19. Interviewer (Sam Altman):
Cool.Yeah, so I want to talk about one of the most common questions we get from people building products is how to
decide whatto build,how to figure out when to bet the company,how to do something totally new. And I think one
thing that Facebook has done incredibly well is figure out what to build and build this repeated innovation culture,
which I think is, like,the hardest thing to do in business.So how have you done that and how do you advise other
people to do the same?
Mark Zuckerberg:
I think the key is building a company which is focused on learning as quickly as possible.Companies are learning
organisms,and you can make decisions that either make it so that you learn faster or you learn slower.And in a lot of
ways building a company is like following the scientific method. You try a bunch of differenthypotheses,and if you set
up the experiments well,then you kind of learn what to do, and I think that that's an important philosophy.
So there are all these different decisions thatwe make inside the company,everything down to really empowering
individual engineers.We invest in this huge testing framework.At any given point in time, there aren't, there's not just
one version of Facebook running in the world.There's probably tens of thousands ofversions running because
engineers here have the power to try out an idea and ship it to maybe 10,000 people or 100,000 people.And then
they get a readouton how that version of what they did, whether it was a change to show better contentin News
Feed or UI change or some new feature, that they get a readouton how that version performed compared to the
baseline version ofFacebook that we have on everything that we care about, how connected people are,how much
people are sharing,and how much they say that they're finding meaningful content,business metrics,like how much
revenue we make, and engagementof the overall community.
And by running tens of thousands of differentexperiments and putting the power in people's hands to try out all these
differentthings, you can imagine we'd just make so much more progress than we could if every change had to be
approved by me or every idea had to come from management.So I do think that there's something very deep about
building this learning culture and moving quickly towards that.That just helps you get ahead over time.
Mark Zuckerberg on How to Build the Future
20. And in a lot of ways building a company is like following the scientific method. You try a
bunch of different hypotheses, and if you set up the experiments well, then you kind of learn
what to do, and I think that that's an important philosophy.
We invest in this huge testing framework.
There's probably tens of thousands of versions running because engineers here have the
power to try out an idea and ship it to maybe 10,000 people or 100,000 people.
We'd just make so much more progress than we could if every change had to be approved by
me or every idea had to come from management.
