Mark Zuckerberg: "You can’t 80/20 everything"

When you first launched in the very beginning, the features were sort of profile with like a profile photo and your name and who you are. And also you included things like what house you lived in, what dorm you lived in, and what courses you were taking. Do you think it would have worked without that? Would it have been enough just to have profiles?

You know, it's a really interesting question. And we certainly since then have evolved and wanted to make a more general service. So we've. So we've dropped some of those things. But I remember there's this early debate that Dustin and I had where we had to do some manual work for every school that we. That we released Facebook at. And in order to do that, we basically went through and we parsed the course catalogs of the schools to make sure that the data was clean. And I remember having this debate where Dustin was like, we could just expand so much faster or it would just be easier. I mean, we were bound by server capacity, but it would be easier to launch new schools if we didn't have to have course catalogs for each school. And we just had this really long debate about what quality meant for us and the community that we wanted to establish and the culture of it. And in retrospect, maybe it wouldn't have had a huge difference on how things played out, but it definitely set this tone. Where there's a lot of clean data on Facebook, you can rely on it. It feels like a college specific thing, which was valuable early on for setting the culture, even though obviously since then we've grown beyond that. And I think you guys in the projects that you work on, you're going to have a lot of similar questions. There's the famous 80, 20 rule where you get 80% of the benefit by doing 20% of the work, but you can't just 80, 20 everything. There have to be certain things that you just are the best at and that you go way further than anyone else. Had to establish this kind of quality bar and have your product be the best thing that's out there. So whether we had to do that one or had to do something we had to do, I think enough of those things or else we just wouldn't have been the best service out there.