Imperfect is perfect, w/Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2017
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you’re Steve Jobs, you can wait for your product to be perfect. For the rest of us, If you’re not embarrassed by your first product release, you’ve released it too late. Imperfect is perfect. Why? Because your assumptions about what people want are never exactly right. Most entrepreneurs create great products through a tight feedback loop with real customers using a real product. So don’t fear imperfections; they won’t make or break your company. What will make or break you is speed. And no one knows this better than Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. He shares the origin story of his mantra “move fast and break things” and how this ethos applied as Facebook evolved from student project to tech giant.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now, |
| 0:07.8 | with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed. |
| 0:17.0 | We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time. |
| 0:24.7 | So search for rapid response in your podcast player |
| 0:28.0 | and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes. |
| 0:31.2 | I'll see you on the other side. |
| 0:33.0 | Mark Zuckerberg famously launched Facebook as an undergraduate student at Harvard, |
| 0:38.0 | but to understand the origins of his success, I'd suggest going back. |
| 0:42.0 | Way back. |
| 0:45.0 | When I was 10, 11 or 12 years old, I used to mostly build games for myself. |
| 0:50.0 | I started off by making these terrible games, like I made this game I remember about |
| 0:55.8 | Snowball Fight that I could play with my sisters and I think the graphics were |
| 1:00.9 | literally stick figures but I could get my sisters to play because they'd prefer playing the game |
| 1:05.0 | than actually having a snowball fight outside |
| 1:07.2 | where we grew up in New York. |
| 1:10.3 | A lot of tech entrepreneurs tell stories about the basic games they built as a kid. |
| 1:15.0 | But what sets Mark apart is that his story just keeps going and going. |
| 1:20.0 | My dad is a dentist. |
| 1:22.0 | Growing up, one of the neat things was that his dental office was actually connected to our home. The dentists and hygienists needed to share data on the patients and chat. So I built a system where he could communicate with |
| 1:35.2 | folks across the rooms and can also communicate with me and my sisters upstairs. |
| 1:39.6 | I called it Zucknet. Um, guys, can you hold that effect till we get to Facebook? |
| 1:47.0 | Because it was basically our little network inside the Zuckerberg home and it was fun. |
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