CS50 Lecture by Mark Zuckerberg - 7 December 2005

There's a now famous Harvard lecture video on YouTube of Zuckerberg earlier in the Facebook days, where he walks through the issues they hit early on. ▶ this video I watched it ages ago, but I seem to remember one thing that I liked was that each time they changed the architecture, it was to solve a problem they had, or were beginning to have. They seemed to be staying away from pre-optimization and instead took the approach of tackling problems as they had as they appeared, rather than imagining problems long before/if they occurred. It's a bit like the "perfect is the enemy of done" concept - you could spend 2-3x the time making it much more scalable, but that might have an opportunity cost which weakens you somewhere else or makes it harder/more expensive to maintain and support. Take it with a pinch of salt, but I thought it seemed like quite a good level-headed approach to choosing how to spend time/money early on, when there's a lot of financial/time constraints.

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It's easy to poke fun at Mark because he's mega rich and can come off a little stiff, but he's pretty interesting to listen when he's speaking without a script. Here's Mark when he was 21 giving a lecture at Harvard's CS50: ▶ this video

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But what happens if a company chooses truly the worst language. Like PHP? Oh, right. That was Facebook. They ALSO ran circles around their competitors and crushed them. I hear they are worth /even more/ than Viaweb! Great PHP story: > Dustin was like, 'Hey, I want to help out" > Zuckerberg told Moskovitz, "That's pretty cool. But you don't know any PHP." > "That weekend he went home, bought the book 'PERL for Dummies,' came back, and was like, 'OK, I'm ready to go,'" Zuck said, and told him, "The site's written in PHP, not PERL, dude." - ▶ this video

in “Beating the Averages (2001)” · View on HN

I suspect the difference is that in the past the only way to go commercial was to work with a big corporation. Going to market with something was so hugely expensive, and required extensive marketing and distribution infrastructure, which was all internal to these big concerns. The problem was these companies expected a lot of invasive creative control and long term contracts to give access to those capabilities, which to be fair were hugely expensive to build and operate. Nowadays all of that infrastructure exists as generic services on the internet you can throw together in a few days, with costs that scale with your needs. I recently watched a Q&A Mark Zuckerberg gave to the Harvard CS50 class in 2005 [0]. He explained that what made Facebook possible to start with was cheap hosted servers running open source software, and the ways that had changed over the previous decade. Nowadays with AWS and Google Cloud its even easier and cheaper. The same applies to physical goods now with eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Etsy, Shopify, running your own one-person media empire on Youtube, etc. The negative connotations with "selling out" were the fact that you had to sell out creative control. You don't have to do that anymore. Dave Chappelle is rightly still sore about how he was cheated over the Chappelle Show. Nowadays you can build an audience independently, and that fact means that even if you do make a deal with big business, they know you're not as dependent on them anymore, so crea

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I'd speculate that knowing/discovering/finding the answer to that question is at the very core of why he built the service. I recently watched a 2005 guest lecture[1] by Zuckerberg, it hit me then, why facebook became the success it is/was. The core insight, was the "people you may know" feature, even though that's obvious when I say it, and think about it.. It never struck me before, that, facebook could have been anything (and, was indeed very different back then) and still have succeeded because solving that problem in a seemingly more efficient way at the time then nobody chocked on it. [1] ▶ this video

in “My Criteria for Picking Startup Ideas” · View on HN

▶ this video Timestamp of the zucc talking about privacy "We care about it, because if people feel like their information isn't private, then that screws us in the longterm, too."

in “CS50 Lecture by Mark Zuckerberg (7 December 2005)” · View on HN