Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg just took the stage at the D6 conference in Carlsbad, California for an interview with Kara Swisher.
Zuckerberg, of course, is a famously difficult interview (my interview of Zuckerberg from TechCrunch40 last year is here). At first glance, this interview is going much better. The audience, at least, is tame.
Swisher: What is Facebook right now? Define Facebook.
Zuckerberg: Facebook is about helping people share information and share themselves. We build products that help people share personalities, open up, share pieces of them communicate, while giving them complete control over their privacy.
Swisher: What were your inspirations?
Zuckerberg: “We’ve been building Facebook for four years now.” AOL was an early inspiration, hacking things on AOL platform, in chat rooms. A lot of his friends grew up learning how to program on AOL.
Swisher: what was it like to come to silicon valley and get instant attention?
Zuckerberg: Once they got to 30 colleges decided FB was worth spending time on, decided to move to California for the summer. So many great companies driving down 101, like Yahoo, thought it would be good to meet some of them.
He says that at the end of the summer he and some of the others stayed in California, took more time off Harvard, eventually dropped out.
Talking about taking classes at Harvard, Art in the time of Augustus, never went to class once. He said he was planning on catching up but built FB instead. Few days before classes ended he built a tool to have people upload images and information for everyone to collaborate. He passed the class.
Swisher: Asks about big funding from earlier this year, Zuckerberg’s decision to stay CEO.
Zuckerberg: Says CEO sets vision for the company and recruits a team. Says not done executing on vision, still building team.
Swisher: What did you learn in first couple of years as CEO?
Zuckerberg: Says “Beacon was a big mistake for us in a lot of ways” but it reinforced for them that there are lots of ways to share information, they learned.
Swisher: Asks Sheryl why she left Google for FB?
Sandberg: web is becoming more social. thinks trend is increasing. was at google for 6.5 years, was looking for something new. was excited about opportunity to do something small again. really believes in mission, wants to help FB scale.
Swisher: Opening up of the platform, what thinking was behind it?
Zuckerberg: they knew they could never build all the useful applications that were needed. Wanted to allow developers to help them. It grew a lot faster in first year than they thought it would. 300k developers now. Lots of apps they didn’t anticipate or purposefully didn’t want to go after. Music, for example - iLike built app. Another - games - things like scrabulous.
Swisher: What is your relationship wth Microsoft?
Sandberg: It’s good. It’s a good partnership. You can’t go it alone. We’re a small company. Partnerships really matter.
Swisher: With Google?
Zuckerberg: We talk to them all the time. Larry came to his apartment when he had a mattress on the floor. Google does a lot of interesting things, would be good to work with them on some things. Google is such a big company that is doing so many different things, working on social stuff. [no real answer here].
More coverage here.
Fuck Zuck.
@1 lol any tweet http://techdosh.com
@1,
Hating someone just because they’re a success is not a valid reason to hate someone
…jealous baaaaastad
Who is Sandberg?
Not a lot of meat behind these answers. Someone is hiding something or lacks confidence.
Ryan
lessons in brevity: http://www.mofata.com
my cat’s blog is better than this post
Very solid interview… so much meat in there.. impressive!
Michael,
It seems to me that these questions are quite vanilla. I’d like to know
1. What FB plans as a solution to the Beacon debacle.
2. How MZ plans to improve FB audience response rates so that FB experiences real organic revenue growth, and not just guaranteed dealflow revenue.
3. How FB plans to stay relevant given past lifecycles of large social nets that grew stale (see GeoCities & TheGlobe.com.
Not being an ass here, but not capitulating either. Just my thoughts.
Koodos to Zuck for stiking gold with his little project called Facebook. Was it his idea? Was it others’? Does not matter. He gets the dough and that’s what matters.
However, he can’t speak like a visionary, his speech is soft and empty. Why would anyone listen to him?
Just wondering…
facebook is the new myspace
its for kids
seriously, they RUINED the service. i dont want to be superpoked. i dont want to add a million applications that have no real function
facebook jumped the shark and has cluttered an otherwise GREAT service
let us OPT OUT of apps, PLEASE
if your communications person is reading this fbook, send it up the ladder
There’s certainly some truth to @10
“I worked at Google” is the new “MBA”. Worthless in the real world — outside of the cocoon it was hatched in. She knows nothing about “scaling a business” where there isn’t really a “business”. If FB has any chance whatsoever, it’s finding the person/key to developing a stable, long-term revenue stream. Traditional ads ain’t it, folks. If they were smart, they would have charged users $10 a year two years ago (without ads) and would be doing just fine. About $700M annually, fine. The Napoleon complex of these little developers is staggering in its shortsightedness.
I find it interesting about this article regarding facebook.
http://ian.onthereddot.com/200.....iendships/
Um, I’m confused.
Is the quoted interview with Zuckerberg and Swisher the same as the title interview with Zuckerberg and Sandberg? Or is the quoted interview something that happened in the past, the same as the links you’ve posted?
Ah, nevermind.
well i really admire the guts by a very young man to start a business that changed the way we looked at internet. connecting people with people is not the only fact about facebook but more over it is a effective advertising arena for advertisers to find their target.
i am starting my own business on car customization. ezridez
@hotmail.com; i just started a facebook account and learning myself. how else can facebook be functional as a good business tool guys?
proud hacker
is mark
So many bergs in one article is making baby Jesus sad.
Q: “What is your relationship with M$?”
A: They provide the money, we have none, we don’t know how to monetize fakebook and we sold our soul to them. They control what gets advertised and how it will develop in the future for Mac OSX and Linux (no development of course) They are the real owners and they make all financial decisions.
That is their relationship with M$, everything else is just crap.
@Shabir: don’t put your email address on the public web, ever. Especially since hotmail has the most awful spam filter ever. It’s seems like it hasn’t been upgraded since M$ acquired them.
Also this smug little brat reminds me of Bill Gates a little too much. Then again, maybe he’s just really shy.
Chuck out those google execs out of facebook, who are wrongly influencing facebook’s decisions.
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