Mark Zuckerberg’s advice to young people: Focus on building relationships rather than ‘on target’

Most people know the story of “Facebook’s dorm room birth”. But according to Mark Zuckerberg, people may have learned the wrong lesson from it.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg attends a meeting on technology regulations and social networking issues on September 19, 2019, on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC.

In a recent episode of the “Lex Fridman Podcast,” initiated by MIT computer scientist Lex Fridman, Zuckerberg said the foundation for creating the original Facebook in 2004 was not because Mark dropped out of college or because had to give up any of his other interests. Instead, the CEO of Meta said, it was due to the personal relationships he forged while in school.

Zuckerberg said that you spend time at university FOR AI is the “most important decision” of every student when sitting in school . “You will become like the people around you,” he explains: “I think perhaps most people are too, focused on goals and maybe not focused enough on relationships and people. that they’re building.”

Zuckerberg met Facebook co-founders ⁠ – Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Andrew McCollum ⁠- while the 5 of them were students at Harvard University in the early 2000s. Together they went on to revolutionize social network and became one of the largest companies in the world: Meta has a market capitalization of $582.58 billion, as of the afternoon of March 17.

However, in the end, the founding team had a “breakup” that was not very amicable, which was narrated in almost detail in the 2010 movie “The Social Network”, but Zuckerberg said on the podcast, he still Try to prioritize relationships over current goals. This applies especially to hiring, he says: When evaluating a candidate, he often imagines what it would be like to work for that person, instead of being their boss.

“I would only hire someone to work for me if I could see myself working under them,” he said.

This strategy, says Zuckerberg, creates a more engaged and productive work environment: If you work with people who share your values ​​on a personal level, there’s a good chance you’ll both achieve your goals. Spend the job smoothly. It’s all about finding personal compatibility, he said, and this is no different than “picking a friend or a partner”.

Prioritizing relationships over goals may also help explain some of Zuckerberg’s controversial decisions to lead Meta. For example, in a 2016 memo first published by Hacker News, Zuckerberg defended then-board member Peter Thiel.

Keeping Thiel on the board, Zuckerberg writes, is more important than any impact the company might have, arguing that Facebook “couldn’t create a culture with a message that cares about diversity and then excluded almost half of the country because they supported a political candidate”. Thiel is said to support the campaign of former US president Donald Trump in 2016

This move could have consequences. Many critics of Zuckerberg believe that his support of Thiel, an early Facebook investor, may have influenced Facebook’s ethos ⁠- or ignored misinformation on the media platform. social media leading up to the 2016 and 2020 elections.

In 2019, a Wall Street Journal investigation found that Thiel was one of the people who pressured Zuckerberg not to check political ads on the Facebook platform. That year, three longtime board members left the company. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have since criticized the way Facebook manages content on its platform.