Facebook leveraged understanding of human behavior to extend people's social capacity and capture the college student market, leading to its success over MySpace.

• 🤔
  00:00

  Establishing a culture of real identity on Facebook in 2004 enabled it to bootstrap into something much bigger, and now people are sharing a thousand times as much stuff a day.

  • Facebook could not have succeeded before 2004 due to certain conditions needing to be in place.
  • School email addresses were used to establish a culture of real identity on the service, and once it was established, it was able to bootstrap into something much bigger.
  • The amount of content shared by individuals is exponentially increasing, suggesting that in 10 years people will be sharing about a thousand times as much as they do now.
  • Before 2004, people would have shared less, but now people are sharing a thousand times as much stuff a day, and services like Instagram are leading the way.
  • Dustin and the speaker had a debate about the quality of the early Facebook service and whether it was necessary to include course catalogs for each school.
  • To establish a quality bar and have the best product, you need to go beyond the 80/20 rule.
• 💻
  05:45

  We rented a server for $85/month and optimized our product to grow 500x in a year.

  • We eventually figured out a way to crowd-source data from hundreds of colleges and our first server cost $85.
  • We used $85 to buy a server and ran ads to make money, while Dustin and I worked on efficiency and Eduardo sold ads to keep the business running.
  • We rented a server for $85 a month and had time to perfect our product and deal with scaling problems.
  • Friendster had massive scaling problems, but with optimization and new features, they grew 500x in a year.
• 📣
  08:46

  Facebook was created to increase sharing and now allows people to learn more about each other, with over 400 million photos shared daily.

  • Within a couple of weeks of launching at Harvard, the majority of students were using Facebook, and other schools started writing to ask for it to be expanded.
  • We chose to launch Facebook at schools that already had school-specific social networks because we cared more about making it exist than other companies.
  • We launched our product at Yale, Stanford, and Columbia to ensure it was better than any existing competitors.
  • Facebook was created due to an increase in sharing, which allowed for enough information to be shared to support the product.
  • Facebook's mission is to keep building the next thing and continue to allow people to learn more about each other.
  • People wanted to share more photos, so Facebook listened and built a photo sharing service, which now sees over 400 million photos shared daily.
• 🤔
  14:44

  Explore your options before committing and stay flexible to maximize option value for starting a company.

  • When I first went to college, I planned to major in Classics, but ended up taking more Computer Science classes than Psychology classes.
  • I bet my sister I'd finish college before her, but I dropped out and my mom knew it would happen.
  • Parents likely knew their child would run their own show, but starting a startup was unexpected.
  • Starting a company is hard, but it can be done by wanting to build something and getting people around you excited about it.
  • Explore what you want to do before committing and keep yourself flexible to maximize option value.
• 🤝
  19:08

  Facebook leveraged understanding of human behavior to extend people's social capacity and capture the college student market, leading to its success over MySpace.

  • Facebook pivoted many times to become a platform, and the feature that kept people coming back was understanding what makes humans human.
  • Humans are uniquely wired to process people, with parts of the visual cortex dedicated to processing micro movements of the face to detect emotion.
  • Facebook extended people's social capacity by giving them the power to share and control what they wanted to share.
  • Humans have the capacity to maintain empathetic relationships with about 150 people, which Facebook extends by allowing people to keep in touch with many more.
  • MySpace was unable to compete with Facebook as it had already captured the college student market, which was the center of gravity socially.
• 🤔
  23:32

  Facebook was created to help Harvard students study for finals, and has since become a platform for staying connected with existing relationships and meeting new people.

  • MySpace was better for meeting new people, while Facebook was better for staying connected with existing relationships.
  • Companies that try to copy existing successful apps are not successful.
  • People have a fundamental need to stay connected with the people they know and meet new people, which Facebook is trying to solve, and MySpace may have failed due to not focusing on this.
  • I released the first version of Facebook in February 2004 due to Harvard's intersession period.
  • Students have a reading period in January to study for finals.
  • I hacked together a website to help my classmates study for a final by downloading images from the course website and allowing people to contribute their thoughts on the historical significance of the images.
• 🤩
  29:00

  After visiting California, I decided to rent a place there with friends, took a term off from Harvard to build tooling and automation, and never went back when we had millions of users.

  • I visited California for the first time in January, was amazed by the technology companies and the weather, and decided to rent a place there with friends.
  • Dustin pulled me aside and said we had a lot of users and servers, but no ops guy, so we had to manage our own servers before ec2.
  • Harvard has a policy allowing students to take as much time off as needed, so we took one term off to build the tooling and automation, and eventually decided not to go back when we had millions of users.
• 🤔
  32:00

  I have to attend a wedding of a former friend who I used to go out for pizza with almost every night.