Refreshing advice: Work on a problem you care about and don't worry about the rest until it's working.
> 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.
Creating a company that gives people jobs and provides customers with a positive NPV service or product also makes the world a better place. A successful company can tremendous value to the world, even if it only provides a fraction of that for the owner to give to charity.
I suspect it's probably a wash. Donating to a Givewell charity has less risk certainly, but a successful startup on the order of Facebook will change the world by multiple orders of magnitude more. The expected value is probably similar.
Trouble with giving to charities is it's not very personal. Ok you may increase the world's anti malaria budget from $1.5bn to $1.50001bn but you can't turn around and say look at this cool thing I built.
Okay so I don't agree with "don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working" part.
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.
During an interview[1] (with one of the AirBnB founders no less), pg offered the general advice that startups should search for success using a hill climbing algorithm, and not worry about dangerous local maximums; only to be immediately confronted with the counter example of AirBnB (the cereal episode).
That company just seems to be an outlier in multiple categories.
I'm not sure the AirBnB guys with hindsight would have followed that policy again. They may have been better tweaking the model till it seemed to work rather than maxing the credit cards on a non working model perhaps. They were kind of failing and losing money till joining YC so the pre YC strategy may not have been great.
"I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck. It's all a matter of luck. Well, consider Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn't it a little too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn't do just information theory. Several years before, he did some other good things and some which are still locked up in the security of cryptography. He did many good things. You see again and again, that it is more than one thing from a good person. Once in a while a person does only one thing in his whole life, and we'll talk about that later, but a lot of times there is repetition. I claim that luck will not cover everything. And I will cite Pasteur who said, 'Luck favors the prepared mind.' And I think that says it the way I believe it. There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn't. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not."
You do not need to be extremely lucky to "make the world a better place". If that is truly your goal, you can definitely do that without building a startup, without getting extremely lucky, without spending 80 hours a week working on ideas.
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.
The good part is that if you are working on something you care about, you won't be as upset when you fail if you were building something just to become the next Zuck.
In this [1] Tim Ferris podcast Peter Thiel states about Zuckerberg (paraphrasing here): "the more time you spent with him the more you realise it is not luck."
The entrepreneur pits his willpower against the entropy of nature. Nature is huge and moves randomly, while the entrepreneur is small and moves purposefully.
There is definitely luck in nature's random movements. But the entrepreneur small purposeful movements add up over time and overcome nature.
Zuckerberg actually understands that. So it is refreshing to see him receive advice from Sam[1], one of the five greatest founders in the past 40 years!
If it takes 100 years for one man, it will only take a month for a company or community ... Some problems can't simply be fixed by one man alone. And it's better to own little of something then all of nothing ... Look at for example Elon Musk. He only owned like 5% of the companies he started once they where sold.
Also Facebook only had a few thousand users when Zuckerberg started to bring more people in to work on it.
"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."
In the case of Elon Musk (and for the record others like Mark Cuban) something tells me you don't make billions of dollars without a (from a modern perspective) massively disproportionate ownership share. Zuckerberg gets off from this because FB is an outlier in terms of it's value, he didn't need as large a percentage to make as much, but Musk does not.
That's when you've chosen too big a problem. Make it smaller. Find a piece you CAN solve. Then as you gain skill and power, expand. This works in every field.
For all the flack that Zuck is getting in this thread
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.
There's a difference between loving Facebook, and begrudgingly using it because that's where my friends/family are.
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.
What you're saying is all true, esp. virtue signalling. But, one can admire Zuck as an individual (Harvard educated, code wizard, able to learn Chinese and become almost fluent at it while running Facebook, etc.) and still think Facebook changed the world for the worst.
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.
I don't think he is getting much flack. I think he is more like Bill Gates with some luck involved. Let us not try to put him in the same bucket as Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Facebook started as a way to hook up college students, remember poke? It did not start out as a vision to connect the world
> 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.
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.
"[The next computing platform] - I think that's going to be virtual reality and augmented reality."
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.)
I agree that's a must watch, but how is it not just HoloLens + 10 years + Ridley Scott (edit plus get me out of here)? It's a bit unfair to compare an artist's vision to a functioning (and almost shipping) device.
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.
Erm, in the United States we have HIPAA which directly makes "a third-party cloud service" "legally obliged to respect the privacy of their patients and the confidentiality of medical data". Besides, using AI doesn't have to mean using centralized cloud architecture.
> 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.
I'm sure the same privacy conditions exist here in Australia too. However, when getting my skin checked, I asked the doctor about what she was looking for, out of curiosity. To explain, she pulled up vision of a problematic mole on someone else's file, and their name/details were visible.
> And just to make this point, how far into Facebook did it actually become a company?
> 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.
"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."
Interesting interview, but I felt Sam could have asked more probing questions (for the lack of a better phrase) and I don't mean the controversies from the early days of Facebook.
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?
Seems like a lot of those questions and deeper probing were off the table before the interview even started. Considering Sam Altman was doing the interview and the content was geared towards ycombinator, it was very startup focused.
"I think Peter [Thiel] was the person who told me this really pithy quote, 'In a world that's changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.'"
Well, as he clarified, the hard part was the management team quitting.
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.
Here's how Peter Thiel wrote that event in Zero to One:
> “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.”
the whole thing was a very vanilla overview of what happened and what he plans to do. I hope this isn't what YC intends to with their podcast.
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.
Why would their body language have anything to do with the content you were hoping for?
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.
Readit News
> 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
Deleted Comment
--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.
[1]http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/
There is definitely luck in nature's random movements. But the entrepreneur small purposeful movements add up over time and overcome nature.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html
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."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185
Deleted Comment
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.
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.)
[1] https://vimeo.com/166807261
Dead Comment
> 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...
Poster: http://mattmay.us/pub/dermfollow_poster.pdf
Paper: http://mattmay.us/pub/dermfollow_final_report.pdf
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.
> 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.
Deleted Comment
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.