Discover essential keys for accelerating your company's growth and ensuring sound decision-making from Mark Zuckerberg.
Innovation, Experimentation, Data-driven, Acquisition, Retention, Conversion, Optimization, Virality, A/B testing, Funnel, User Journey, Scalability, Metrics, Automation, Hacks
I think the key is building a company which is focused on learning as quickly as possible. Companies are learning organisms. You can make decisions that either make it so that you learn faster or you learn slower. 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 that's an important philosophy. So there are all these different decisions that we 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's not just one version of Facebook running in the world. 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. And then they get a readout on how that version of what they did, whether it was a change to show better content in News Feed or UI change or some new feature, they get a readout on how that version performed compared to the baseline version of Facebook 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 engagement of the overall community. And by running tens of thousands of different experiments and putting the power in people's hands to try all these different things, you can imagine we 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. What about the bigger bets like making a large acquisition or the rollout of News Feed or something like that? How do those decisions work? So I actually think when you do stuff well, you shouldn't have to do big crazy things, right? So you want to actually evolve in a way where you're working with your community and making steps and learning. So take News Feed, for example, there was a relatively big shift, but it actually had been a couple of years in the making by watching how people were using the service, right? So when we started off, we didn't have anything like News Feed that showed you updates from what people were sharing, we just had profiles. And what we found were originally one of the big behaviors was people would just click around, right? They'd click on different profiles, hundreds of them, and they'd go through all their friends to see what people had changed, right? To see what the update was in their friend's day. And we learned from that that people were not just interested in looking up and learning about a person, but also understanding the day-to-day changes. So first, we made this product that just showed in order which of your friends had updated their profile, right? So that at least told you whose profile to click on. And then the first version of News Feed was really simple. All it did was it basically took the content that people were posting and put it in order on your home page. So I think when things are working well, you use data and you use the qualitative feedback that you're getting from listening to how your community is using your product to tell you what problems to go solve. And then you basically use intuition to figure out what the solutions to those problems might be, and then you test those hypotheses by rolling them out and getting more data and feedback on that, and then that gives you a sense of where to go. When I look at things like we bought the Oculus team for a lot of money. I actually view that as if we'd done a better job of building up some of the expertise to do some of that stuff internally, then maybe we wouldn't have had to do that. But instead, we hadn't done that. And the Oculus team is by far the most talented team working on that problem, so it just made sense to go make this big move. But I actually kind of think as CEO, it's your job to not get into a position where you need to be doing these crazy things, right? Yes. Of course, it's inevitable over the period of doing stuff, you can't be ahead of everything, so it's better to make big moves and be willing to do that than have pride and not do that and never admit that you could have done something better in the past. But I think when stuff is working well, you're learning incrementally and growing that way.