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 and 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 determination is probably the biggest
piece you know it's um 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 the 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 yeah I think one of the hardest
parts for me was was actually when Yahoo offered to buy the company for for a lot
of money because up until that point that was this turning point in the
company where before that we everyday we just come in and kind of do what we
thought was the right next thing to do right we'd open two more schools we we
open to high school and open beyond schools and you know launch more photos
because because that's what it seemed like the next thing that we needed to do
to help people express themselves and understand more what was going on around
them but then no yahoo came in with this with this really meaningful offer right
even a billion dollars for us was how far into the company I was a couple of
years ago right and you know we have 10 million people using the product at the
time right so it wasn't like it wasn't as if it were obvious that we were gonna
succeed far beyond that and that was the first point where we really had to
to look at the future and say wow is what we're gonna build going to actually
be so much more meaningful for this and you know that caused a lot of
interesting conversations in the company and and with our investors and you know
at the end of that Dustin and I just decided you know no we think that we can
actually go connect more than just the 10 million people who are in schools we
can go beyond that and have this really be a successful thing and we just had to
go for it but it was really stressful because a lot of people really thought
that we should sell the company and and you know for a lot of folks who joined a
start-up I feel like at that point I hadn't been very good about
communicating that we were trying to go for this mission yeah you know we just
showed up every day and yeah and just kind of did what we thought was the the
right next thing to do so for a lot of the folks who joined early on that there
weren't really aligned with me right before them you know they they joined
and you know being able to sell a company for a billion dollars after a
couple years was I was like a home run right and it is a home run right then
and that's you know I think that that's um I I get that but you know that I
think that the fact that I didn't communicate very well about what we were
trying to do cause caused this huge tension and the part that was painful
wasn't wasn't turning down the offer it was the fact that after that a huge
amounts of the company quit because I didn't believe in and what we were what
we were doing right him if you look at the management team that we had did that
fellow management team leave the whole management team who was gone within
within about a year after that I think the key is building a company which is
focused on learning as quickly as possible
all right companies are learning organisms and you can make decisions
that either make it's that you learned faster or you learn slower and you know
in a lot of ways building a company is like following the scientific method
right you 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 that's an
important philosophy so there are all these different decisions that we make
inside the company you know everything down to really empowering individual
engineers we invest in this huge testing framework right at any given point in
time there aren't there's not just one version of Facebook
running in the world right there's probably tens of thousands of versions
running because engineers here have the power to to try out an idea and and ship
it to you know maybe ten thousand people or a hundred thousand people and then
they get a readout on how that version of what they did whether it was a change
to you know show better content a news feed or UI change or some new feature
they could have read out on how that version performed compared to the
baseline version of Facebook that we have on everything that we care about
how how connected people are you know 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 an engagement of the overall community and you know by
running in 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 that we could if every change had to be approved by me
right or any every idea had to come from from management so I do think there's
something very deep about building this you know learning culture and moving
quickly towards that that just helps you get ahead over time I think Peter was
the person who who told me this really pithy quote that in a world that's
changing so quickly the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk and I
really think that that's true right a lot of people I think think that you
know whenever it comes to whatever you get yourself into a position where you
have to make some some big shift and direction or do something you know there
are always people are going to point to the downside risks of that decision and
locally there may be right right I mean it for any given decision that you're
gonna make there's upside and downside but in aggregate if you are stagnant and
you don't make those changes then then I think you're guaranteed to fail right
and not not catch up so to some degree I think it's really right that over time
the biggest risk that you can take is to not take any risks how did you figure
you were going to start a car company and be successful
well I didn't really think Tesla would be successful I thought we would most
likely fail but you say you didn't expect the company to be successful then
why try if something's important enough you should try even if you bubble
outcome is failure don't just follow the trend so you may have heard me say that
it's good to think in terms of the physics approach for first principles
which is rather than reasoning by analogy you boil things down to the most
fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there and this is a
good way to figure out if if something really makes sense or if it's just what
everybody else is doing it's hard to think that way can't think think that
way about everything takes a lot of effort but if you're trying to do
something new it's the best way to think and that framework was developed but by
physicists to figure out counterintuitive things like quantum
mechanics so it's really a powerful powerful message and anyway so that's
and then I think that the final thing I would encourage you to do is now is the
time to take risk you don't have yeah you don't have you don't have kids your
obligations at all seven probably not this the the the but but as you as you
get older your obligations increase so your and once you have a family you
start taking risk not just for yourself but for your family as well it gets much
harder to do things that might not work out so now is the time to do that before
you before you have those obligations so I would encourage you to take risks now
do something bold you won't regret it well first of all I'd say I actually
think I think I feel feel fear quite strongly so it's not as though I just
have the absence of fear I've I feel it quite strongly but there were times when
something is important enough you believe in it enough that you do you do
it in spite of the fear so speaking of important things like
people shouldn't think I should think well I feel fear about this and
therefore I shouldn't do it it's normal to be to feel fair like you'd have to
definitely something mentally wrong you shouldn't feel fair so you just feel it
and let the importance of it drive you to do it anyway yeah you know actually
something that can be helpful as fatalism some degree if you just think
it's just accept the probabilities then that diminishes fear so my starting
SpaceX I thought the odds of success were less than 10% and I just accepted
that actually probably I would just lose lose everything no banks want to do it
banks are now this thing never work so I don't know what to do because if I start
to launch a payment system it's against the financial legal laws because you
have to have a license but if I don't do it emo ecommerce would go nowhere so
then I went to Davos I listened to a leadership a discussion leadership is
about responsibility and after I listened to that panel
I give a call to my friends my colleagues in the my apartment say do it
now immediately if something wrong the govern not happy by that if one body has
to go to the prison Jack might go to the prison because it is so important for
China for the world to build of the trusted system and if you did not do it
I sent and do not do it properly stealing money money was no trust red
code I sent you to the prison yeah so how is they think and people people
don't like it so many people I talked to at that time for all he paid they say
this is the stupidest idea you have ever got but I say I don't wear the stupid
club as long as people use it now we have 800 million people using this a
leap a 1999 year 2000 and evening at the Yahoo time a lot of people say
jack is crazy he's he's doing something that we don't understand a lot of
venture capitals give you money because there is such a American model already
there but they say Alibaba we don't see this kind of model right name Jack's
crazy yeah this is crazy guy I mean I remember my first time in Time magazine
they call me crazy jack and I think Chris is good we are crazy but we're not
stupid we know what we are doing but if everybody agree with me if everybody
believed my our idea is good we have no chance I worry about it today young
people lot of young people lose hope lose vision and start a complaint
because we also have the same Pyrrhus when I got it's not a good feeling being
rejected by so many people we also depressed though at least later
we find that the world has a lot of opportunity how you see the world how
you catch the opportunity if you don't do it nothing is possible if you try to
do it at least you have the hope