MARK ZUCKER DISCUSS HIS BIGGEST FEAR AND GIVES BUSINESS ADVICE TO STUDENTS.

Posted on Oct 22, 2012 | No Comments

Mark Zuckerberg took time out of his busy schedule to give students of the Y Combinator’s School event some business advice. He discussed his biggest fear and provided insight on how he position himself from avoiding experiencing it, he stated “I have this fear of getting locked into doing things that are not the most impactful things you can do.”

“I think people really undervalue the option value in flexibility. Explore what you want to do before committing. Keep yourself flexible. You can definitely do that in the framework of a company, but you have to be weary of working at a company and getting locked in. You’re going to change what you do.”

Below are a few other tips he provided to attendees which were recorded by TechCrunch’s Josh Constine and Colleen Taylor:

Facebook started as a hobby, not a company. “I started building Facebook because I wanted to use it in college…we weren’t looking to start a company,” he said.

Zuckerberg assumed someone else would create the company Facebook is today. ”I thought that over time, someone would build a version of [the college-only Facebook] for the world, but it wouldn’t be us — it would be [a large existing software company] like Microsoft.”

Facebook grew slowly compared to companies today. “It took a year for us to get to one million users and we thought it was incredibly fast,” he said.

Zuckerberg doesn’t understand the notion of wanting to start a company before deciding what you what you’re going to build. ”Facebook, I didn’t start to ‘start a company’… it was mostly just through wanting to build it and having it be this hobby and getting people around me excited. It eventually evolved into a company… but I never understood the psychology of wanting to start a company before deciding what you wanted to do,” he said.

Facebook learned what features to build by watching its users. For example, it didn’t launch photos out of the blue. It noticed users were swapping their profile pictures every day, and that it’d probably be useful to create a broader photo sharing tool. “We really listened to what our users wanted, both qualitatively listening to the words they say, and quantitatively looking at behavior that they take,” he said.

If you decide to start a business, make sure you’re starting something impactful. ”A lot of companies I see are operating on small problems, and that’s fine if you want to be an entrepreneur, but the most interesting things operate on a fundamental level.”