Move Fast & Break Things: Facebook

“You would never build something great doing it the same way others have done it” Mark Zuckerberg

Maybe this is a good concept if we are talking about innovation, but being more specific…about open-innovation. However…. what is open innovation? It is the fact to combine internal and external ideas as well as internal and external paths to market to advance the development of new technologies.

Talking about innovation there are four elements which are the clue and which are interconnected: strategy, ideas, process & climate.

In the Facebook case, the project started in 2004 in Harvard when Mark Zuckerberg was 19, and nowadays it has 300 million users all around the world and $500 million in revenue.

The main idea was that people care a lot about controlling information about themselves, their reputation and privacy. It had worked in Harvard and the big initial question was: Is it going to work in the world? …. The answer to that question was that every user has an identity that they want to express and friends and family that they want to stay connected with. And it has grown from the original 6 thousand person student body to more than 300 million people across the world.

All the motivation of this idea comes from a creator’s passion of building things very quickly. The first person in Facebook was built in 2 weeks, and after that they improved the application ending in a really quickly website.

As Mark has said, it is the idea that is sacred and is the person who thought of it the one that should get full credit for it and so forth. It is just the combination of execution and an idea of where you want it to go.

So, from those conversions that Mark had with his friends in college, they had this very broad idea of where they thought the world should go and not just, kind of, guide at Facebook’s development to this date. But a lot of it was also just good technical decisions, getting really smart people in to work on it. These are the three keys to Facebook success  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl74ypiwlA4

Furthermore, long term focus is a really important part of this innovation process and we have lots of opportunities to optimize for the shorter term whether it is in selling the company or doing in different products that would have benefited us in the short term but not optimized for the long term impact.

“Opportunities like this don’t come around that often. So, when you get one, I feel like you almost have a duty to see it through and built it to be what it can be” Mark Zuckerberg.

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