Mark Zuckerberg discuss startups
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook met with students at StanfordUniversity. He had few advices to them that I found valuable. He said that students must use their knowledge to focus on solving difficult problems that are really important to society, not just start a company to be an entrepreneur. He find that Silicon Valley has so many startups but most only focus on solving small problems, therefore cannot make money. Not many startups are successful; most are struggling because they start with the wrong ideas and no vision. He understood the desire to be an entrepreneur but encouraged students to build companies that solve big and difficult problems, not start a company just to feel important. He said: “I never understood the psychology of starting a company before knowing what to do. You should NOT start a company just to start a company.”
He shared his own story about how he started a social network website in Harvard then expanded to other schools although many of them already had their own social networking sites. The reason was he did not think of starting a company yet. He just wanted to test his vision to see what he was doing was worth doing. He said: “I went to schools that would be hardest for us to succeed at to test my product. I knew if we had something better than the others, it would make it worth putting time into.” Of course, after few months his social networking product was so good and easy to use, most students abandoned their own social network sites and switched to his product. Only then Zuckerberg decided to start his own startup called “Facebook”. Today Facebook has over a billion users and is the largest social network site on earth.
Zuckerberg urged students to start with an idea but test it thorough to make sure it is worth pursuing. He asked them to explore different areas to make sure that it could have an impact before started the company. He said: “Explore what you want to do, test it, validate it before committing. You must keep yourself flexible and ready to change whenever the market changes. For example, Facebook noticed early on that people were changing their profile picture every day. It was user activity that made the company realized that it must focus on photos. He laughed: “We learned quickly that there was strong demand for people to share photos with each other.”
Zuckerberg built the first version Facebook in January of 2004 during the time most students were studying for exams. For an art history class, he had to memorize about 200 pieces of art and explained their historical significance. Instead of doing it, he developed a website that randomly selected one of the 200 art images with a small blank space below it for students to write what the historical significance was. He emailed that to students with a message ‘I built this tool where you can write something about it here.” As students added their comments into the pictures, he compiled and turned them in to his professor. He admitted that his grade on that class was not very good but the idea of having a network of people sharing information stuck with him. That was the beginning of the development of the social network that later became Facebook.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
