Mark Zuckerberg explains the importance of option value and flexibility before starting a company

I never really understood the psychology of deciding that you want to start a company before you understand what you want to do. I know that that's different from your philosophy on this. No, no, believe me, I wish we.

Would get more people who were the company started them rather than vice versa.

This gets back to the question of why did we first open at colleges that had competitors? I have this big fear, I think, of getting locked into doing things that aren't actually the most impactful things. And to me, this is like the trait that entrepreneurs have is they just have this, like, laser, like ability to go find where they can have the most impact. And, you know, when you take on a new project, especially if you hire people or start a company, you're doing that project. There are obviously different ways that it can exit and all that. But I think having the flexibility to explore a lot of different things, which you can do when you're in college, which is one of the amazing things about being in college is you can work on all these hobbies and code a lot of stuff and try a lot of different things. It's this amazing flexibility that I think most people take for granted. And once you decide, okay, I'm going to start a company and I'm going to do it with someone else, you immediately now need to convince someone else if you want to change your mind on something. And I think people really undervalue the option value and flexibility. I think explore what you want to do before committing is really like the key thing. And keep yourself flexible. You can definitely do that within the framework of a company, but I think you have to be wary about starting a company too rigidly because you're going to change what you do. I mean, people talk about pivots all the time, as if your thing didn't work, so you pivoted. So Facebook pivoted many times. We were college, and then we were not college, and then we were just a website and then we were a platform. You're going to change what you do, right?

There's another word for the kind of pivots you were talking about. Expansions.

That's not what people usually mean by pivoting. Well, you know, flexibility, yeah.