Mark Zuckerberg: Don't Just Start A Company, Do Something Fundamental

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.”

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.”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 would be worth putting time into.”

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.

Forbes