A brief transcript of Mark Zuckerberg (via a YouTube upload) arguing that to be a true technology company you need a sufficiently technical leadership and engineering share across the organization. He warns that companies that treat technology as an afterthought—non-technical CEOs, boards, and management teams—aren't genuine tech companies. He states a strategy: learn faster than competitors by shipping early, building feedback loops, and iterating quickly to produce better products.
Chapters
We never thought about ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that. For a lot of companies, I think, think about themselves too narrowly in terms of, okay, well, we're this kind of one thing. And it's one of the things that I observed as soon as I came out to the Valley, that all these companies that called themselves technology companies were not really set up that way. The CEO wasn't technical. The board of directors had no one technical on it. They had, like one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical and like everyone else wasn't. It's like, all right, if that's your team, then you're not a technology company. So I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about, and I think that there's like a balance, right? It's like you don't want everyone to be an engineer because there's other things that matter too. But if you don't have enough of your kind of share of the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company. I define our strategy as we can learn faster than every other company. We're going to win. We're going to build a better product than everyone else because we're going to get it out first early. We're going to have a good feedback loop. We're going to learn what people like better than other people. I think that's basically the formula. Be a technology company, build good foundation. Like, learn from what people are kind of focused on in the world and just iterate as quickly as you can.