality."
For all the flack that Zuck is getting in this thread he lays out a pretty concise vision of what he needs to do to continue the FB's juggernaut run.
> someone has built a machine learning application where you
> can take a picture of a lesion on someone's skin, and it can
> detect instantly whether it's skin cancer with the accuracy
> of the best dermatologists and doctors in the world. So who
> doesn't want that, right?
I wonder what that app is? Is it SkinVision[1] or IBM's proprietary medical techonology from T.J Watson Research Center[2]?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299930
[2]: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2860758/ibm-detects-ski...
> I don't know. I think it became a formal Delaware company when Peter Thiel invested about six months in.
Isn't this an outright lie? He sure stammered over his answer. He's joked himself about the fact that Edwardo incorporated Facebook as a Florida LLC originally.
This is how history gets rewritten to be more streamlined...
The fact is Zuckerberg was extremely ambitious about starting a company and had many attempts. That Florida LLC could've been dissolved easily if Facebook had failed. There's no downside to incorporating really.
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-booted-hi...
"His plan: Reduce Saverin's stake in TheFacebook.com by creating a new company, a Delaware corporation, to acquire the old company (the Florida LLC formed in April), and then distribute new shares in the new company to everybody but Saverin."
What was the thinking behind acquiring WhatsApp for such a large amount of money and how will they monetize the platform? How is WhatsApp going to be an important part of the future?
Facebook's mission is to connect the world, but in the case of Free Basics, they violated net neutrality principles which is clearly not in the best interest of the users.
Mark Zuckerberg also mentions that he finds it frustrating that people talk about AI turning against humanity, which is one of the things that Elon Musk, Sam and OpenAI are trying to educate the population about. Maybe a discussion about that could have been included in the interview.
If any of the mods are reading this, maybe there could be some way that future interviews can include questions from HN? We could have a discussion about the questions that the HN community wants to ask, and the mods can pick out the questions that generate the most interest from the community?
"So can you tell us about some of the hardest parts in the history of the early history of Facebook?"
(He basically says the hardest point was not selling for $1 billion, and that it was a non-issue months later.)
But I think it's hard to be vulnerable when you reach that level of prominence... anything he says will be scrutinized and potentially be quoted for years to come, and will affect not only himself but everyone who works at Facebook. Even if you want to be authentic, there are powerful social forces which make you careful in what you say.
Peter Thiel almost cost Zuck one of the biggest mistakes in business history.
Another inconvenient fact that goes unsaid.
Groupon's looking silly for not selling at 6BN, at least as a company. (I think they personally made out ok?)
> “When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn’t. A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.”
He should have spoken about one of the many times they were on the brink of disaster or the company shutting down, not some time where he got offered a $B.
I hope someone like Tim Ferriss can get a hold of Zuck for 2 hours, and chat to get an in-depth view of him. The dude is going to be remembered as the Edison of this century. He should share more about himself outside the context of fb and their products.
I came looking for a video that would talk about building the future and I am surprised Sam & Mark spent lot of time talking about FB origins and other things related to FB and talk future only for the last few minutes.
Its almost palpable the cold nature of the interview, they don`t shake hands nor greet each other as someone else noted the conversation seems very detached to say the least.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/04/0...
Yeah, the title is a bit more grandiose than just "Sam interviews Mark." I thought it was good. It's a huge topic that has hundreds of thought leaders so it's not like you should be expecting something mind blowing.
For me, it was valuable because the whole "building the future" thing is still very much rooted in existing institutions. Outside of Silicon Valley, everybody "knows" that if you want to do something really big you need a government or corporation to do it. Everybody believes it's impossible for one person or a small team to create an impact. It's good to remind people that Facebook is changing the world, but it started in a way that lots of people could start.
And you're right, the similar affect of the two -- the earnestness, the forward posture telegraphing intensity, the lack of humor -- all together, it is off-putting. Later in the interview, Sam leans back which seems to break this unpleasant symmetry.
They do seem intensely earnest, but both of them always do in the interviews I've seen. I personally don't see that as a negative in this sort of context, however.
Starts at 1:15 https://youtu.be/54NIcx3HJSE?t=75
Zuck's body language looks bad because of the chair their are using. It is slanted and Zuck is sitting straight. It makes him look less relaxed (like a job interview). Same with Sam Altman.
Complete lack of emotions in Zuck's eyes. It might be part of his personality but it makes him look very detached from what he is talking about.
Maybe you're one of those 10-100K experiments where some engineer pushed something out to see if it worked. Maybe a new feature boosts revenue so they can build solar-powered internet planes that bring entire cities a connection. Maybe it's just noise and isn't actually relevant.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/02/22/16/3173A83C0000057...
Really, just plain HTML would've been fine, but instead it's trapped in a PDF that's trapped inside Scribd!
http://genius.com/Mark-zuckerberg-how-to-build-the-future-ma...
Because that was a pretty big deal back in the day.
The Lycos or Excite of Social ...
Without MySpace, I'm not sure if FB would be.
Oh - and remember 'Friendster' ?
:)
> ...It was the fact that after that, huge amounts of the company quit because they didn't believe in what we were doing. If you look at the management team that we had...
>Interviewer: Did that whole management team leave?
>Mark: The whole management team was gone within about a year after that.
That's an eye opener. Guess most people are in it for short term cash. I bet a lot of them regret leaving now.
Σ$0.04: Mark Zuckerberg mentions talk on the threat of AI as fear mungering, however, https://intelligence.org/ (MIRI) argues that advanced AI is a legitimate existential threat. Note that when MIRI speaks of "AI", they are not talking about fancy neural networks, but the fact that since humans are no where near any kind of upper bound on intelligence, and the space of possible Turing machines and self modifying algorithms is overwhelmingly large, plus reams of other arguments you , humans will eventually be able to produce computer programs with the capability of destroying civilisation. N.B: This is my brief summary of what their stance seems to be, and isn't a direct quotation or paraphrasing of MIRI's official opinion.
This is instructive for many startups. You don't need amazing or even original ideas. You do need to have growth features in place that, if users choose to use them, will make world domination an inevitable conclusion. Then it's just a matter of optimizing until a high enough percentage of users use that feature. If you are successful at this, you will have perpetual growth.
That being said, there is something to be said about how this comment was made. Because the hard part wasn't turning down the offer. It wasn't even dealing with the outcome of an unpopular choice per se -- hard to imagine these people thought "acquired by Yahoo" was the road to product success, even back then. It was dealing with the outcome of telling people they'd have to wait, possibly forever, to see their efforts rewarded (it took them 6 more years to IPO, with Zuckerberg famously devaluing the stock of early contributors along the way).
Noticing the lack of trust (possibly in both directions) _is_ a dark time, but it's hard to come to that conclusion when these things are referenced so obliquely ('people left' isn't a dark time, it's business).
HN users sometimes feel that the rules are off when a rich and famous person is the target, but that misunderstands why we have the rules. It's not to protect the rich and famous, who (as cynics are fond of pointing out) don't need it, except of course insofar as they're human beings like anyone else. Rather, it's to protect the community from becoming a mean place that only mean people would want to be part of, and eventually not even them.
It's pretty safe to ignore most of the flack in this thread. Most people vote with their feet (or wallets, or eyeballs, or attention), and they've voted that they love Facebook, regardless of what a minority of people in this thread say or upvote.
Nerds have a cantankerous side and are as prone to virtue signalling as any other group. Those of us who read Slashdot ages ago may remember the Microsoft hate it hosted and the way every year was going to be the year of Linux on the desktop. Well, Microsoft is still here; Linux on the desktop is still a minority pursuit; and most people never cared that much about the OS they used.
The specific target nerd derision has changed some, but the form of the attack and disdain has not. Any company or country or person's haters is proportionate to its size. Look at what people do and how they behave rather than what they say.
Facebook sucks, not just because of confusing UI, or because of silent changes to privacy settings, or because it's one stop shopping for scary three-letter-agencies, but because the network effect is so damned strong, it will take a monumental misstep for it to become the next Myspace.
Google and Microsoft gave us tools that enabled us to work faster and do things we couldn't do before (esp. Google); Facebook is just addictive but doesn't enable anything.
I would rather "the future" didn't include more of Facebook.
Plenty of people in the HN demographic also vote with their feet by quitting FB.
You don't have to be a billionaire to see those being important. Hopefully we'll have a more benevolent entity than Facebook bringing us into that future.
You have to listen to Zuckerberg on this, because he's good at understanding what people will put up with. I never expected that a sizable portion of the population would walk around looking at smartphones, totally losing situational awareness. Even when not playing Pokemon Go. But that became socially acceptable.
The failure of Google Glassholes seemed to indicate that artificial reality was going to be socially unacceptable. But Zuckerberg might be able to sell it to society. Microsoft talks about it as an office tool (see their "HoloLens" stuff) but that may be the wrong vision.
The right vision may be "Hyperreality".[1] This is a must-see for anybody thinking about artificial reality. These people are much closer to a realistic vision than Microsoft is. (Watch at 1080p if possible.)
What about privacy? Doctors in my country (France) are legally obliged to respect the privacy of their patients and the confidentiality of medical data. A third-party cloud service, not so much.
Edit: To be more precise, I'm not saying that medical apps can't be done right. I'm just disagreeing with the implication that an efficient medical app is automatically a good thing.
> And finally, if you’re worried about your own gnarly ER visit showing up on Figure 1, the app is very careful about patient privacy. Every time anyone uploads an image, the first thing they do is fill out a consent form. Figure 1 has an algorithm that automatically obscures faces, and tools that let the user erase any pixels containing names, dates, or any other identifying details.
Accuracy is great, but false positive are bad for everyone.
In other words: the only worthwhile companies for VCs are the ones that do not follow the set patterns and to which the rules do not apply.
That's more or less the same situation that the TV show Silicon Valley used to stress out their founder. He's got something with potential and an offer to buy it for more money than he's ever thought about before. What do you do? Maybe go throw up in the bushes? How would it feel when you make your decision and then most of your team leaves? What if they're right and you ruined everything?
That scenario is dramatic enough when you get to watch it happen to someone else. Living through it could easily be "dark."
Technology isn't the problem. It's "why bother"? Zuckerberg is thinking of AR as a social system. That implies something much more like Hyperreality than Microsoft's system. Remember, there is not, as yet, a killer app for VR, even though good hardware has been available for years now.
Imagine a textbook 500 years in the future (there won't be physical textbooks of course, but whatever students are using as a learning tool then)... Who do you think will be profiled in that textbook? Bill Gates? Warren Buffet? Larry Ellison? Steve Jobs? Mark Zuckerberg? Maybe any or all of those people, but then again, maybe not, I bet Elon Musk will be there.
SkinVision has been around for 5 years. "It was founded in 2011 in Bucharest, Romania based on a PhD study to apply the mathematical theory ‘fractal geometry’ for medical imaging. Fractal geometry simulates natural growth of tissue and is widely used and documented in biology." [1]
Alternative way of framing this: Any CEO who is personally responsible for generating most of the important features or business decisions in his company is incompetent at hiring and delegating
[1] "Biggest mistake ever was not to do the Series B round at Facebook," http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiels-bad-investment-2...
Equity in Startups - Cap tables at IPO
This probably varies from person to person, but failing at something I care about would make me much more upset than failing at something I didn't really care about.
The most obvious way is direct through e.g. drugs. There's a very wide spectrum of potential futures here from nootropics to brave-new-worldesque soma.
The less obvious way is that technology alters your surroundings, which in turn influence your psychology.
Neither scenario seems particularly implausible to me.
However, the Winklevoss twins had hired Zuck and communicated their proprietary information so that they could get his execution. It is absolutely shady to get hired to develop a product, chicken out, and then implement your own version using your client's intellectual property. It's obvious that Zuck was in hot water here; if he wasn't, he wouldn't have paid out to the Winklevoss's.
It appears the lesson from Zuck is "take whatever you can and win, then deal with any potential consequences from a position of strength".
> —PG, Ideas for Startups (2005)
The first is that, erm, yes, there's a huge market for startup ideas. It's called the get-rich-quick-scheme industry. Sells billions of dollars worth of goods every year trying to teach people what business ideas will make them rich.
The second is that it depends what you mean by "idea." If you mean some generic one sentence pitch about some vague idea ("Uber for pets"), then, sure, it's probably not worth much.
If you have a very precise plan that includes details about go to market strategies and execution, and that is based on data only you are in possession of, it can be worth a lot of money. That's essentially what Peter Thiel talks about when he mentions good startups being based on "secrets" (the way I understood it, anyway).
That there's no liquid market for such ideas doesn't tell you much about their value.
> What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
> Recall the business version of our contrarian question: what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world‐changing companies yet to be started.
The text of that chapter is on Genius: http://genius.com/Peter-thiel-zero-to-one-chapter-8-secrets-...
Not to Facebook.
Coercion - even subtle social coercion - only works up to a point. If you piss off people enough they'll reward you with zero loyalty, no matter how popular you think you are.
FB is vulnerable unless it keeps its users very happy. Currently it has a monopoly on a product that's actually quite mediocre and frustrating in many ways, and not seen as particularly cool.
If it has to face real competition, it's going to have issues.
There are specific times when you can unseat a behemoth, and those times are when new markets and new platforms arrive.
How is FB doing in China? How are the Chinese doing with AI, AR/VR, and mobile?
Anyone looking at China can see that it's becoming competitive with the US. So far the software markets are largely separate, but I think it's naive to believe that's still going to be true 10-20 years from now.
Also, hating Facebook makes jumping ship so much easier - my wife uses Instagram primarily now instead of Facebook. Yes I know Facebook owns Instagram, but there are other social platforms people are jumping to.
I mean, technology is probably not going to make rich people's lives better at this point unless it removes some substantial annoyance. I suspect that like money, there's diminishing returns after a certain point.
But, for someone who has never had internet before, to get connected (one of Mark's three stated goals in the video) is life changing.
Edit: By the way, this is the essential difference between Bentham's and Mill's versions of utilitarian philosophy, if you'd like to research further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Utilitarianis...
You can read about humans, to understand humans you have to form relationships with them and experience them yourself. An analogy would be reading K&R compared to bashing against GCC.
See e.g. http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/is-facebook-luring-you-into...
Which, of course, is not to say that ideas in and of themselves build companies. But that point is so obvious it seems a little stupid to have to point it out.
That's the thing with "ideas don't matter, it's all about execution." It's either true by definition (every company has to execute something at some point to even exist), or incredibly shallow and wrong (as long as you execute something you'll get great results).
It seems stupid to us, but I run into people every few weeks who "have the next big idea if only they can find a dev" but are hesitant to share more than a two-sentence pitch of fear that their coveted idea would get "stolen".
Fixed mindset vs growth mindset is still a battle for many people, especially (would be) first time non-technical founders.
Also - if Harvard is a great school - how the F does someone find time to do the work and make a product at the same time?
When I did Engineering, I didn't have time to take a shower.
Looking back at college it was easily 80% worrying about doing work and 20% actually doing it. With something like programming, knowing how to use a debugger, profiler and an IDE give you a huge leg up. Easily 95% of CS students never take the time to learn the tools b/c you have to do it on your own time - but you have other homework to stress out about.
Sure, luck may have played a large role in Facebook's initial success. But that was over 10 years ago. Many companies experience that initial success and then go nowhere, e.g. MySpace. Facebook, on the other hand, has continuously surpassed everyone's expectations. It's not until recently that people have began to accept that Facebook is here to stay. Discounting Facebook's repeated successes as luck is just silly.
Building a $350B company does not happen from luck, it requires a constant stream of good decision making.
I don't want to discount merit or work, but we too often seriously discount luck. Luck plays a large part in every success. That's not to say that people are justified in being unsuccessful; it's just to recognize that we're all involved in something larger than ourselves.
As failure doesn't always correlate to incompetence, success doesn't always correlate to competence.
I am not trying to lessen his feat but just saying that luck is a big part of it.
I spent way too much time worrying about grades. I'm not sure it mattered. It would have been just as good (and probably more enjoyable) to be a B-student with awesome side projects rather than an A-student with none.
(And often, esp. for college, one doesn't even need to make that trade-off when homework is largely immaterial, and your grade only depends on exams.)
I say this as someone who got in (eventually chose to attend a different school for a variety of reasons) and with many friends who went there.
At Harvard, the primary thing you do is the extracurricular in your field of interest - whether that's law, activism or startups - is up to the individual student. Your grades, your education and your brand in society - Harvard takes care of that.
MySpace was limited in features, and a fugly interface.
Neither had talented people.
Zuck started at Harvard. That was his core user base. The Ivy League. Basically marquis 'customers' in social.
Think of how massively that affected recruiting and attention? The network effect of Ivy League x 1000. It would have been trivial for him to get investment.
But in the end - forget culture - the basic features were just better, and for every great feature, there are 'smart things' happening internally that are good. Zuck deserves credit for that.
I used to work a little bit with MySpace. Their culture was 'LA Cool Kid' i.e. 'The Standard' hang-out types.
They reminded me of a Record Label - totally hip - totally useless. I feel sorry for any Engineer that had to work at MySpace.
If you knew the culture at Lycos, Excite etc. - and compare it to Google, it's a little bit of a similar story.
If it was purely based on luck, without any talent involved, you'd expect billion dollar companies to be more evenly distributed, and not cluster among certain individuals.
This factor alone accounts for a large percentage of repeat successes. Square probably never would have obtained the capital necessary to become competitive, had it not been for Twitter.
But honestly, for all their funding, even most of these second tries turn out to be failures. What you're really doing here is confusing selection bias with skill: take a pool of enough entrepreneurs, and eventually, just by chance, you'll find someone who has repeat successes.
There's only 170 companies on this list: https://www.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn-companies
The fact that there's even more than one company on it that has a repeat founder suggests that there's something more than selection bias going on her, given the sheer amount of startups started every year.
So the next thing we could do is take a look at if there's other correlations to these repeat founders besides their ability to get capital. I would argue that the fact that most of them are intelligent at least merits a look as a FACTOR that might help them.
I agree with you that talent is a thing. That said, the Matthew effect is also a thing. Winning tends to compound – partially because talented people are repeatedly successful, but even lucky untalented people can be repeatedly successful because of all the attention they get.
The example that's coming to my mind now is a little silly but – there are lots of funny people on Twitter who barely get any retweets, and there are moderately funny things said by popular people on Twitter who get tonnes of retweets and responses suggesting that they're the funniest people ever.
It takes a lot of work and/or luck (probably usually both) to get to the point where people just lap up everything you say, but once you're there, there IS a certain Halo effect of sorts.
Sorry if not water-tight, just rambling here
In the long run, luck and genius are probably both necessary but not sufficient; I have no doubt that Zuckerberg's a very smart guy, I just think there are many, many people just as smart who aren't billionaires.
It reminds me of how Google won the search engine war by delivering a more streamlined, less exploitative product.
And then of course there were a couple innovations that neither MySpace or Friendster had: photos with tags of your friends, and the concept of the News feed. It's hard to imagine a social network without those features, but they didn't exist before Facebook introduced them.
Friendfeed was launched October 2, 2007 and acquired 2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed
MySpace started out as a way for bands in LA to post gigs.
So their initial user-base/NDA was musicians, LA culture.
Facebook was a little more academic/ivy league.
It's hard to change one's genes :)
