Eco-system
- Palo Alto was the hub where technology innovation happened
- People forgot to send Mark Zuckerberg the memo that the consumer internet was over
- The idea of a web about people linked together online was relatively new then. The accepted norm of the day was about pages linked together
- on the web the values of a few people can have a huge impact on everyone - the web will ultimately go where the collective conscience wants to go
Product Management
- Getting users to use their real name is very important as it will limit the need to monitor for porn since it is tied directly back to their personal reputation
- Be very focused and clear what your product is supposed to do - small details are extremely important
Facebook is a utility to efficiently communicate with friends
- MySpace is an online community to share similar interest
- it was a dead simple product. Just users profiles
- Uptake of a well crafted feature is pretty organic and retention is high
- Photo tagging was the largest growth driver
- your home Page is constantly changing is a new concept - your personalized newspaper
- user research help elevating understanding from the conversation from “our users are so stupid” to what makes sense for our users -
people became scared when they did understand what was going on
- match user complains to corresponding usage data of the same person
- give people the control or even an illusion of one on how they are presented publicly on their feed to alleviate fear
Engineering
- Failure to scale infrastructure properly when required will kill the user experience
- User needs and behavior drives engineering activities
Culture and HR
- The team was really focused as a group
- Ok to pay with stock for services rendered to company
- The social graph is based on Graph Theory, a mathematical concept that will appeal to someone with math background
- move fast break things as a concept stopped working at 10 engineers. Some level of discipline became necessary
- Younger people had simpler lives and didn’t own much. 75% of adults who joined the company in the early days became divorced
- The culture became very clear and apparent early in
Facebook is undergraduate culture,
- Google is graduate culture
- Acquisition offers should be considered on the merit of whether the decision to go ahead will further the mission
- Mark and his whole team just kept repeatedly using the same word “Domination!!!” as a mantra until Mark was told to stop by the general counsel
External reference
- [Facebook early days interview](https://medium.com/@WIRED/sex-beer-and-coding-inside-facebooks-wild-early-days-in-palo-alto-7b447c143d52?source=linkShare-6f0e9c1903cf-1536774930)