I don't have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.
Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook.
Of course the Silicon Valley is unique and Berlin is not yet comparable. But of all the different cities that are building a startup infrastructure, Berlin is the one with the most similar energy.
Some of the best ideas throughout the company's evolution have been from places all throughout the company whether it's an engineer or someone on the customer support team. Just different areas around the company.
When you think about it, there's no way to input things into a computer. It's all... the holes only go out, right? Like you can plug a keyboard or a mouse in but that's a trick because the computer thinks the inputs are outputs. That's a programmer trick, basically magic. The key to the future is to make holes that go in too.
Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They're keeping up with their friends and family, but they're also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They're connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It's almost a disadvantage if you're not on it now.
Facebook is all about information and helping people share it.
Hollywood has nothing to do with real life.
There are many machines throughout history that were built to do something better than a human can.
While we generally believe in free speech and giving everyone as much ability to speak as possible, in practice there are lots of barriers to that, whether it's legal restrictions, technological restrictions or you can't share what you want if you don't have access to the internet.
I made so many mistakes in running the company so far, basically any mistake you can think of I probably made. I think, if anything, the Facebook story is a great example of how if you're building a product that people love you can make a lot of mistakes
The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'
In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people's perspectives... I really try and live the mission of the company and... keep everything else in my life extremely simple.
The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open.
It occurred to me that building a company was the best way to align a group of people towards building something great. And its really... it's a good organizational structure where you can really reward people. If they're building something that's good, you can you work with partners and reward them if the product that you're developing work well. It's a good way to get the best people involved to build something very good.
Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn't have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he's getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.
I think video is a mega trend, almost as big as mobile.
On engagement, we're already seeing that mobile users are more likely to be daily active users than desktop users. They're more likely to use Facebook six or seven days of the week.
I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don't pretend that if Facebook didn't exist, that this wouldn't even be possible. Of course, it would have.
Berlin definitely has one of the most vibrant of the startup scenes that I have seen. Not really just across Europe, but across the whole world in terms of cities. It's an interesting dynamic.
Building a mission and building a business go hand-in-hand. It is true that the primary thing that makes me excited about what we're doing is the mission, but I also think, from the very beginning, we've had this healthy understanding which is that we need to do both.
When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us.
I personally don't invest in a lot of companies because I think it would be a conflict of interest and Facebook doesn't typically either.
Openness fundamentally affects a lot of the core institutions in society - the media, the economy, how people relate to the government and just their leadership.
When you give people ability to stay connected with all the people they care about, and you make it so they can express new things about themselves or in communication with other people who they care about, then you just open up new possibilities. You make it so people can stay connected in ways that they couldn't before.
