7 new things I learned from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in his interview with Y Combinator

Image credit: Screengrab from Y Combinator video

Prominent startup accelerator Y Combinator did a 30-minute long interview with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg recently. Here are the highlights.

1. His interest in psychology led to Facebook.

Mark studied psychology and computer science while in college, and was fascinated by what makes people tick.

One of the things that you learn when you study psychology is that there are all these parts of the brain which are geared just towards understanding people, understanding language, how to communicate with each other, understanding facial expressions, emotions, processing.

Yet when I looked out at the internet in 2004, which was when I was getting started [with Facebook], you can find almost anything else that you wanted. You could find news, movies, music, reference materials, but the thing that mattered the most to people, which is other people and understanding what’s going on with them, just wasn’t there.

He realized that in order to index information about people, you needed to build tools that’ll allow them to express themselves.

2. Facebook was an amalgamation of many little experiments he did at Harvard.

And there were probably 10 other things like that that I built when I was at Harvard before I actually got around to building the first version of Facebook that added a lot of these things together.

One of it was Course Match, a tool for people to see who else was taking the same classes as them.

People would just spend hours clicking through. Here are the courses that people are taking, and, wow, isn’t it interesting that this person is interested in these things? It was just text, right? There was nothing that was super interesting there, but that just struck me as people have this deep thirst to understand what’s going on with those around them.

3. Like Google and many others, Mark Zuckerberg had no intention of turning Facebook into a full-fledged business.

After launching the first version of Facebook, he chatted with friends about how someday someone would build a Facebook for the world. They never thought it would be them.

4. Start with solving a problem, not with deciding that you want to build a company.

Mark believes entrepreneurs should start by solving problems first instead of being determined to start a company from the get-go. He thinks a lot of top Silicon Valley founders had this same attitude.

5. Facebook’s whole management team left after Zuckerberg decided not to sell in Yahoo.

6. There are tens of thousands of versions of Facebook running at any one time.

7. The first version of News Feed was simple.