TECH

Mark Zuckerberg: Don't Just

Start A Company, Do
Something Fundamental
Tomio Geron Former Contributor
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Oct 20, 2012, 05:40pm EDT

This article is more than 9 years old.

Entrepreneurs should go after hard problems that are really important

to them, not just start a company to be an entrepreneur, Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg said in a talk at Y Combinator's Startup School.

Zuckerberg advised entrepreneurs to go after real problems, not settle

for something easy. "Do something that’s fundamental," Zuckerberg said
Saturday at Stanford speaking with Paul Graham. "A lot of companies I
see are operating on small problems. It's cool to want to be an
entrepreneur. The problem is trying to build a company that solves a
tangible problem. The most interesting thing is to operate on something
fundamental on how humans (live). It was fundamental for me. I feel
this need really acutely. I wanted this."

Interestingly Zuckerberg and his team purposely decided to launch

Facebook (after Harvard) at other colleges that already had fledgling
social networking sites and directly take on the competition. This is
partly because Zuckerberg did not think of Facebook as a company at
first. He also wanted to take on these other schools to see if what he was
doing was really worth doing. In addition, the other sites showed that
there was an interest in this kind of service at those other schools. "I
wanted to go to schools that would be hardest for us to succeed at,"
Zuckerberg said. "I knew if we had something better than the others it
would make it worth putting time into."

Zuckerberg in his talk also urged startups to explore different areas and
make sure it's something that is impactful before doing it--whether
that's in college or elsewhere. "Explore what you want to do before
committing," he said. "Keep yourself flexible. You can do it in the
framework of a company. Starting a company too rigidly is going to
change what you can do."

The thing not to do is to start a company just to start a company. "I

never understood the psychology of starting to build a company before
knowing what you want to do," Zuckerberg said.

Startups need to be very flexible to adjust to their audience, Zuckerberg

said. For example, Facebook noticed early on that people were changing
their profile picture everyday. It was that user activity that made the
company realize that it needed to focus on photos. "Our takeaway was
there's very strong demand for people to share more photos."

Zuckerberg also said he didn't know if it would've been possible to start

Facebook a few years earlier than he did. It was only when colleges
began issuing email addresses to all students that it became possible for
Facebook to start and verify each person's identity--a key tenet of the
company.
Zuckerberg, who was a psychology major though he took mostly
computer science classes, recounted one of the ways he hacked his
studying while he was at Harvard. He built the first version Facebook in
January of 2004 during Harvard's intersession when most students
study for finals. "I probably should’ve been studying," he says. For an art
history class he figured out a way to crowd source his studying. He had
to memorize about 200 pieces of classical art and explain their historical
significance.  So he hacked together a website. He built a simple site that
randomly selected one of the 200 images and had space for students in
the class to write what the historical significance was. "I emailed this to
the class list and said, 'Hey guys, I  built this study tool.'" Grades on the
class had never been so high, Zuckerberg says.

Tomio Geron Follow

I was previously a staff reporter at Forbes covering start-ups and venture capital. I
was previously a reporter for Dow Jones VentureWire where my work also
appeared... Read More

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