Mark Zuckerberg Quotes

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ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
Bloody Facebook- and to think I'd enjoyed The Social Network. Clearly Mark Zuckerberg was the devil.
Lindsey Kelk (The Single Girl's To-Do List)
The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
Mark Zuckerberg
What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
Mark Zuckerberg
When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn’t.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future)
EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
I made so many mistakes in running the company so far, basically any mistake you can think of I probably made. I think, if anything, the Facebook story is a great example of how if you're building a product that people love you can make a lot of mistakes
Mark Zuckerberg
Ideas don’t come out fully formed , they only become clearer as you work on them . You just have to get started.
Mark Zuckerberg
We Don't Build Services to Make Money, We Make Money To Build Services.
Mark Zuckerberg
Sure, Mark Zuckerberg had learned to code on his father’s computer when he was ten, but medicine was different: it wasn’t something you could teach yourself in the basement of your house.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students—Mark Zuckerberg’s first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future)
A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. —Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder
Eli Pariser (The Filter Bubble)
If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.
Mark Zuckerberg
Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
Mark has the most long-term perspective I’ve ever seen. This guy is uber uber uber on the long-term view.
David Kirkpatrick (The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World)
That’s what Harvard was like: thinking you’re pretty good at something, then meeting someone who is really good or even one of the best in the world. And that doesn’t mean they get good grades. A lot of the most famous alumni left without graduating because their work became more important than school. People like Bill Gates, Matt Damon, and Mark Zuckerberg. And you know who did graduate? The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. The point is: Never graduate from Harvard.
Colin Jost (A Very Punchable Face)
Facebook is no longer just a company, I told them. It’s a doorway into the minds of the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg left that door wide open for Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and who knows how many others. Facebook is a monopoly, but its behavior is more than a regulatory issue—it’s a threat to national security. The concentration of power that Facebook enjoys is a danger to American democracy.
Christopher Wylie (Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America)
The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” - Mark Zuckerberg
Library Mindset (The Art of Laziness: Overcome Procrastination & Improve Your Productivity)
I never wanted to run a company.To me a business is a good vehicle for getting stuff done. Mark Zuckerberg in The Facebook Effect written by David Kirkpatrick
David Kirkpatrick
Strategy is about out-thinking your competition. Mark Zuckerberg, while at Harvard, built a website called Facemash ‘for fun’. Even today, Facebook believe that ‘done is better than perfect’.
Max McKeown (The Strategy Book)
Google gets $59 billion, and you get free search and e-mail. A study published by the Wall Street Journal in advance of Facebook’s initial public offering estimated the value of each long-term Facebook user to be $80.95 to the company. Your friendships were worth sixty-two cents each and your profile page $1,800. A business Web page and its associated ad revenue were worth approximately $3.1 million to the social network. Viewed another way, Facebook’s billion-plus users, each dutifully typing in status updates, detailing his biography, and uploading photograph after photograph, have become the largest unpaid workforce in history. As a result of their free labor, Facebook has a market cap of $182 billion, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has a personal net worth of $33 billion. What did you get out of the deal? As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier reminds us, a company such as Instagram—which Facebook bought in 2012—was not valued at $1 billion because its thirteen employees were so “extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” Its inventory is personal data—yours and mine—which it sells over and over again to parties unknown around the world. In short, you’re a cheap date.
Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
We don't crash EVER!
Mark Zuckerberg
If I may, I’d like to take a moment to praise Mark Zuckerberg’s parents for not procreating sooner. Praise be to all that is holy that Facebook didn’t exist when I was that age and the Internet then was but a Usenet group for Star Trek fans. I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have grown up when cameras used actual film because the only thing that stood between infamy and me was the clerk who developed photos at Walgreens. Thank God for him.
Jen Lancaster (I Regret Nothing: A Memoir)
The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail
Mark Zuckerberg
Finding your purpose isn't enough. the challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.
Mark Zuckerberg
Qué clases de conexiones metafísicas realizan los robots de Mark Zuckerberg para reunirte virtualmente con personas de las que no deseas volver a saber nada.
Ricardo Garza (Hipsteria)
Hecho” es mejor que “perfecto” – Mark Zuckerberg.
Nelson Martínez (PROTOTHINKING: Pensamiento de Diseño en Acción (Spanish Edition))
Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are far more important symbols than any politician today, and they occupy the space that iconic political figures did in earlier eras.
Fareed Zakaria (In Defense of a Liberal Education)
We're about to travel to the one country in the world where there's an open arrest warrant for Mark Zuckerberg. And Mark thinks this is the time to show us his fake gangsta handshakes.
Sarah Wynn-Williams (Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism)
The internet is a sea full of creepy, cybercriminal fish, and if Mark Zuckerberg can cover his laptop webcam with a piece of tape, I reserve the right to keep things painfully anonymous.
Ali Hazelwood (Love on the Brain)
The imbalanced power relationship is in your face all the time. Don’t you feel humiliated using one of the Facebook brands, like Instagram or WhatsApp? Facebook is the first public company controlled by one person.32 I mean, I don’t personally have anything against Mark Zuckerberg. It isn’t about him. But why would you subordinate a big part of your life to any one stranger?
Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real world person called Mark Zuckerberg. It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.
Zadie Smith (Feel Free: Essays)
The very success of the internet itself is due to its openness, equality of opportunity and innovation. Platforms like Facebook itself would not have been created if Mr. Mark Zuckerberg was accessing the internet via free basics.
Arzak Khan
having opinions online can be very dangerous. The internet is a sea full of creepy, cybercriminal fish, and if Mark Zuckerberg can cover his laptop webcam with a piece of tape, I reserve the right to keep things painfully anonymous.
Ali Hazelwood (The Love Hypothesis)
The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.” •
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
The notion of “taking too much space” is born out of a framework of scarcity upon which we have built a world where some people are allowed to build skyscrapers and stadiums or run countries and make laws for the masses, while others are told to stay small, go unnoticed, don’t take up too much room on the sidewalk. But only some of us receive that message. We have yet to collectively tell Amazon gazillionaire Jeff Bezos or Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, “Hey, buddy, you’re just taking up too much space!
Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love)
By a “product person,” Loeb and Wolf meant someone who could get teams of engineers and designers to build software tools that consumers find useful, addictive, or fun. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was this kind of executive. So was Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.
Nicholas Carlson (Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!)
Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful men, once told the New York Times:1 “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: ‘How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!
Mike Monteiro (Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It)
Zhang was at Harvard at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg, and it’s interesting to speculate on which of them will end up having the most impact on the world. It’s a proxy for the larger question, which future historians will answer, of whether the digital revolution or the life-science revolution will end up being the more important.
Walter Isaacson (The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race)
Raffensperger also requested and received a $5,591,800 grant from the privately funded Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), a group funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.84 The group reported Georgia used the funds to push mail-in balloting and to counteract negative messaging about mail-in voting.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
I’m here to build something for the long term. Anything else is a distraction,” Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg said when he declined Yahoo’s $1 billion offer to buy his social networking service in 2006. The average twenty-two-year-old would have accepted millions in profit from a dorm-room experiment, but Zuckerberg kept his eyes on the horizon.
Amy Wilkinson (The Creator's Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs)
Senator, we run ads.
Mark Zuckerberg
Trong một thế giới đang thay đổi rất nhanh chóng, lộ trình duy nhất đưa bạn đến thất bại là không dám mạo hiểm
Mark Zuckerberg
They just can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.
Mark Zuckerberg
I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community
Mark Zuckerberg
Your ability to keep doing interesting things is your willingness to be embarrassed and go back to step 1.
Mark Zuckerberg
People don't care about what you say, they care about what you build.
Mark Zuckerberg
Don't discount yourself, no matter what you're doing. Everyone has a unique perspective that they can bring to the world.
Mark Zuckerberg
haha yes
Mark Zuckerberg
Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.
Mark Zuckerberg
Dr. Fauci worked with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other social media sites to muzzle discussion of any remedies. FDA sent a letter of warning that N-acetyle-L-cysteine (NAC) cannot be lawfully marketed as a dietary supplement, after decades of free access on health food shelves, and suppressed IV vitamin C, which the Chinese were using with extreme effectiveness.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
The world would be so different today if Mark Zuckerberg had not stuck to his ignorant, self-serving interpretation of the US Supreme Court Justice Louis D Brandeis’s aphorism that the way to counter hate speech is more speech. Brandeis said those words in 1927, long before the time of abundance, the time of Facebook, when a lie can now be delivered a million times over.
Maria Ressa (How to Stand Up to a Dictator)
The rest of Facebook's leadership wasn't very different. Mark really couldn't be bothered to care. Now he's developed priorities, and they're mostly pretty horrible and ignorant of the human costs.
Sarah Wynn-Williams (Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism)
A lot of these new start-up founders are somewhat unsavory people. The old tech industry was run by engineers and MBAs; the new tech industry is populated by young, amoral hustlers, the kind of young guys (and they are almost all guys) who watched The Social Network and its depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lying, thieving, backstabbing prick—and left the theater wanting to be just like that guy.
Dan Lyons (Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble)
Until today, Marcos has denied any connection to “trolls,”22 despite the data that we at Rappler exposed in a three-part Marcos propaganda series in 2019. Not so subtly, the messaging on his social media accounts began with changing the past. To begin with, he repeatedly lied about his education at Oxford University and Wharton. After being caught in the lie by a Rappler exclusive,23 his Senate office quietly changed his résumé on the Senate website, but he doubled down on the lie,24 a lesson many people, including Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg, have learned is easily facilitated by social media. His disinformation network also hijacked popular pages and news groups with copied-and-pasted comments that slowly chipped away at the legacy of the Aquino family, long seen as his family’s nemesis—all
Maria Ressa (How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future)
Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
Il fatto è che del dio degli Inglesi non ti devi mai fidare. Questi servizi segreti più o meno deviati si fanno i fatti miei e i fatti tuoi, anche se vivi una vita normale e non sei incazzato a morte con il sistema di valori in cui vivi. Sono un po’ quelli che avevano già Facebook prima di te. Prima anche di Mark Zuckerberg. E non devi nemmeno registrarti né pubblicare nulla. Loro ascoltano le tue telefonate. Guardano le tue foto. Se scrivi sul pc si godono i tuoi aggiornamenti di stato. Leggono le tue email come fossero messaggi in bacheca. Non riescono a smettere di farsi i cazzi tuoi. Vigilano su noi poveri cavalli. Su voi poveri buoi. E appena siamo inutilizzabili, ci conducono al macello. Puoi provare a denunciarli per stalking, perché a un certo punto sono davvero un riccio nel culo. Ma ho come la sensazione che non riusciresti a portarli in tribunale.
Stefano Zorba (Mi innamoravo di tutto: Storia di un dissidente)
The world’s richest man pulled Microsoft out of his butt. All Bill Gates exploited was a line of 0s and 1s as long as a piece of string. Now Microsoft employs 118,000 people. Number six on the rich list, Mark Zuckerberg, created Facebook out of less than that. All Mark had was a dumb idea that all the stupid people want to tell every stupid thing about their lives to all the other stupid people. Current net worth of the person with that dumb idea, $11.2 billion.
P.J. O'Rourke (How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016)
Google had a built-in disadvantage in the social networking sweepstakes. It was happy to gather information about the intricate web of personal and professional connections known as the “social graph” (a term favored by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) and integrate that data as signals in its search engine. But the basic premise of social networking—that a personal recommendation from a friend was more valuable than all of human wisdom, as represented by Google Search—was viewed with horror at Google. Page and Brin had started Google on the premise that the algorithm would provide the only answer. Yet there was evidence to the contrary. One day a Googler, Joe Kraus, was looking for an anniversary gift for his wife. He typed “Sixth Wedding Anniversary Gift Ideas” into Google, but beyond learning that the traditional gift involved either candy or iron, he didn’t see anything creative or inspired. So he decided to change his status message on Google Talk, a line of text seen by his contacts who used Gmail, to “Need ideas for sixth anniversary gift—candy ideas anyone?” Within a few hours, he got several amazing suggestions, including one from a colleague in Europe who pointed him to an artist and baker whose medium was cake and candy. (It turned out that Marissa Mayer was an investor in the company.) It was a sobering revelation for Kraus that sometimes your friends could trump algorithmic search.
Steven Levy (In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives)
The thing is,” said J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, “that we’ve spent like, what, two or three hundred years wrestling with existentialism, which really is just a way of asking, Why are we on this planet? Why are people here? Why do we lead our pointless lives? All the best philosophical and novelistic minds have tried to answer these questions and all the best philosophical and novelistic minds have failed to produce a working answer. Facebook is amazing because finally we understand why we have hometowns and why we get into relationships and why we eat our stupid dinners and why we have names and why we own idiotic cars and why we try to impress our friends. Why are we here, why do we do all of these things? At last we can offer a solution. We are on Earth to make Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg richer. There is an actual, measurable point to our striving. I guess what I’m saying, really, is that there’s always hope.
Jarett Kobek (I Hate the Internet)
Starting something new in middle age might look that way too. Mark Zuckerberg famously noted that “young people are just smarter.” And yet a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old. Researchers at Northwestern, MIT, and the U.S. Census Bureau studied new tech companies and showed that among the fastest-growing start-ups, the average age of a founder was forty-five when the company was launched.
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
So we had better call upon our lawyers, politicians, philosophers and even poets to turn their attention to this conundrum: how do you regulate the ownership of data? This may well be the most important political question of our era. If we cannot answer this question soon, our sociopolitical system might collapse. People are already sensing the coming cataclysm. Perhaps this is why citizens all over the world are losing faith in the liberal story, which just a decade ago seemed irresistible. How, then, do we go forward from here, and how do we cope with the immense challenges of the biotech and infotech revolutions? Perhaps the very same scientists and entrepreneurs who disrupted the world in the first place could engineer some technological solution? For example, might networked algorithms form the scaffolding for a global human community that could collectively own all the data and oversee the future development of life? As global inequality rises and social tensions increase around the world, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg could call upon his 2 billion friends to join forces and do something together?
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Después de tres meses de búsqueda introspectiva, el 16 de febrero de 2017 Mark Zuckerberg publicó un audaz manifiesto sobre la necesidad de construir una comunidad global y sobre el papel de Facebook en dicho proyecto.[1] En un discurso complementario en el acto inaugural de la Cumbre de las Comunidades, el 22 de junio de 2017, Zuckerberg explicó que los trastornos sociopolíticos de nuestra época (desde el consumo de drogas descontrolado hasta los regímenes totalitarios asesinos) son el resultado en gran medida de la desintegración de las comunidades humanas. Lamentó el hecho de que «durante décadas, la afiliación a todo tipo de grupos se ha reducido hasta una cuarta parte.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 lecciones para el siglo XXI)
Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Mark's expecting his first child, and he tells us he might not be present for the birth. As the only person who's birthed a baby, I'm stunned. And genuinely curious. "What would you be doing instead?" I asked him. Like, what in the world could possibly be more meaningful to him than the birth of his first child? He had no idea. Just "something more important might come up.
Sarah Wynn-Williams (Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism)
Os políticos são um pouco como músicos, e o instrumento que eles tocam é o sistema emocional e bioquímico humano. Eles fazem um discurso e uma onda de medo varre o país. Publicam um tweet e há uma explosão de ódio. Não creio que devamos dar a estes músicos um instrumento mais sofisticado no qual tocar. Uma vez conseguindo manipular diretamente as nossas alavancas emocionais, gerando ansiedade, ódio, satisfação e tédio à sua vontade, a política vai tornar-se um mero circo emocional.Por muito que devamos recear o poder das grandes empresas, a História sugere que não estamos mais seguros nas mãos de governos todo- poderosos. Em janeiro de 2018, prefiro que as minhas informações estejam nas mãos de Mark Zuckerberg do que nas mãos de Vladimir Putin(...)
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer. The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right. The Struggle is when food loses its taste. The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred. The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is The Struggle. The Struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The Struggle is unhappiness. The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse. The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The Struggle has no mercy. The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood. The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak. Most people are not strong enough. Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through The Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is The Struggle. The Struggle is where greatness comes from.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers―Straight Talk on the Challenges of Entrepreneurship)
Five years earlier when I arrived at Facebook, Mark didn't have a theory of how he and the company should be in the world; he didn't really have developed opinions about policy or politics, beyond "sign up more users." The rest of Facebook's leadership wasn't very different. Mark really couldn't be bothered to care. Now he's developed priorities, and they're mostly pretty horrible and ignorant of the human costs.
Sarah Wynn-Williams (Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism)
Let me tell you why the rest of the world needs to pay attention to what happens in the Philippines: 2021 was the sixth year in a row that Filipinos – out of all global citizens – spent the most time on the internet and on social media. Despite slow internet speeds, Filipinos uploaded and downloaded the largest number of videos on YouTube in 2013. Four years later, 97% of our country’s citizens were on Facebook. When I told that statistic to Mark Zuckerberg in 2017, he was quiet for a beat. “Wait, Maria,” he finally responded, looking directly at me, “where are the other three percent?” At the time, I laughed at his glib quip. I’m not laughing anymore. As these numbers show and as Facebook admits, the Philippines is ground zero for the terrible effects that social media can have on a nation’s institutions, its culture, and the minds of its populace.
Maria Ressa (How to Stand Up to a Dictator)
When yous say 'adversary,' who do you mean?" I raise my hand and ask tentatively, a little concerned about what will happen to anyone on one of these lists. "Anyone who opposes us is an adversary," Mark responds firmly. Not acknowledging that when it comes to Free Basics, that's basically everyone. All I can think is how horrified politicians would be if they knew Facebook was harnessing the platform and its power to put the screws to their thumbs.
Sarah Wynn-Williams (Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism)
Of course, this is not an innocent activity—even though the tech companies disavow any responsibility for the material they publish and promote. They plead that they are mere platforms, neutral utilities for everyone’s use and everyone’s benefit. When Facebook was assailed for abetting the onslaught of false news stories during the 2016 presidential campaign—a steady stream of fabricated right-wing conspiracies that boosted Donald Trump’s candidacy—Mark Zuckerberg initially disclaimed any culpability. “Our goal is to give every person a voice,” he posted on Facebook, washing his hands of the matter. It’s galling to watch Zuckerberg walk away from the catastrophic collapse of the news business and the degradation of American civic culture, because his site has played such a seminal role in both. Though Zuckerberg denies it, the process of guiding the public to information is a source of tremendous cultural and political power. In the olden days, we described that power as gatekeeping—and it was a sacred obligation.
Franklin Foer (World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech)
Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey. The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
One of my favorite sayings is that there are two kinds of people in the world: optimists and pessimists. And the saying goes that optimists tend to be successful and pessimists tend to be right. And the idea is that if you think something is going to be terrible and it is going to fail, then you are going to look for the data points that prove you right and you will find them. That is what pessimists do. But if you think that something is possible, then you are going to try to find a way to make it work. And even when you make mistakes along the way and even when people doubt you, you are going to keep pushing until you find a way to make it happen.
Mark Zuckerberg
Irrespective, he blames other people for all of those things, including forgetting his passport. I guess that's what it's like to live in a bubble, like Mark does. But a bubble implies flimsy transparency, a diaphanous space where you can see a normal life just beyond your grasp. And what Mark inhabits is more like a thick opaque dome, a murky fortress that separates him from the rest of the world. When you have so many other people doing things for you professionally and personally, you stop taking responsibility for any of it. Max Weber said that dealing with unintended consequences of your actions is what political responsibility is. This guy can't even take responsibility for leaving his passport at home, let alone influencing the US election.
Sarah Wynn-Williams (Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism)
Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.
Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
By collecting data from the vast network of doctors across the globe, they added dozens of new compounds to the arsenal—all proven effective against COVID-19. Dr. Kory told me that he was deeply troubled that the extremely successful efforts by scores of front-line doctors to develop repurposed medicines to treat COVID received no support from any government in the entire world—only hostility—much of it orchestrated by Dr. Fauci and the US health agencies. The large universities that rely on hundreds of millions in annual funding from NIH were also antagonistic. “We didn’t have a single academic institution come up with a single protocol,” said Dr. McCullough. “They didn’t even try. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke, you name it. Not a single medical center set up even a tent to try to treat patients and prevent hospitalization and death. There wasn’t an ounce of original research coming out of America available to fight COVID—other than vaccines.” All of these universities are deeply dependent on billions of dollars that they receive from NIH. As we shall see, these institutions live in terror of offending Anthony Fauci, and that fear paralyzed them in the midst of the pandemic. “Dr. Fauci refused to promote any of these interventions,” says Kory. “It’s not just that he made no effort to find effective off-the-shelf cures—he aggressively suppressed them.” Instead of supporting McCullough’s work, NIH and the other federal regulators began actively censoring information on this range of effective remedies. Doctors who attempted merely to open discussion about the potential benefits of early treatments for COVID found themselves heavily and inexplicably censored. Dr. Fauci worked with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other social media sites to muzzle discussion of any remedies. FDA sent a letter of warning that N-acetyle-L-cysteine (NAC) cannot be lawfully marketed as a dietary supplement, after decades of free access on health food shelves, and suppressed IV vitamin C, which the Chinese were using with extreme effectiveness.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Finding the right mentor is not always easy. But we can locate role models in a more accessible place: the stories of great originals throughout history. Human rights advocate Malala Yousafzai was moved by reading biographies of Meena, an activist for equality in Afghanistan, and of Martin Luther King, Jr. King was inspired by Gandhi as was Nelson Mandela. In some cases, fictional characters can be even better role models. Growing up, many originals find their first heroes in their most beloved novels where protagonists exercise their creativity in pursuit of unique accomplishments. When asked to name their favorite books, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel each chose “Lord of the Rings“, the epic tale of a hobbit’s adventures to destroy a dangerous ring of power. Sheryl Sandberg and Jeff Bezos both pointed to “A Wrinkle in Time“ in which a young girl learns to bend the laws of physics and travels through time. Mark Zuckerberg was partial to “Enders Game“ where it’s up to a group of kids to save the planet from an alien attack. Jack Ma named his favorite childhood book as “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves“, about a woodcutter who takes the initiative to change his own fate. … There are studies showing that when children’s stories emphasize original achievements, the next generation innovates more.… Unlike biographies, in fictional stories characters can perform actions that have never been accomplished before, making the impossible seem possible. The inventors of the modern submarine and helicopters were transfixed by Jules Vern’s visions in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “The Clippership of the Clouds”. One of the earliest rockets was built by a scientist who drew his motivation from an H.G. Wells novel. Some of the earliest mobile phones, tablets, GPS navigators, portable digital storage desks, and multimedia players were designed by people who watched “Star Trek” characters using similar devices. As we encounter these images of originality in history and fiction, the logic of consequence fades away we no longer worry as much about what will happen if we fail… Instead of causing us to rebel because traditional avenues are closed, the protagonist in our favorite stories may inspire originality by opening our minds to unconventional paths.
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
A LITTLE BIT before Adeline made her unforgivable mistake, a billionaire named Sheryl Sandberg wrote a book called Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Sheryl Sandberg didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. In her book, Sheryl Sandberg proposed that women who weren’t billionaires could stop being treated like crap by men in the workplace if only they smiled more and worked harder and acted more like the men who treated them like crap. Billionaires were always giving advice to people who weren’t billionaires about how to become billionaires. It was almost always intolerable bullshit. SANDBERG BECAME A BILLIONAIRE by working for a company named Facebook. Facebook made its money through an Internet web and mobile platform which advertised cellphones, feminine hygiene products and breakfast cereals. This web and mobile platform was also a place where hundreds of millions of people offered up too much information about their personal lives. Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg, who didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. What is your gender? asked Facebook. What is your relationship status? asked Facebook. What is your current city? asked Facebook. What is your name? asked Facebook. What are your favorite movies? asked Facebook. What is your favorite music? asked Facebook. What are your favorite books? asked Facebook. ADELINE’S FRIEND, the writer J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, had read an essay called “Generation Why?” by Zadie Smith, a British writer with a lot of eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. Zadie Smith’s essay pointed out that the questions Facebook asked of its users appeared to have been written by a 12-year-old. But these questions weren’t written by a 12-year-old. They were written by Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire. Mark Zuckerberg was such a billionaire that he was the boss of other billionaires. He was Sheryl Sandberg’s boss. J. Karacehennem thought that he knew something about Facebook that Zadie Smith, in her decency, hadn’t imagined. “The thing is,” said J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, “that we’ve spent like, what, two or three hundred years wrestling with existentialism, which really is just a way of asking, Why are we on this planet? Why are people here? Why do we lead our pointless lives? All the best philosophical and novelistic minds have tried to answer these questions and all the best philosophical and novelistic minds have failed to produce a working answer. Facebook is amazing because finally we understand why we have hometowns and why we get into relationships and why we eat our stupid dinners and why we have names and why we own idiotic cars and why we try to impress our friends. Why are we here, why do we do all of these things? At last we can offer a solution. We are on Earth to make Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg richer. There is an actual, measurable point to our striving. I guess what I’m saying, really, is that there’s always hope.
Jarett Kobek (I Hate the Internet)
I am of the opinion that soon celebrities would not sound so much like "special people" cos everyone would be a celebrity in his own right. Privacies would be gone...And all men shall be free to be themselves and grow (or not) doing so. Mark Zuckerberg and i, seem to be thinking alike. The world is beginning to not major on the minor things. Hurray!
Asuni LadyZeal
Making the movie” is the term that a venture capitalist friend applies to the process of building a start-up. In my friend’s tech-company-as-movie analogy, the VCs are the producers and the CEO is the leading man. If possible, you try to get a star who looks like Mark Zuckerberg—young, preferably a college dropout, with maybe a touch of Asperger’s. You write a script—the “corporate narrative.” You have the origin myth, the eureka moment, and the hero’s journey, with obstacles to overcome, dragons to slay, markets to disrupt and transform. You invest millions to build the company—like shooting the movie—and then millions more to promote it and acquire customers. “By the time you get to the IPO, I want to see people lined up around the block waiting to get into the theater on opening night. That’s what the first day of trading is like. It’s the opening weekend for the film. If you do things right, you put asses in the seats, and you cash out.
Dan Lyons (Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble)
Because [Jeff Bezos] and [Mark Zuckerberg] own $100 billion in the current state of the legal system, the current state of the fiscal system, the current way the international economy is organised, people say, ‘OK, $100 billion, exactly the right level.’ But with a different legal system, different international taxation, it could be 200, it could be 50. So what would be the story? Any level that they will attain, it will be the best? This kind of sacralisation of special individuals is a form of religious thought. People who use this kind of argument: ‘He's great, therefore –‘ therefore what? Therefore we should subsidize him so that he's even richer?
Thomas Piketty
why I don’t believe people like Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, or any other famous personalities have any real idea of what kind of evil they are helping to promote through being members of these various organizations.
J. Micha-el Thomas Hays (Rise of the New World Order: The Culling of Man)
I forget,” said Tuesday, “you’re the last Luddite teen in America.” “It does not make me a Luddite,” Dorry said, “to not want to give it up to Mark Zuckerberg.” “Dear Dorothea.” Tuesday put a warm hand on her shoulder. “The first time you share your private information with an internet monolith is a very special, magical—” “I’m saving myself for Tumblr.
Kate Racculia (Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts)
Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jack Dorsey formerly of Twitter, Tim Cook of Apple, Elon Musk of Tesla—all these business leaders regularly attend their companies’ quarterly calls. Let’s take a concrete example. Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil companies, had revenues of about $140 billion and a market value of about $190 billion in 2019. The management held a conference call for investors and analysts on January 31, 2020, to highlight its performance.20 The analysts and investors asked twenty-nine questions. What percentage of these do you think were about the future? More than 70 percent.
Pulak Prasad (What I Learned About Investing from Darwin)
Mark Zuckerberg’s three greatest fears, according to a former senior Facebook executive, were that the site would be hacked, that his employees would be physically hurt, and that regulators would one day break up his social network.
Sheera Frenkel (An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination)
Jeff Bezos & Mark Zuckerberg are exception not rule — not all startup founders should be CEOs
Bhaskar Majumdar (Everything Started As Nothing)
In an interview published in Vanity Fair, President Barack Obama said, “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”10 The same is true of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with his gray hoodies, or Apple founder Steve Jobs and his famous black-turtleneck-and-jeans uniform. Acutely aware of how taxing deliberating over options can be, they sought every opportunity to limit choice in their lives.
Ryder Carroll (The Bullet Journal Method: The ultimate self-help manifesto and guide to productivity and mindful living)
Whatever I post on Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook and Elon Musk's Twitter (now X), I see only one impression of myself and another from the Twitter team, and the rest remains restricted since I do not want to be a paid customer instead of a free user.
Ehsan Sehgal
If Mark Zuckerberg is the most damaging man in tech to me, Musk was the most disappointing
Kara Swisher (Burn Book)
Software,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has proclaimed, “is eating the world.” It’s true. You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food. But there’s also less-obvious software lurking all around you. Nearly any paper book or pamphlet you touch was designed using software; code inside your car helps manage the braking system; “machine-learning” algorithms at your bank scrutinize your purchasing activity to help spy the moment when a criminal dupes your card and starts fraudulently buying things using your money. And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer—someone precisely like Ruchi Sanghvi or Mark Zuckerberg. Odds are high the person who originally thought of the product was a coder: Programmers spend their days trying to get computers to do new things, so they’re often very good at understanding the crazy what-ifs that computers make possible. (What if you had a computer take every word you typed and, quietly and constantly and automatically in the background, checked it against a dictionary of common English words? Hello, spell-check!) Sometimes it seems that the software we use just sort of sprang into existence, like grass growing on the lawn. But it didn’t. It was created by someone who wrote out—in code—a long, painstaking set of instructions telling the computer precisely what to do, step-by-step, to get a job done. There’s a sort of priestly class mystery cultivated around the word algorithm, but all they consist of are instructions: Do this, then do this, then do this. News Feed is now an extraordinarily complicated algorithm involving some trained machine learning; but it’s ultimately still just a list of rules. So the rule makers have power. Indeed, these days, the founders of high-tech companies—the ones who determine what products get created, what problems get solved, and what constitutes a “problem” in the first place—are increasingly technologists, the folks who cut their teeth writing endless lines of code and who cobbled together the prototype for their new firm themselves. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet.
Clive Thompson (Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World)
It is common today to hear techno-futurists and billionaire trans-humanists muse about the potential of technology to help mankind—or least the extremely wealthy—slip the surly bonds of aging and even death by “uploading” memories to a digital cloud and using AI to recreate consciousness. Billionaire investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, who sees “the vector of our civilization” in terms of a choice between “anarcho-primitivism or optimalism/transhumanism,” has talked about “life extension” technologies that could make possible what he calls “genomic reincarnation,” in which a person’s sequenced DNA could in theory be synthesized and printed out into a new body, “like a clone, but it is you in a different time.”23 And of course there are the billionaire enthusiasts like Elon Musk who see a future in which technology is fused with human biology in some kind of brain-machine interface, or Mark Zuckerberg, who dreams of replacing physical society with a virtual “Metaverse.
John Daniel Davidson (Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come)
When Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook was asked about the best advice he’d ever received, he replied, “In a world that’s changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.
Mark Sochan (The Art of Strategic Partnering: Dancing with Elephants)
To be sure, most dropouts do not become geniuses or success stories. But prominent among the dropout titans of recent history are Bill Gates (Harvard), Steve Jobs (Reed College), Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard), Elon Musk (Stanford), Bob Dylan (University of Minnesota), Lady Gaga (New York University), and Oprah Winfrey (Tennessee State). Jack Ma never went to college, and neither did Richard Branson, who dropped out of high school at age fifteen. Creative force Kanye West dropped out of Chicago State University at age twenty to pursue a musical career; six years later he released his first album to great critical acclaim and commercial success: The College Dropout (2004). The point is not to encourage dropping out but rather to observe that these transformative figures were somehow able to learn what they needed to know. Here successful people and geniuses share a common trait: most are lifelong learning addicts. It’s a good habit to have.
Craig Wright (The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness)
One thing Tesla elected not to do when preparing for public ownership, which would have ramifications years later, was introduce a dual-class stock system. This was what allowed Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google (or Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook two years later) to keep control of their company, even as they held a small fraction of its total stock. It’s unclear why Tesla’s IPO paperwork, which it filed in January 2010, contained no such provision
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
For his part, Mark Zuckerberg has described Musk’s worries as “hysterical,” and indeed, a few weeks after the Tesla baron made public his fears, the Facebook baron announced that he was building a helpful AI to run his house. It would recognize his friends and let them in. It would monitor the nursery. It would make toast. Unlike Musk, Zuckerberg perkily explained, he chose “hope over fear.
Bill McKibben (Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
Google’s semantic search is the first step toward a search engine that is like Star Trek’s onboard computer and the brains of that semantic search is what Google calls the Knowledge Graph. The word “Graph” here has been taken from mathematics but in this context it was coined by Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who used it to express the social network of relationships within Facebook’s digital boundaries. He called it the Social Graph.
David Amerland (Google Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic)
Now Where Do You Find Customers? When novice entrepreneurs search for opportunities, they too often look beyond their Zone of Influence. They think the action is happening somewhere else, in some other location or industry. But seasoned entrepreneurs almost always find and create opportunities within the context of who they are, what they know, and especially who they know. In each of the examples above, the business validation process begins with potential customers in the entrepreneur’s orbit. Actual people with names. Tribes you belong to or are interested in, most of whom are already self-organized online. People you know how to reach, today. Though it’s rarely a part of their official origin stories, the biggest companies in the world—even the viral apps now worth billions—started through personal networks and real human connections. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in a weekend by emailing friends to use it. Version 1 did well, validating it. And Microsoft started with Bill Gates building software for a guy in Albuquerque. He had a CUSTOMER FIRST. In the beginning, founders should reach out to their friends, their former colleagues, their communities. You may think your business is unique, but trust me, it’s not. Every successful business can start this way. For example, Anahita loves her dogs and wanted healthier snacks for them. She started taking her homemade organic dog treats to her local dog park. She would sell out every time. A year later she now has a store called the Barkery, a dog bakery. Before you even think about picking a business idea, make sure you have easy access to the people you want to help. An easy way to do this is to think about where you have easy access to a targeted group of people whom you really want to help—like, say, new moms in Austin, cyclists, freelance writers, and taco obsessives (like me!). CHALLENGE Top three groups. Let’s write out your top three groups to target. Who do you have easy access to that you’d be EXCITED to help? This can be your neighbors, colleagues, religious friends, golf buddies, cooking friends, etc. The better you understand your target group, the better you can speak to them. The more specifically you can speak to their problems, the better and easier you can sell (or test products). Note how this process prioritizes communication with people, through starting (taking the first iteration of your solution straight to customers) and asking (engaging them in a conversation to determine how your solution can best fix their problem). Business creation should always be a conversation! Nearly every impulse we have is to be tight with our ideas by doing more research, going off alone to build the perfect product—anything and everything to avoid the discomfort of asking for money. This is the validation shortcut. You have to learn to fight through this impulse. It won’t be easy, but it’ll be worth it.
Noah Kagan (Million Dollar Weekend: The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours)
We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.’ Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
Ajaz Ahmed (Velocity: The Seven New Laws for a World Gone Digital)
The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer. The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right. The Struggle is when food loses its taste. The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred. The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is the Struggle. The Struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The Struggle is unhappiness. The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse. The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The Struggle has no mercy. The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood. The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak. Most people are not strong enough. Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through the Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is the Struggle. The Struggle is where greatness comes from.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)