Mark Zuckerberg

My number one piece of advice is: you should learn how to program.

I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the side, and we've funded ever since by putting ads on the side.

People can be really smart or have skills that are directly applicable, but if they don't really believe in it, then they are not going to really work hard.

Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'

Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.

I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

I think a lot of the time there isn't such a black-and-white difference between what's a platform and what's an app. It's really just like the most important apps become platforms.

Building a mission and building a business go hand-in-hand. It is true that the primary thing that makes me excited about what we're doing is the mission, but I also think, from the very beginning, we've had this healthy understanding which is that we need to do both.

My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don't care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that - building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.

People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.

If you just work on stuff that you like and you're passionate about, you don't have to have a master plan with how things will play out.

When you want to change things, you can't please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren't making enough progress.

It is important for young entrepreneurs to be adequately self-aware to know what they do not know.

In a world that's changing so quickly, you're guaranteed to fail if you don't take any risks.

People don't care about what someone says about you in a movie--or even what you say, right? They care about what you build.

So many businesses get worried about looking like they might make a mistake, they become afraid to take any risk. Companies are set up so that people judge each other on failure. I am not going to get fired if we have a bad year. Or a bad five years. I don’t have to worry about making things look good if they’re not. I can actually set up the company to create value.

We look for people who are passionate about something. In a way, it almost doesn’t matter what you’re passionate about. What we really look for when we’re interviewing people is what they’ve shown an initiative to do on their own.

If things aren’t breaking, then you’re not moving fast enough. People learn by making mistakes.

Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.