Facebook: This Surprising Habit Made Mark Zuckerberg a Billionaire!

He's an American computer programmer and internet entrepreneur He's best known as one of the co-founders of the social networking website Facebook His personal net worth is estimated to be thirty eight point six billion dollars He's Mark Zuckerberg and here are his top ten rules for success First I'll focus on it, right? I mean, I think like you basically get what you spend your time doing, right? I mean, I want the company to build three products this year and we're gonna work on a few others because people are interested in them But those are the three things that I'm spending my product time on, right? You get what you put into it. If you spend a third of your time Trying to make the people around you better through getting better people Mentoring getting them to be better getting the best people in your organization You know into more impactful roles and I think over time that just accrues and you get a better organization We've had this tradition for I don't know probably seven or eight years at the company Where every week we have a Q&A where where our employees can come and ask me any question that they want about what's going on and What the what the direction of the company is or questions or things that they read about in the press or that they're friends? Who use the product? What what they're asking them and um, and it's been this really important tradition for us Both because we really believe in an openness and communication and that's kind of what Facebook is all about But it's also really important for for me and for Running the company to be able to get feedback, right and and to be able to learn what's on people's minds what are what our employees and folks who who are who are part of our team are thinking about and And just kind of a lot of the time there are good questions that people ask that change the way that we that we think About what we're building and what we're here to do in the world and that often make us go think and reevaluate How we should be approaching different problems So many things go wrong when you're starting a company and often I think people ask, you know, what mistakes should you avoid making and You know my answer to that question is don't even bother trying to avoid mistakes because you're gonna make tons of mistakes, right and the the Important thing is actually learning quickly from whatever mistakes you make and not giving up, right? And I mean there are things every single year of Facebook's existence that could have killed us or made it so that It just seemed like moving forward and making a lot of progress just seemed intractable But you just kind of bounce back and you learn and nothing is impossible You just have to kind of keep running through the walls. I don't hire people who I wouldn't work for myself I think that's a really good heuristic because everyone knows this like there's the saying like a Players hire a players and B players hire C players, which is like good people hire good. Yeah And I don't think that that's that informative Hire better people or you don't get to hire people like I mean, no, I mean And I think a lot of the time the problem is you don't actually know and sometimes you're like trying to figure out how good Someone is if you didn't think they were good. You wouldn't have hired them, but the heuristic of only hiring people who you would work for Tends to be pretty good I think because then it's like then that you know, right It's like I would not work for this person then Okay, I'm not gonna like stretch just because I need to fill a role today when you're starting something. It's um It's just kind of hard You need to be pretty headstrong about it, right? They're gonna be all these challenges that come up and I think the main thing that you need to do is just not give up right and And kind of know what you want to do and you know The best entrepreneurs that who I've met don't really start companies because their goal is to build a company they do it because they want to make a change in the world and help people and I think if you if you kind of stay true to that and And if you just focus on kind of powering through no matter what the the challenges are that will inevitably Come up in your path then You'll find that there are lots of tools that are available and a lot of people who will help you build what you're building one definition that I have for a good team is a group of people that makes better decisions as a whole than would individually make as a sum of the parts and When you're I think most smart people like learning, right? And I mean that's like one of the thrills of starting a company right as you're just the learning curve can be so steep And if you can set up a team dynamic where you're constantly learning from the people around you then I mean, what's better, right? These are the people I wake up every morning and I want to I want to go learn from and work from is that one? Of your heuristics for hiring people to to like hire people that you learn from Yeah And when building a team you want it to you want to think about the dynamics so that way you can maintain this property that the Team makes better decisions as a group than any individual would I always kind of like I get a little upset whenever Any media attention focuses on me personally and me leading Facebook much less a movie It's been kind of a bad year, hasn't it? Awesome the Those those really fluttering but like but I think that it's one of these things that the media systematically gets wrong Is that this idea that it's a person, right? It's never a person, right? It's it's always a team and the most important thing if you are an entrepreneur trying to build something is You need to build a really good team and that's what I spend a lot of my time on right? I mean I spend Probably at least three hours a day with our core team right and doing things I spend probably 25% of my time recruiting finding good people both outside the company and inside the company to put in more in more Impactful roles. So there's this inherent conflict in the system though Which is you know Are we trying to optimize newsfeed to give each person all of you guys the best experience when you're reading or are we trying to? Businesses just reach as many people as possible and in every decision that we make we optimize for the first for making it So that when for the people who we serve who use Facebook and who are reading newsfeed Get the very best experience that they can and that means that if a business is sharing content That's going to be useful for them Then we'll show that but that means that if the business is sharing content that isn't going to be useful for them We may not show that because it's probably more important that they learned about their friend who had a baby and their baby is healthy so that's an important guiding principle for how we think about this stuff and as The and as the products continue to develop there's just going to be more people sharing more things And we're going to continue to try to do our best at it's showing the best things that we can Understanding that there's no way that we can that a person will ever take the time to go through every one of the 1,500 things That are shared with them every single day so that's but that's kind of how I think about organic reach and You know there are a lot of pages that are going that are doing quite Successfully and their organic reaches is growing quite a bit because they're delivering content to people that they really want So if you're a business owner, and you're thinking about how to use your free page on Facebook. I would just focus on trying to Publish really good content that's going to be compelling to your customers and the people who are following you You know I actually I spent a bunch of time analyzing and reflecting on why it was that we were even able to do it because all Like all reasons suggest that we shouldn't have been able to do it right because all these other companies had way more engineering power and and and servers and time and money and all the stuff and I actually think that this is a pretty instructive thing for anything that you want to go do because This is the same property is going to be true for anything that you guys start is that someone else is going to have more Resources and be able to do it the reason why I think we actually ended up being the ones doing it is because we just Cared way more about it than everyone else right so there were always projects at some of these other companies that were these hobbies, but We always thought that it was this really important thing and really just like felt in our gut and our heart that we wanted to do It and you know early on there were always these skeptics saying that oh this can't be a business We didn't actually care that much about it being a business early on But a lot of the reason why bigger companies didn't invest in it was because it wasn't clear that there was a model that would Work for it. It seemed like a bad idea Yeah And I actually think that that's true for a lot of the best ideas Where it is that it's not that someone else can't do it they actually can and the odds are stacked against you But I think often that belief in the fact that you just care so much about what you're doing is The only thing that kind of drives you to do it, and you know to be honest that kind of drives me to this day I mean one of the the big emphasis points for the company right now is Internet org and you know for a while we had this rallying cry of can we connect a billion people? And you know when we start talking about that we thought that was crazy It was way bigger than any service in in the world that had been built, and you know is ten digits long, right? It's like a you know it just it felt crazy We'd never get to that But then the thing is as we started to actually get closer to that We took a step back and like all right well our mission isn't actually to get one in seven people in the world to be Connected it's we want to connect everyone So it's um it's a big issue that only around a third of the people in the world have access to the internet And that's something that we think that we can do something about and similar to early Facebook We don't there's no business model around this I mean all the people who have all the money in the world I mean, it's not necessarily a fair thing are already the people who are on Facebook, right? It's in the first you know seventh of the world, but we just believe really strongly. It's like this is what we are here to do This is what our company cares about I care about it the team cares about it our culture cares about it So we're just gonna keep pushing on it And I actually think a lot of the reason why great stuff gets built is because it's kind of irrational at the time But so it kind of selects for the people who care the most about it doing it But the students around me were really important as well, right and Both in high school and in college I mean the people who started Facebook with me and a lot of people who are still with me running the company today are People who I met when I was at Harvard and some of them were my TF's at Harvard right and you know when the professors Were off writing papers these were the people who actually taught me and then we hung out and we had like social bonds and academic bonds and I Just I wouldn't understate the importance of that and I mean it's very tied into my whole philosophy and the product that that I spend my life building Facebook because we just believe that social bonds are critical and in one way that I think about the The value that Facebook is filling in the world is that you go through school and at least when I did people just focused on You know Academics like achievement different areas and one of the things that no one really ever taught me was like Having friends is really valuable. No, not that I didn't have friends, but but like Although, you know the movie yes But That first girlfriend, but for sure. I don't think anyone is like it's not like okay third grade We're going to like now we're going to like teach you that like hanging out with people is a very important development Right, and I don't know. I actually think that that is and I think that's part of the reason why sometimes people view Facebook as A waste of time, but I actually think it's this extremely socially valuable utility And I know that I wouldn't be where I want where I am today without That aspect of my life being as developed as the academic part. Thank you so much for watching I made this video because Moxerton's asked me to so if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next Leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do I would also love to know which of Mark Zuckerberg's top 10 rules Had the biggest meaning to you leave it in the comments, and I will join in the discussion Thank you so much for watching continue to believe and I'll see you soon Hey everyone yesterday governor Chris Christie challenged me to the ALS ice bucket challenge Governor I accept your challenge and after I dump this bucket of ice on my head I get to nominate three new people to challenge So I'm going to challenge Bill Gates My partner at Facebook Sheryl Sandberg and Netflix's founder and CEO Reed Hastings to do this within the next 24 hours You have 24 hours to do this or you have to donate $100. All right, here we go That was really cold I Think that that's why you become an entrepreneur, right? Like you don't get to pick your partners a lot of the time but You do get to pick your organization And you do get to pick who you partner with I mean sometimes you may be forced by circumstances to try to work with people who aren't your top pick to have to work with but you just like you get say over all this stuff, right and I Don't know don't be a victim make it happen But no, I think the real story is just you know a lot of hard work, right? I mean, it's a lot of people who are engineers who kind of sit around and code and And we're here because we're trying to help people connect and we believe deeply in this mission And you know our community today has 1.35 billion people in it And there are 7 billion people in the world that we want to connect all of them. And that's why we're here