Mark Zuckerberg on the value of a growth team

One thing I heard you say years ago is that one of the best things Facebook had done was invent the idea of a growth group. And so this is something now that I've heard a lot of founders ask about. Could you tell us, is that still something you recommend people running companies put in place and how Facebook's worked in the early days?

So making it so we could grow faster was, I think, the most important product feature that we ended up building for Facebook. And, you know, the traditional approach to growing and marketing is you have a communications group or you have a marketing team, and you buy ads. And I think that sometimes there's a place for that, especially when you're trying to communicate something and get a message out. But if you're actually trying to grow a product, I think often the best levers for doing that are within the product themselves and getting people in your community who enjoy what you're doing to evangelize that to their friends and getting that to happen as efficiently as possible. So there's no magic in the growth group that we built that other people can't replicate. It's just being very rigorous with data, investing in data infrastructure. So that way you can process all these different experiments and learn what people are trying to tell you and then go invest engineering and actually try to grow the community. Because I think that's the most important feature for a lot of networks.

And can you tell how much of an impact that group had on the growth rate of Facebook?

Yeah, I think it's, you know, there overall, I think it's been very big. I don't have a number off the top of my head, but, I mean, even just looking at some of these specific features that we've built, like people you may know. Right. Which is one of the important things. Right. Again, if you're a social product, isn't that useful if you're not connected to other people when you're using it? So helping you go from signing up for Facebook to connecting to the people that you care about most is probably one of the most important things that we can do.