Mark Zuckerberg observes that many successful companies start off trying to make something cool

One cool characteristic of a lot of the companies that end up being really successful. Not that we are really successful, but I guess we also fall into this bucket, is that they started off as someone trying to make something cool and not someone trying to make a company. Google came out of Larry and Sergey's PhD dissertation at Stanford, and Yahoo came out of also some Stanford guys just kind of screwing around in their dorm room. Ebay came out of some guy trying to build a marketplace for his girlfriend to exchange PEZ dispensers. Amazon was a little more calculated. So Facebook, for example, when it just got started, what I thought was the most interesting thing was just to be able to type in someone's name and find out information about them. I mean, there was hardly any of the stuff that was there. Now there's no groups, there was no messages even. There was poking.