Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered a speech in Chinese at "Tringhua Students Dialogue with Board Members" on Oct 24, 2015 in Tsinghua University, Beijing. This is the first time he used Chinese throughout the whole speech. Though his Chinese is not that fluent, his hard work on learning Chinese is well appreciated.
In this speech, he shared three stories : mission, care and looking ahead.
Mission
You have to believe in your mission. When you have a mission, it will help you focus. In 2004, when he started to create Facebook, he thought it was important to be able to connect with people online. At that time, you could find everything online except one thing, there was no service which could help find the most important thing in our lives -- friends. He thought our life would get better when we started t connect.
Just after Facebook started a few years, a big change was made to Facebook - News Feed. This feature is now very popular but it was disgusted at the time when it was introduced. Around 10% of users were threatening to leave Facebook if they didn't bring back the old Facebook. Mark said that many companies would compromise to those users. But Facebook didn't compromise because they knew that News Feed was very important for their mission and they stayed strong.
Care
After you have your mission, you just need to care about your mission. Facebook encountered lots of problems and many changes were made.. Many doubts appeared along the way of Facebook's growth:
- Facebook is just for students, so it will never be important
- Facebook is now used by lots of people, but people will stop using it soon
- Facebook maybe work in US, but it won't be used internationally
- Social media will never make money
- Facebook won't work on mobile
There were no answers to these doubts or questions. The reason why they kept moving is because they cared. They cared about everything that could help connect the people and people finally recognized their effort.
Looking ahead
The more you learn, the more you find to be done. When Facebook was first started, the goal was to connect 1 billion people. After they reached this goal, they found 1 billion was just a number. So they think they want to connect everyone on the planet. It's hard to achieve this goal. Many people do not have internet access, they have to expand the internet by inventing new technologies like satellites and planes. Facebook founded the Internet.org to expand the Internet. Mark didn't know how this could make money but he did know that it was their mission to connect people so he had to do this.
They didn't know what the whole plan is now, but he believed that the future would be better if they could help people. "We would face more challenges in the future, we could solve these problems if we look ahead" Mark said.
The mission, care and looking ahead makes Facebook the largest social platform with 1.5 billion users on the Internet to connect people. We can definitely expect more from Facebook.
