“Follow yourself,” Mark Zuckerberg preached in front of an awed audience of Harvard students on Monday, November 7th.
A Harvard dropout most renowned for his success in following his dreams, Zuckerberg was welcomed warmly back to campus by students and administrators. Over 200 students gathered in Farkas Hall to hear the CEO of Facebook speak during his first return to his alma mater since he left Harvard in 2004. Students first applied to attend the event before being notified if they earned a seat in the lecture; a waitlist of eager students also lingered outside the event hoping they would be able to fill in any empty seats. The vast majority of the audience consisted of students interested in computer science, engineering and applied math.
Sitting alongside Zuckerberg on stage were Mike Schroepfer, the vice-president of engineering at Facebook, Jocelyn Goldfein, a director of engineering at Facebook, as well as CS50 instructor David Malan who facilitated discussion throughout the conversation.
Much to the audience’s happiness, Zuckerberg spent a considerable amount of time reminiscing about his time at Harvard. A resident of Straus and then Kirkland, he spoke a lot about his strong inclination to experiment with programming, and to work incessantly on different projects until one clicked. “I just like making stuff,” he said. “When I was here, I was really just focused on hacking together a bunch of things and seeing what worked.”
While at Harvard, Zuckerberg built several websites that did not catch on in the same colossal way that his Facebook project did. These sites ranged from a “Course Match” website to help students plan and share their shopping week courses to a website called “6 Degrees of Harry Lewis,” which linked people appearing in the Crimson by finding their connections to the most frequently mentioned person: computer science professor Harry Lewis. He encouraged his audience to experiment with building different programs as well, and never to fear making mistakes. “Learning to engineer is kind of like riding a bike,” he advised. “You pick up different skills on the way; you learn something new with each project you do.” While he acknowledged that Facebook wrestles with bugs and problems in itself, users put up with them because the site is “fundamentally giving them value.”
In the beginning, Zuckerberg did not intend for Facebook to become a company – he simply thought it was a cool idea, and was a project he was interested in making for his friends. After divvying out roles to his two roommates, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg was able to promote the website until the project grew too big to contain at Harvard. “It was the momentum that kept us growing,” he said. “The users really carried us.” Since its conception, Facebook usage has grown exponentially: besides its increased user count growing to over 800 million people in the past 7 years, the average amount of information that a given person shares on Facebook is doubling every year.
Throughout his speech, Zuckerberg encouraged his undergraduate audience members to take chances in following their passions. In college, he and his friends would always muse over innovative ideas and what they thought was going to happen with social networks, but never expected that they would be the ones to accomplish the change. “Who are we, college students, to think we could build this?” they asked themselves. In retrospect, Zuckerberg said that they “thought the big companies – like Microsoft, Google, Amazon – would be the ones to take charge, but they just never got around to it.” Even Schroepfer acknowledged the incredible nature of Zuckerberg’s success: “It is shocking to think that one person couldn’t have an impact on the world, but then realize that they really, really could.”
While Zuckerberg’s return held sentimental value because of his Harvard connection, his visit was primarily a recruiting trip. He spoke of the Facebook office as one in which innovation is not only encouraged: it is necessary. According to Zuckerberg, Palo Alto’s Facebook office is a “culture of hacking and prototyping” in which engineers are constantly experimenting with new prototypes – experiments that often end up creating the best features on the website. Although the Facebook website caters to a similar amount of customers as other large internet websites, their team is much smaller, consisting of only about 700 engineers. What’s their criteria for hiring? For one, Schroepfer said that engineers need to be “excited about something in their lives, ideally about building things.” Aside from that, Schroepfer and Zuckerberg both agreed on the importance of being able to recognize the hardest leverage of a project to work on, and to figure out the problem in order to create an efficient final project.
One student asked Zuckerberg what he would be doing right now were he not the frontrunner of this billion-dollar company. “When I was at Harvard, I went to one of Bill Gates’ talks. The advice that he gave was that everyone should go take time off to work on something,” Zuckerberg replied. “Harvard is great because you can take as much time off as you want.” With this in mind, Zuckerberg said he might have gone back to finish his career at Harvard if the Facebook endeavor had failed.
“After all, my little sister made a bet that she’d finish college before me,” he laughed. “Oh yeah, she finished already. And it’s okay. I gave her the fifty dollars.”
— Julia Eger, ‘14
