Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered
questions yesterday during a live public Q&A about the future of the
social network. The last question was asked by a shy 8th grader from a local
school; she wanted to know how he forged through the hard times in the early
Facebook days.
Zuckerberg’s answer was simple: Don’t go it
alone. He faulted the media for propping up startup celebrities as superhuman,
as though they can tackle any problem by themselves.
“No person knows how to deal with
everything. But if you can find a team of people, or friends, or family — and
there will be different people over time because different people like to focus
on different problems or different scales of the problems — then that’s what’s
really going to get you through, that’s what’s gotten me through and that’s
what continues to get me through all the stuff that we have. Yeah, you don’t
have to be superhuman, you have to just kind of keep on going and not do it
alone and find people who share your passion for what is the important thing in
the world.”
Interestingly enough, at Stanford this
week, Linkedin cofounder Reid Hoffman gave a lecture on
the exact same topic, although he gave more specific advice about how to
leverage local and personal networks to found a great tech startup. Both he and
Zuckerberg said that it’s better for a startup to have more than one founder.
“What great founders do is seek the networks
that will be essential to their task…Usually it’s best to have two or three
people on a team, rather than a solo founder,” Hoffman said.
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