Using a script someone posted the last time someone did this (fold --spaces -w 75 | sed -e 's/^/ /'), plus 30 seconds in Sublime to break the q/a apart. I'll leave the rest as an exercise for the readers. :)
Interviewer: Welcome to How to Build the Future. Today our guest is Mark
Zuckerberg. Mark, you have one of the most influential companies in the
history of the world, so we are especially excited that you are here.
Mark: I'm not sure where to go from there.
Interviewer: Why don't we start with just the early days of Facebook? Tell
us what it was like when you started it.
Mark: Sure. So for me, the thing that I was really fascinated by and
always have been is people and how people work. When I was in college, I
studied psychology and computer science, and one of the things that you
learn when you study psychology is that there are all these parts of the
brain which are geared just towards understanding people, understanding
language, how to communicate with each other, understanding facial
expressions, emotions, processing. Yet when I looked out at the Internet
in 2004, which was when I was getting started, you can find almost
anything else that you wanted. You could find news, movies, music,
reference materials, but the thing that mattered the most to people, which
as other people and understanding what's going on with them, just wasn't
there. And I think what was going on was that all that other content was
just out there able to be indexed by search engines and other services,
but in order to understand what's going on with people, you needed to
build tools that made it so that they could express what was going on with
themselves. I wanted to figure out what courses to take, so I built this
little website, Course Match, that just made it so that you could enter
what courses you were taking, and you could click on them and see who else
was in them, and it did all these correlations. It told you people who
took this course were likely to enjoy this course too. And the thing that
just struck me from the beginning is people would just spend hours
clicking through. Here are the courses that people are taking, and, wow,
isn't it interesting that this person is interested in these things? It
was just text, right? There was nothing that was super interesting there,
but that just struck me as people have this deep thirst to understand
what's going on with those around them. And there were probably 10 other
things like that that I built when I was at Harvard before I actually got
around to building the first version of Facebook that kind of added a lot
of these things together.
Interviewer: Did you think Facebook was going to be a company when you
started?
Mark: I built the first version of Facebook because it's something that my
friends and I wanted to use at Harvard, a directory and a way to connect
with the other people around us, and I didn't think at all that it was
going to be a company. I remember very specifically the night that we
launched the first version. I went out to get pizza with a couple of my
friends who now work here. And I remember really clearly we were talking
about how one day we thought that someone was going to build a community
like this for the world and that that would be some company, but it
clearly wasn't going to be us. It just, it wasn't even...
Interviewer: It didn't even occur.
Mark: Yeah, no. I mean it wasn't even an option that we considered that it
might be us. We just weren't focused on building a company back then. We
were just building something that we thought would be useful at our school.
Interviewer: So as you look back, is there something that made Facebook
different from the other projects that you had built that allowed it to
turn into this, the company it is today?
Mark: Well, for one, I think we kept going [laughs], so the others, Course
Match and just the other different crowd source tools, they kind of served
their purpose and then we were done, whereas with Facebook there was just
such...people loved it and had such an intensity of using it. I think
within a couple of weeks two-thirds of students at Harvard were using it.
And all these other students at MIT and other local universities were
writing in asking us if we could open up a Facebook at their school, so we
kind of just followed that. Again, I didn't set out and my roommates
didn't set out to build a service that we were going to turn into a
company, but we just kind of followed what people wanted, and that led us
to expand it to all these other schools and eventually beyond schools and
to...at some point, once we'd hired a bunch of people, we decided to turn
it into a company and go for this mission of connecting the world, but
that's not where we started.