Charlie Rose interviews Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg tonight on his show. In the preview video above, he tried to get them to talk about what looks like a “flat out war” between Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon “for the future.” Zuckerberg says, “People like to talk about war.” While he admits there is competition, he doesn’t think one company will “win all the stuff.”
But then he can’t help himself and makes a dig at Google, which is “trying to build their little version of Facebook.”
In the full transcript of the interview below, Zuckerberg and Sandberg talk why they want to IPO (to attract and retain talent), social media’s role on political revolutions (“overblown”), and how even at its current size Facebook is still “focused on doing one thing incredibly well.”
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TRANSCRIPT
Guests:
Mark Zuckerberg
Sheryl Sandberg
Charlie Rose:
Tell me what the mission is today for Facebook. You’ve got 800 million and counting –
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
– users.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
It’s an extraordinary reach. Someone said it’s the most expansive human enabler of communication, or an enabler of human communication there has ever been.
Mark Zuckerberg:
We’re trying.
Charlie Rose:
You’re doing well at it too. So what’s the mission? Where is this thing going?
Mark Zuckerberg:
So the stated mission of the company is to make the world more open and connected, right? And the idea is that when you give people this ability to stay connected with all the people they care about, and you make it so they can express new things about themselves or in communication with other people who they care about, then you just open up all these new possibilities. You make it so people can stay connected in ways that they couldn’t before. They can learn about new things, whether it’s events that are happening in the world or ability to organize new things or learn about new products or new movies or music that they want to listen to. It opens up a lot of new possibility when you can keep all of these connections open to the people that you care about. So obviously, a big part of our mission is just connecting all these different people in the world. And one of the things that we are really proud of is that now 800 million people around the world are using Facebook every month and perhaps even crazier — it’s mind-blowing from my perspective. But more than half a billion people use Facebook every day. And I just think that’s crazy.
Charlie Rose:
500 million plus people –
Mark Zuckerberg:
500 million people, yeah. That’s growing. And it’s growing every day. And if you just look back, you know, seven years from when we were getting started, I mean, there would have been no way that we would have thought –
Sheryl Sandberg:
500 million people in your dorm room.
Mark Zuckerberg:
The funny thing is that, you know, I used to talk to a lot of my friends when I was at — when I was in college. We used to go out to get pizza every night. And we used to talk about what we thought was going to happen in the world and on the Internet. And we thought that there would be something like this, right, that, you know, it seemed pretty much inevitable that people would have a way to connect and that they would be able to express all these things and that there would be tools to make not just a social network, but that every product that you use is better off with your friends. We figured that there would be tools to do that. But the big surprise of this thing is that we’ve played a big role in making that happen. And when we were in college, we just figured, you know, who are we to do this, right? I mean, maybe we can create this cool little community for ourselves in college, but clearly it’s going to be some other company that does it.
Charlie Rose:
That’s what it is, a web within a web, is it not?
Mark Zuckerberg:
Well –
Charlie Rose:
It’s a personalized web within the web.
Mark Zuckerberg:
I think it’s shaping — it’s shaping the broader web.
Charlie Rose:
Yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, right now, if you look back for the past five or seven years, the story of social networking has really been about getting these 800 million people connected, right, so that they can stay in touch with all these people who they care about, and getting them signed up for Facebook and all that. But if you look forward for the next five years, I think that the story that people are going to remember five years from now isn’t how this one site was built. It was how every single service that you use is now going to be better with your friends because they can tap into your friends, right, so whether it’s, you know, music services that we just announced this new product a little more than a month ago and since then some of the music services that are out there, Spotify has grown from a little more than three million users with Facebook to now more than seven million users with Facebook. Another service called Mog [spelled phonetically] has grown from I think it’s a relatively small number of subscribers but it’s grown by four or five times in the last month alone.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg:
And I think what that just shows is that all of these different products are better when you’re doing them with your friends. I mean think about it, do you want to go to the movies by yourself or do you want to go to the movies with your friends, right? You want to go with your friends.
Charlie Rose:
Or do you want to know what your friends like rather than what a whole different [unintelligible] likes.
Sheryl Sandberg:
That’s right.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.
Sheryl Sandberg:
It’s the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends, you know.
Charlie Rose:
The wisdom of crowds means –
Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
– so that’s Google versus Facebook right there.
Sheryl Sandberg:
I don’t think it’s Google versus Facebook. I think it represents –
Charlie Rose:
The wisdom of crowds versus the wisdom of friends?
Sheryl Sandberg:
Well, I don’t think — I think the wisdom of crowds applies not just to Google but to a phase of the web –
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.
Sheryl Sandberg:
– which is about information and about links. And it was a lot of wonderful things, mostly based on anonymity and links between crowds.
Charlie Rose:
Right, right, right, right, right, right, right.
Sheryl Sandberg:
What does the crowd think? What is the best thing? Ours is just structured a totally different place so it is an evolution. The information web still exists, it’s still broadly used, but the social web didn’t exist before. The social web can’t exist until you are your real self online. I have to be me. You have to be Charlie Rose. He has to be Mark Zuckerberg. I have to be Sheryl Sandberg. Once we are online as ourselves, connected to each other and our other friends, then you can have the evolution of what becomes the social web, not just on Facebook but throughout.
Charlie Rose:
What is it about that people want to be on Facebook, they want to talk about themselves, what is the sort of essence of that?
Mark Zuckerberg:
I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think it’s always existed.
Charlie Rose:
It’s as though –
Mark Zuckerberg:
One of the things that I think makes us human. But yeah and obviously to know what’s going on with your friends’ lives or not just your friends but people you care about. Right? You know, people who you’re interested in who aren’t your friends who are maybe on the periphery of your social circle, yeah, I think that those are all just core human needs and until Facebook there wasn’t a great tool for doing that, but I think that a lot of that and building that up was the last five years. I think the next five years is going to be about, okay now you’re connected to all these people, now you can have a better music listening experience, you can have a better movie watching experience, you can see what your friends are reading and learn what news you should read first, all of these things I think are going to get better. And that’s the thing that I’m most excited about for the next five years. And if we do well I think five years from now people are really going to look back and say wow, over the last five years all these products have now gotten better because I’m not doing this stuff alone, I’m doing it with my friends.
Sheryl Sandberg:
And it’s personal, it’s not just that you’re bringing your friends with you and then it becomes personal to you. So if you look at how people use most of the web, most products out there, even if you’re logged in, if I looked over your two shoulders, you see the same stuff because it’s basically produced for the masses.
Charlie Rose:
Is the key to –
Sheryl Sandberg:
And ours is different.
Charlie Rose:
Is the key to the monitorization of the future the fact that advertising will believe this is the best way to reach people, who are likely to buy their products?
Sheryl Sandberg:
Marketers have always wanted you know personal relationships with consumers or relationships where consumers do two things, consumers buy their products and consumers tell their friends to buy their — that they buy their products. Marketers have always been looking for that person who’s not just going to buy but spread the word to their friends. What we do on Facebook is we now enable marketers to find that and then if I do it on Facebook I’m sharing with an average of 130 people. And so it becomes a word of mouth marketing at scale, so people can tell each other what they like which is for marketers the thing they’ve been looking for I think for a long time.
Charlie Rose:
Is there a limit in terms of how many friends you should have?
Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, I don’t think a limit in terms of should, they’re just –
Sheryl Sandberg:
It’s very personnel.
Mark Zuckerberg:
– I think that humans have a capacity for different amounts of social relationships. And I think it varies from person to person but it’s also not about what you should do. You should use the product to keep in touch with whatever set of people you want to. And we try to build all kinds of products that make it so you can stay in touch with small groups. All right, we have this groups product that you know it’s I think it’s 300 or 400 million people who are using it on a monthly basis now in order to communicate on Facebook with a subset of their friends, right, not their whole friends list, something that’s very widely used and a lot of people want to do that. And then we have functionality where people can publish things publicly, right? And some people have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even in some cases millions of subscribers who they can publish to and communicate with. So I mean people have a variety of different communication needs and we strive to build products that help people set [spelled phonetically] all of those.
Charlie Rose:
What’s the valuation today of Facebook?
Sheryl Sandberg:
So we’re a private company so we don’t really have a valuation.
Charlie Rose:
So then why do you want to be a public company? Why do you even think about an IPO?
Mark Zuckerberg:
I actually think the biggest thing for us is that a big part of being a technology company is getting the best engineers and designers and talented people around the world. And one of the ways that you can do that is you compensate people with equity or options, right, so you get people who want to join the company, both for the mission, right, because they believe that Facebook is doing this awesome thing and they want to be a part of connecting everyone in the world, but also, if the company does well, then they get financially rewarded and can be set. And, you know, we've made this implicit promise to our investors and to our employees that by compensating them with equity and by giving them equity, that at some point we're going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly, in a liquid way. Now, the promise isn't that we're going to do it on any kind of short-term time horizon. The promise is that we're going to build this company so that it's great over the long term, right. And that we're always making these decisions for the long term, but at some point we'll do that.
Charlie Rose:
And it will be a liquid dividend for your –
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, whether it's a dividend or not, they'll be able to trade their equity for money. And you know, that's something that we take seriously, as a responsibility of running the company. And we just care deeply about all the employees and the investors who have been there with us.
Charlie Rose:
Has the Groupon experience and has other things changed your sense of the timing of an IPO?
Mark Zuckerberg:
I don't — I don't think so.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Not really.
Mark Zuckerberg:
No.
Charlie Rose:
You'll go when what? When will you decide?
Sheryl Sandberg:
When we're ready.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
No, but how — what will tell you it makes sense?
Mark Zuckerberg:
I don't know. It's a good question. Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
But you'll just know?
Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, yeah. It's — honestly, it's not something I spend a lot of time on a day-to-day basis thinking about it now.
Charlie Rose:
How do you measure the impact that we now believe social media play in the Arab Spring?
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, my personal take on this is that it's — the social media's role is maybe a bit overblown in that. I mean, the way that I think about it is that if people want change, then they will find a way to get that change, right. So, whatever technology they may or may not have used was neither a necessary nor sufficient case for getting to the outcome that they got to, but having people who wanted change was. So, I mean, I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don't pretend that Facebook didn't exist, that this wouldn't even be possible. Of course, it would have.
Charlie Rose:
Yeah, but it certainly accelerated it. And do you know of any effort in terms of where governments, because of that, are trying to shut down Facebook in terms of access?
Mark Zuckerberg:
There are examples intermittently throughout the world all the time, but –
Sheryl Sandberg:
And there are places we're not available. Well, China's obviously the big one. We're not broadly available.
Charlie Rose:
So how do you see that going into China, because — and if in fact it requires some sense of censorship, does that make it a "don't go"?
Sheryl Sandberg:
You know, if your mission is to connect the entire world for all the reasons we've been talking about, you can't connect the whole world and not China.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Sheryl Sandberg:
That’s not something we’re working on or focused on right now because it’s not a decision we have to make. So you are correct that when and if we go into China, we’ll have –
Charlie Rose:
A billion and a half people.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Well, we’ll issues. But since, for right now, we’re not available, and we don’t have an immediate path to become available, it not — these are not policy decisions we have to make.
Charlie Rose:
So it’s not on the immediate horizon –
Sheryl Sandberg:
Not on the immediate horizon.
Charlie Rose:
– to go into China. And the reason is, though, is it because of what happened to Google?
Sheryl Sandberg:
So it’s not really our choice. It’s the government’s choice, you know. We’re not available because they’ve chosen to make us not available.
Charlie Rose:
Because they acted a certain way, you’ve chosen not to go there. Fair enough.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yes.
Sheryl Sandberg:
No, it’s — yeah, yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah. And then at some point I think there would be some discussion around what it would take to go there, and then we’d at that point have to figure out whether we were willing to do that.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Exactly.
Mark Zuckerberg:
But honestly, the way that we look at it now is there’s so many other places in the world where we can connect more people more easily without having to face those hard questions that I think a simple rule in business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress. So then I assume, you know, we talk about running Facebook for the long term and over the decades in which we hope to run and build Facebook to be a great company, I would imagine that this will be a question that we have to answer. But, I mean, right now, there’s still so much room for growth in a lot of other countries that it’s just not — it’s not the top thing that we’re worried about right now.
Charlie Rose:
To achieve your objectives that you want to do, the expansion, the –
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
– connections, the advertising revenue, how important and where do you put making sure that Facebook gets more of the best engineers than anybody else regardless of where you have to steal them?
Sheryl Sandberg:
First, second and third.
Charlie Rose:
That’s one, two, three, yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg:
But it’s really important.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Steal is not –
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Attract. We attract them.
Charlie Rose:
If you go to Google and you ask about you, they say, “Steal.”
Sheryl Sandberg:
Attract. Attract.
Charlie Rose:
He brought you from Google, and you brought other people from Google.
Sheryl Sandberg:
He attracted me from Google. And I attracted — you know, I wanted to — but it’s — [unintelligible] hiring engineers, so Google –
Charlie Rose:
Do you think Larry would believe it was attraction or theft?
Sheryl Sandberg:
Well, we’re not proper in the United States. And I’m fairly certain he would say, but you’re getting at a really important question.
Charlie Rose:
I am.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Which is engineering talent in this country.
Charlie Rose:
Yes.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Which there is not enough of.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Mm-hmm.
Sheryl Sandberg:
So we would hire lots more people. Google would hire lots more people. Every company we know of has more desire for engineers –
Charlie Rose:
And more need for the talented engineers –
Sheryl Sandberg:
– than we have them.
Charlie Rose:
And you can’t find them.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Can’t find them.
Charlie Rose:
How much of that is because of the U.S. immigration policy?
Sheryl Sandberg:
Some.
Mark Zuckerberg:
I’m not sure. I think some of it is that. But a lot of it is just education. I mean, I think that there’s not enough supply of engineers to meet the demand. I mean, all of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school, I mean, my number one piece of advice is you should learn how to program. I mean, I think that in the future, all kinds of jobs, not even just straight engineering jobs, but all kinds of different jobs are going to involve some element of programming. And, I mean, I just look at, you know, when I was at school, and I remember the average salary that an engineer, one of my computer science classmates got. And it’s gone up at least 50 percent, maybe even doubled in the last seven years since I was at school. And I think the reason is that the economy is shifting, and there are more companies that are growing that are these technology and software focused companies. And the skill set of being able to write code is so highly in demand that — and the amount of engineers who are graduating isn’t growing at a fast enough rate that the people who are there are just in more demand, and they get paid more.
Sheryl Sandberg:
And we have both an education problem and an immigration problem.
Mark Zuckerberg:
That’s true.
Sheryl Sandberg:
So it’s an education problem. We do not train — we don’t graduate enough kids from high school. We don’t graduate enough kids from college in this country. And having these kind of skills, we’re just absolutely far off. And also, the immigration policy you talked about is very real. So, you know, someone made a joke. We give a huge percentage of the spots in our engineering undergrad and grad program to people from other countries, and then we kick them out. It’s like a company. We’d have Facebook training, and we train everyone, and then we’d say, but you can’t work here. Go work for our competitor. That’s what we’re doing as a country. People have talked about stapling.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Sheryl Sandberg:
We should be stapling a visa.
Charlie Rose:
Stapling a green card to every diploma.
Sheryl Sandberg:
To every high-tech diploma because those people, not only do they not take jobs from other Americans. They create jobs for other Americans if we could keep them here and have them work in our [unintelligible].
Charlie Rose:
I don’t understand why they that can’t be changed, other than it’s caught up in the overall immigration politics.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
Otherwise you would think it’s so obvious.
Sheryl Sandberg:
We’re not — we’re not experts on the political process.
Mark Zuckerberg:
It’s above my pay grade.
Charlie Rose:
But you’re having a different — you have to have, today, a company the size of Facebook, a presence in Washington. You have to have a sense of making sure that Washington knows who you are, and you know what they’re about. Do you know?
Sheryl Sandberg:
We do.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yes.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah, no, we do.
Mark Zuckerberg:
It’s an important — it’s an important part, I mean, for these issues and a lot of others. But I think changing the stuff is just such a long process, right. If we were actually going to effect any change in terms of getting more folks, each one be visas so we could not kick some of the best engineers out to other countries, I don’t know, I mean, that’s years, right. I mean –
Sheryl Sandberg:
I mean, I think it’s a public education issue. I think, look, we have huge unemployment problem, and we have a growing crisis of people that not only want jobs and need jobs but deserve jobs. And it’s our job to — and so I think people don’t understand that these jobs do not take jobs from other Americans, but they create jobs around them. I mean, there are so many stories on this. We have one guy named Javier Oliveon who works here. He was one of the best engineering students in Spain, nationwide, came to Stanford to get his MBA.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Started here, works with us, and he created our internationalization tool. He runs our internationalization projects. We serve most of the world from the United States. It’s the opposite of what everyone thinks is happening. We’re not hiring out there to serve here. We’re serving — we entered the visa lottery for him, and we won. We had the jobs for him.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, yeah.
Sheryl Sandberg:
If we had lost, we would have moved those jobs to wherever he could work. But because we got him a visa, those jobs stayed here.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
But let me ask this question, which is at the heart of the debate that’s going on in America.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Mm-hmm.
Charlie Rose:
Which is, you know, the competition of America with the rest of the world.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Mm-hmm.
Charlie Rose:
Facebook came out of America. Apple came out of America. Microsoft came out of America. Google came out of America. Are those things going to be coming — those kinds of companies, the kind of company you created –
Mark Zuckerberg:
Mm-hmm.
Charlie Rose:
– more likely to come from China tomorrow?
Mark Zuckerberg:
Well, if you — I think that there’s actually two big ingredients, right. One of the big parts of the Facebook story was that — you know, I didn’t have to have some master plan at the beginning. I didn’t have to have a lot of money. I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the side, and we’ve funded ever since by putting ads on the side.
Charlie Rose:
Right, right.
Mark Zuckerberg:
And but literally just starting small and growing it. So I think you need two things. One is the ability to have engineers, right, and educate engineers who can just try out their own ideas.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Mark Zuckerberg:
And the second is the ability to try out their own ideas, right, and the freedom to do that. And the U.S., I think historically has been extremely good at both. We’ve led in education, and we’ve led in freedom and supporting people trying risky things.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Free market economics.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
And a sense of innovation and creativity and –
Sheryl Sandberg:
Public policy that supports entrepreneurship.
Charlie Rose:
Right, right.
Sheryl Sandberg:
In America, you can hire and fire.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Sheryl Sandberg:
In America, you can start a company without going through endless bureaucratic red tape, even though it’s growing a bit.
Charlie Rose:
Yes.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Right? I mean, in America, we’ve had a country of entrepreneurs.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.
Sheryl Sandberg:
We have set up our political system so you can start companies. You can close companies. I think people don’t always see the costs of increasing bureaucracy on entrepreneurship. The best people are going to go where they can get the best talent and where they have the best environment to hire.
Charlie Rose:
Speaking of environment, how is your culture, say, different from the culture that you saw at Google? What is the Facebook culture?
Sheryl Sandberg:
You know, when I think about this, if you compare Facebook and Google to, you know, most of the world, right, to other companies in other industries, they’re actually, in some ways, incredibly similar. They are founder led.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Silicon Valley based technology companies that have broad [unintelligible].
Charlie Rose:
Driven by engineering.
Sheryl Sandberg:
That’s right. Driven by engineering. They’re very similar.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Sheryl Sandberg:
In the little Silicon Valley bubble in which we live, they’re truly different, totally different.
Charlie Rose:
How so?
Sheryl Sandberg:
Couple things. One is that, you know, Google is fundamentally –
Charlie Rose:
You’re interested yourself.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, I’m interested in hearing [unintelligible].
Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah, but Google is fundamentally about, you know, algorithms and machine burning.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Sheryl Sandberg:
And that — and that has been very important and continues to be very important. They’re doing a great job. We start from a totally different place. We start from an individual. Who are you? You know, what do you want to do? What do you want to share? You know, for us, the vision of the world is that we are like a hacking culture, and we mean that in the best of ways. We do not mean scary people breaking into your home or anything.
Charlie Rose:
Or espionage.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Or espionage. What we mean is we build things quickly and ship them. So we are not aiming for, you know, perfection that comes over, you know, years, then we ship a product. We don’t work on things for years and then ship it. We work on things. We ship them. We get feedback from the people who use it. We get feedback from the world. We iterate, we iterate, we iterate. We have these great signs around, you know, “Done is better than perfect.” “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” we’re very much a culture.
Charlie Rose:
Because the notion of perfect is the enemy of good.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.
Sheryl Sandberg:
And a culture of very, very rapid, very rapid innovation.
Charlie Rose:
Okay. You set out — did you have a belief in a certain culture when you were building this company, that this is the kind of place I want to work? And this is how I want to –
Sheryl Sandberg:
Well, he’s never worked anywhere else.
Charlie Rose:
That’s true. So therefore how did you know what kind of culture you wanted?
Mark Zuckerberg:
Well, I think it sits [spelled phonetically] from the type of things that we want to build, right? So we’re trying to help people connect with all these different folks, right, and that map of all those different connections needs to get built from the ground up, right? So it is fundamentally about giving people the tools that they need to share the things that they want with the people that they want, make the connections that they want, and bootstrap from nothing to something that’s broader.
It is really different from a culture where you’re already taking the web and your primary mission is okay I want to organize something that’s out there, we have this culture where we place a really big premium on moving quickly right and one of the big theories that I had about that was that all technology companies and probably all companies just slow down dramatically as they grow, but if we can focus at every step along the way and moving quicker then maybe when we’re around 2,500 or 3,000 people now maybe we move as quickly as you know a company that only has 500 people, right, because we’ve invested so much in building up the infrastructure and tools and also the culture that tells people to take risks and try things out. And I just think that, that ability to build stuff quicker will be a big advantage for us and will help us build better products over the long term.
Charlie Rose:
I want to talk about the future and competition. There are many people who look to the Silicon Valley and they say there are four platforms out here. It's Amazon, it's Apple, it's Google, it's Facebook. And what we're going to witness over the next 10 years is a flat-out war between the four of you for the future. How do you see that?
Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, people like to talk about war. You know, there are a lot of ways in which the companies actually work together. There are real competitions in there. But I don't think that this is going to be the type of situation where there's one company that wins all the stuff.
Charlie Rose:
But you're already getting in each other's businesses. You know that. They have something called Google+.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yes, and no. I mean, I think, you know, Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook. But you know, when I look at Amazon and Apple and I see companies who are extremely aligned with us, right. And we have a lot of conversations with people at both companies just trying to figure out ways that we can do more together, and there is just a lot of reception there. I mean, I can't think of an Apple product or an Amazon product that I look at and it's like, oh, that's really –
Charlie Rose:
Yeah, but come on. Look at it. Apple just — Amazon just announced a new Kindle Fire, which is –
Mark Zuckerberg:
I know, and they're tablet –
Charlie Rose:
– could deeply compete with the iPad.
Mark Zuckerberg:
And that's cool. I mean, we don't have tablets, though, so we could care less about that.
Charlie Rose:
There are no borders out here in terms of what you might want to do. Come on, Sheryl.
Sheryl Sandberg:
There are no borders for us, certainly, right, because we want everything to be social, and we want — prefer everything to be social with Facebook. And so, for us, our goal is really to work across. We want to work on every tablet.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Right, this is the important stuff.
Sheryl Sandberg:
And Apple and Amazon, you know, God bless them. They can compete and build lots of different tablets.
Charlie Rose:
You found a device, and we want to be seen on it.
Sheryl Sandberg:
That's right.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, yeah. So if you're Amazon, and one of the big strategies is sell Kindles so you can sell more things, right. If you're Apple, a big part of your strategy is sell devices because that's how you make money. If you're Google, they want to get Android as widely adopted as possible, and our goal –
Charlie Rose:
Therefore, they go out and they buy Motorola.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, but our goal, I mean –
[talking simultaneously]
Charlie Rose:
And there are rumors that Microsoft may buy Nokia or something like that.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Sure, but our goal is not to build a platform; it's to be across all of them. I mean, because our mission is to help people connect and stay connected with people no matter what devices they're on, we want to be in all these places.
Charlie Rose:
You — go ahead — you — go ahead.
Sheryl Sandberg:
This is also really — sorry — but this is really important. It actually gets back to the differences before retirement with Google and Facebook. There's one thing that I think is most important that's to Facebook, which is that we are focused on doing one thing incredibly well. We only really want to do one thing.
Charlie Rose:
Social media.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Connect the world.
Charlie Rose:
Connect the world. Okay, fair enough.
Sheryl Sandberg:
And be the social technology people use. I think if you look at other companies, all of these companies are doing lots of different things, but we are still, as we grow, doing exactly one thing.
Charlie Rose:
But here's the thing. There's nothing you think you can't do. I mean, you look at –
Mark Zuckerberg:
[unintelligible] were going to go in a different direction with this, because, I mean, it is true, there's a corollary to what you just said, right. So, it is true we are focused on this one thing, but because there's all this other stuff out there, that means that Facebook has evolved as a partnership company.
Sheryl Sandberg:
That's right.
Mark Zuckerberg:
– which is very different from the way that Apple or Google or Amazon or Microsoft or any of these folks are, right. I mean, if Apple or Google want to build a product, they typically go build it, right. Whereas if Facebook wants to make it so that, you know, we want to help rethink the way that people listen to music or watch movies. What do we do? We build a platform on top of which people connect, and we enable all these different companies, dozens of companies to plug in, companies that are big companies, companies that are small companies, things that don't even exist. It's a really different approach than what all these other companies have.
Charlie Rose:
But the end result is you want to provide a means for people to look at movies, to listen to music, to do all kinds of things.
Mark Zuckerberg:
But they’re all [unintelligible] other people's services.
Sheryl Sandberg:
We don't want to provide the means. This is the thing. Our one thing that is the basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach, we build the social technology. They provide the music.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, exactly.
Sheryl Sandberg:
They — we don’t — we don’t want people to use Facebook to watch movies or read newspaper articles.
Charlie Rose:
You want to do what? You want to –
Sheryl Sandberg:
We want to provide the social technology. So we want them to listen to music on the iPhone or through Apple or through Spotify, anything they want. We want them to watch movies anywhere.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.
Sheryl Sandberg:
We just want Facebook to be how they share wherever they are. And so we do this one thing which is — underlies this huge partnership strategy, and it does make us, I think, pretty different than many of the other companies you’re talking about.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Just take the movies thing as an example.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, the biggest movie company –
Sheryl Sandberg:
We don’t care where you watch.
Mark Zuckerberg:
– is that — our partners right now and are building on top of our platform are Netflix and Hulu.
Charlie Rose:
Right.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Right? And I guess Hulu’s more on the TV side. But people can share all kinds of videos that they’re watching. You can see the top things that your friends are watching. So I go to your profile or your timeline and if you want, you can have a box up there that’s what are the TV shows that you watch the most? And I can go ahead and click on it, and it’ll take me right to the Hulu app, and I can start watching that. That, I think is really powerful. The piece that Facebook is doing is saying, okay, we’re friends, right, and allowing you to share that — I want to express to people what are the TV shows that I like. And now Facebook is giving me a place to go see what you want to watch if you want to share that. But then from there, you click on it, and it takes you to Hulu or takes you to Netflix. Or if you want to listen to music, it takes you to Spotify, or it takes you to one of these other companies.
Charlie Rose:
But is central your sense that the future belongs to social networking, that that’s the future?
Mark Zuckerberg:
I think that a big piece of it is –
Charlie Rose:
Finish that.
Mark Zuckerberg:
It’s not everything.
Sheryl Sandberg:
Yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg:
I mean, if you think about it, in your own life, right, with all the things that you do, how much — how many of the things that you do are better when you’re doing them with other people or with your friends? Probably a lot. But not everything, but a big piece of that.
Charlie Rose:
Almost everything.
Mark Zuckerberg:
And I think that we can help power that. But for all of those things, then, you know, some of them we’re going to build ourselves, right, so the core experience where I can go learn stuff about you, right, based on what you’ve shared, we’re going to build that piece, right. The core piece where you can see all of the stuff that’s going on with all of your friends that they wanted to share. We’ll build that piece.
Charlie Rose:
Yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg:
But the piece where, you know, you go to try to consume a specific type of content, right, I want to see what news my friends are reading. There will be newspapers.
Sheryl Sandberg:
This is why this matters, right, because we can win along with lots of other people winning.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.
Sheryl Sandberg:
And that is totally different, I think about the strategy of what we’re trying to build.
Charlie Rose:
What don’t you want — go ahead, finish.
Sheryl Sandberg:
So we can — if — if news becomes more social, that’s great for Facebook if it happens with our technology. But –
Charlie Rose:
Because you’re the great connector of the world.
Sheryl Sandberg:
– it is great for the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Huffington Post and anyone who chooses to use our technology which we make available to every news service out there. We’re not trying to replace everyone or do everything. We want to enable everyone — everything to be more social for everyone else.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah, I think — it’s actually — it’s a lot more extreme even than you’re saying. I mean, take — and we’ve talking a lot here about –
Sheryl Sandberg:
It’s always more extreme.
Mark Zuckerberg:
One thing that we haven’t talked about at all here are games, right. I mean, games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.
Charlie Rose:
Yeah, well –
Mark Zuckerberg:
– which are going public soon and will be valued at most likely at multibillion dollar valuations. And basically all of their games are built on top of Facebook for the most part.
Charlie Rose:
Exactly.
Mark Zuckerberg:
And a huge number of other companies as well. So I mean, does Facebook build any games? No. We build no games.
Charlie Rose:
You say that today –
Mark Zuckerberg:
No, we –
Charlie Rose:
You say that today.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Actually –
Sheryl Sandberg:
I’m pretty sure we’re not going to –
Mark Zuckerberg:
No, I’m pretty sure we’re not going to build any games.
Sheryl Sandberg:
[unintelligible] we’re not going to build games.
Mark Zuckerberg:
We build –
Charlie Rose:
Well, why are you so sure?
Mark Zuckerberg:
Here’s why. Here’s why.
Charlie Rose:
I’m only saying this because people thought that Steve Jobs –
Mark Zuckerberg:
I’ll tell you why.
Charlie Rose:
– would never go into retail, and he did.
Mark Zuckerberg:
I’ll tell you why.
Charlie Rose:
All right.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Because building games is really hard. And so that’s –
Charlie Rose:
So that’s the only reason.
Mark Zuckerberg:
And we’re doing — what we’re doing is really hard. And we think that we’re better off focusing on this piece. I think that building a great game service is really hard. Building a great music service is really hard. Building a great movie service is really hard. And we just believe that an independent entrepreneur will always beat a division of a big company which is why we think that the strategy of these other companies trying to do everything themselves will inevitably be less successful than an ecosystem where you have someone like Facebook trying to build the core product to help people connect and then independent great companies that are only focused on one or two things doing those things really well.
Sheryl Sandberg:
And those companies can’t — don’t have the discipline to do it, right. They get big, and everyone wants to do everything, and they just say yes. And then they don’t do everything well.
Charlie Rose:
At this point, enter this name, Steve Jobs. I’ve had an experience with him once at TIME 100. And he walked over to say hello, and there was — I was talking to a young entrepreneur who was obviously in awe and in — you know, thrilled. It was the greatest moment of his life. There was Steve.
Mark Zuckerberg:
Mm-hmm.
Charlie Rose:
And I said to Steve, “What should he do?” and Steve said to me, “He should focus on his knitting. Not try to do everything. Do one thing well.”
Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.
Charlie Rose:
Did you ever have that conversation with Steve Jobs?
Mark Zuckerberg:
I don’t know.
Sheryl Sandberg:
[unintelligible] conversations with –
Mark Zuckerberg:
Well, you know, one of the funny things is when you agree with someone, you tend not to talk about it for too long because you just take it as an assumption. So I mean, I think in some of our conversations it might have been like, yeah, that thing, okay, now let’s go talk about something else.
Charlie Rose:
So what were the conversations like? I mean, here is someone who’s –
Mark Zuckerberg:
Oh, I don’
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