In the early days of Facebook, the driving force behind its creation was a profound enthusiasm for human connections, psychology, and computer science.

entrepreneur, start-up, inspiring, journey, success, challenges, perseverance, innovation, motivation, lessons, passion, failure, growth, advice, mentorship

The thing that I was really fascinated by, and it always have been, is people, right, and how people work. You know, when I was in college, I studied psychology and computer science. And, you know, 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, right? Understanding language, how to communicate with each other, understanding facial expressions, emotions, processing. Yet when I looked out at the internet, right, in 2004, which is when I was getting started, you can find almost anything else that you wanted, right? You could find news, movies, music, reference materials. But the thing that mattered the most to people, which was other people and like understanding what's going on with them, it just wasn't there, right? And I think what was going on was that all that other content was just out there able to be indexed by search engines and other services. But in order to understand what's going on with people, you needed to build tools that made it so that they could express what was going on with themselves. You know, I wanted to figure out what courses to take. So I built this little website course match that, you know, that just made it so that you could enter what courses you were taking and you could click on them and see who else was in them. And it did all these correlations. It told you people who took this course were likely to enjoy this course too. And, you know, the thing that just struck me from the beginning is, you know, people would just spend hours clicking through. Here are the courses that people are taking and, wow, like, isn't it interesting that this person is interested in these things? And it was just text, right? There was nothing that was like super interesting there. But that just struck me as, you know, people have this deep thirst to understand what's going on with those around them. And, you know, 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 kind of added a lot of these things together. Did you think Facebook was going to be a company when you started? I built the first version of Facebook because it's something that my friends and I wanted to use at Harvard, a directory and a way to connect with the other people around us. And I didn't think at all that it was going to be a company. I remember very specifically the night that we launched the first version. I went out to get pizza with a couple of my friends who now work here. And, you know, I remember really clearly we were talking about how one day we thought that someone was going to build a community like this for the world and that that would be some company. But, like, it clearly wasn't going to be us. I mean, it just it wasn't even... It didn't even occur. Yeah, no, I mean, it wasn't even an option that we considered that it might be us. I mean, we just weren't focused on building a company back then. We were just building something that we thought would be useful at our school.