Mark Zuckerberg: Run Towards Your Mistakes

Mark Zuckerberg - Nothing is Impossible

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg advises people not to avoid making mistakes, and says the important part is to learn from them, bounce back quickly, and never give up.

Transcript:

Mark Zuckerberg: I knew nothing when I got started. You have to remember, I was 19 years old when I started Facebook. Probably like the same age or younger than most of you guys.

Interviewer: I think you would be young for this audience actually.

MZ: I knew nothing, nothing about business at all. I didn't even think that I was starting a company. I actually remember when I first came out here for the summer with Dustin because we wanted to learn from Silicon Valley companies, I remember driving up the 101 and seeing all these great companies and thinking to myself, "Oh wow, these are such amazing companies. Maybe one day I'll start a company," and I'd already started Facebook.

Interviewer: Right.

MZ: It hadn't occurred to me that that was actually...

Interviewer: How did you learn? How did you learn ... 

MZ: Well just from ...

Interviewer: ... to manage people?

MZ:... a lot of the people around me. There's so many mistakes that just come from not ... I really knew so little at the time. So many things go wrong when you're starting a company. Often, I think people ask what mistakes should you avoid making. My answer to that question is, don't even bother trying to avoid mistakes because you're going to make tons of mistakes. The important thing is actually learning quickly from whatever mistakes you make and not giving up. There are things every single year of Facebook's existence that could have killed us or made it so that it just seemed like moving forward and making a lot of progress just seemed intractable, but you bounce back and you learn. Nothing is impossible, you just have to keep running through the walls.