One of the purposes of life, and selfishly what makes people happy, is building things that are impactful.
Dustin Moskovitz
There's an idealization of being an entrepreneur, but the most important thing is to have a really great idea.
Mindfulness has helped me succeed in almost every dimension of my life. By stopping regularly to look inward and become aware of my mental state, I stay connected to the source of my actions and thoughts and can guide them with considerably more intention.
I can't apply $3 billion in capital to the tech industry. It wouldn't work. But in infrastructure, education, I can make a real difference. I can change someone's life, for the better, permanently. If I can improve a kid's education, I can increase their salary later on and for decades.
There are a lot of people building small ideas now. There's an idealization of being an entrepreneur, but the most important thing is to have a really great idea.
Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004. On February 5, we were feeling pretty confident, even from observing the first few hours of usage. Students used it like crazy. They'd sign up then spend the next 3-4 hours on it. Then we'd go to lecture hall and see it on every computer screen there.
It was a precondition to leaving Facebook that I wasn't going to start something that was just about chasing money.
I used to be really anxious about money. I got that from my parents. I still am, but for entirely different reasons.
For most people, their wealth accrues slowly, and at any given point they say, 'Okay, I should kick up my standard of living because now I've earned slightly more wealth.' I went from the dorm room to having a billion dollars.
There's a lot of complacency in philanthropy. People figure organizations are trying to do good, and that's enough, even if the results aren't there. But that's wasteful and inefficient. It crowds out better programs.
Facebook was a very big mission; it really knocked it out of the universe. It's pretty hard to focus on a small idea after that. You really have to be working on something that you believe will be of similar impact.
As with Google, Facebook was a place that just concentrated a lot of top talent. It's just sort of natural that those people would go on and continue to be successful.
Once a few Facebook employees put together a promising idea and start a company, that's very exciting to people. I happen to think being a Facebook employee is really correlated with good ideas.
The first time I looked at Yammer, I thought I was on Facebook. Work is not a social network, with serendipitous communications and photo collections. Work is about managing tasks and responding to things quickly.
I'm not really sure where it comes from, but every time I meet someone who says 'I really want to be an entrepreneur' but has no idea what they want to do, I really just think: 'This person is totally aimless.'
When we founded Facebook, we put a lot of hours into it and worked hard every day. 'The Social Network' painted this picture that we were partying all the time, when really we only attended 2 or 3 parties during Facebook's first year.
Facebook was founded on February 4th, 2004, and around February 5th, we were feeling pretty confident it would be bigger. We would see Facebook on every single laptop in class. We knew there was a bigger story here.
