If Mark Zuckerberg were starting Facebook again today, the CEO wouldn’t do it in Silicon Valley, he said Saturday in an interview at Y Combinator’s Startup School, summarized by TechCrunch.
“If I were starting now, I would do things very differently,” he told Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston. “I didn’t know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.”
Zuckerberg explained that the short-term nature of the Valley is something he once discussed with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Amazon is based in Seattle, a city where people on average, stay in a job twice as long as they do in Silicon Valley.
“There’s a culture out here where people don’t commit to doing things, I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on longer-term. You don’t have to move out here to do this,” the Facebook co-founder said.
Zuckerberg also gave some insight into the early days of Facebook. He told Livingston that when he moved out to California the summer after his sophomore year of college, he thought he would build a startup one day, but he wasn’t sure Facebook was that company.
“It wasn’t until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.” However, he said he found that forming a company was the best way to unite people to achieve the same goal.
He didn’t just talk about the early days. Zuckerberg also gave a glimpse into what Facebook’s future looks like.
“I think the story that we look back on will be the apps and things that are built on top of Facebook. The past five years have been about connecting people and the next five to 10 years are about what are all the things that can be built now that these connections are in place,” he said.
In the interview, Zuckerberg also gave advice on choosing investors and handling acquisition offers.
You can see the entire interview here.