The Advice Steve Jobs Gave Me: Mark Zuckerberg

By Press Trust of India | Updated: 6 June 2012 17:29 IST

Highlights

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says he received some words of wisdom from Apple's late co-founder Steve Jobs who told the young Silicon Valley billionaire to focus on building the right team for a "high quality" company.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says he received some words of wisdom from Apple's late co-founder Steve Jobs who told the young Silicon Valley billionaire to focus on building the right team for a "high quality" company.

Zuckerberg, appearing in an interview with Charlie Rose with his Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, said Jobs advised him on how to improve his company's focus and also discussed with him about "the aesthetics and kind of mission orientation of companies."

"I had a lot of questions for him," including on "how to build a team around you that's focused on building as high-quality and good things as you are."

Zuckerberg, 27, also visited Harvard University, his alma mater from where he had dropped out in 2004 to start Facebook, which now has 800 million users.

He told students at Harvard and later at MIT in Cambridge that he would be hiring the best minds from the Ivy League institutions for his multi-billion dollar social network.

Jobs, who died on October 5, had told his biographer Walter Isaacson that he admired Zuckerberg for not "selling out."

Zuckerberg told Rose Jobs had not proposed an acquisition of Facebook.

Named the ninth most powerful person in the world by Forbes magazine with a net worth of USD 17.5 billion, Zuckerberg also spoke about Facebook's much-awaited IPO, which he added is not "something I spend a lot of time on a day-to-day basis thinking about."

"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," he said.

"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," he said.

Referring to the competition in Silicon Valley, Zuckerberg said while people like to talk about war among the technology companies, "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," he said.

Zuckerberg added that while Internet search giant Google "is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook," Amazon and Apple are companies that are "extremely aligned with us."

On acquisitions, Zuckerberg said lot of the acquisitions that Facebook makes is focussed on "great entrepreneurs out there who are building things".

"And often, the acquisitions aren't even to really buy their company or what they're doing. It's to get the really talented people who are out there trying to build something cool."

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