Startup School: An Interview With Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage at Startup School, where Y Combinator's Jessica Livingston is interviewing him. I'm liveblogging the interview below.

Mark Zuckerberg: "I love being here. These are like, my people."

Q: I want to go way back, before Facebook. What did you learn from those experiences?

A: I mostly built stuff that I liked. When I got to college I started messing around with other programs. There's this story ? I was making Facebook the week before finals, and there was a class where you had to learn all these pieces of art. I was supposed to be studying, but instead I was building Facebook. A few days before the exam I was screwed. I took all the images, and made a website, where you could add notes to each image, and it was a 'study tool' where everyone else filled in all the notes that I needed to pass the class. After that the professor said it had the best grades of any final he'd ever given. This was my first social hack. With Facebook, I wanted to make something that would make Harvard (and more open that) more open.

Q: How were the first users using Facebook?

A: Looking people up, but it was so simple. There were no messages. You could look at profiles, poke people. Everything else built over time. People say launch early and iterate, Facebook is clearly a good example of that. YC has a shirt that says "do something people want" and I think that's a great way of looking at it.

Q: Tell us all the dumb things you did.

A: Where do you want to start? *pause* What kind of stuff do you want to start with?

We weren't even set up as a company at first. I started it with different friends at Harvard who were really smart, and they didn't have the same levels of commitment. I moved to Silicon Valley, lots of folks didn't want to move out. A lot of the early founder group was fractured. I didn't want to be involved with setting up the business at all. We had this guy Eduardo . Instead of setting up standard company, we set up as Florida LLC. I don't know all the things wrong with that, but lawyers out here said that was number one to unwind. In the beginning we weren't trying to make it as big as possible. We wanted to provide value. Instead of launching schools that would be most receptive, we did least receptive. We launched at Stanford, Columbia, Yale where each of them had their own community already. When we launched Facebook at those schools and it took off, we realized it could be worth putting our time into it. My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley. We wanted this to be valuable.

Q: But that's a problem for startups ? it's not valuable til people start using it (chicken/egg problem).

A: Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn't really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn't until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth. Before that organic spreading on campuses. One amazing thing, we launched at schools with most people asking for it. We didn't have enough money for all the schools, we had servers for $85 a month, kept getting more as we needed them. At Dartmouth, half the student population signed up in one night.