Interview: Mark Zuckerberg

Last Modified: 10 Oct 2008
By: Benjamin Cohen

The founder of Facebook talks to Benjamin Cohen about the financial crisis and the future of the networking site.

Here are are some of the things he had to say:

On the credit crunch:

"Even though an economic crisis like this will probably affect everyone in some capacity, as a private company I think we'll probably be a little bit less affected on a day to day basis than maybe public companies which have to deal with the turmoil of the public markets."

"We started off very small in a dorm room, and recently we hit this big milestone for the company where we just passed 100 million users. That was something pretty big and important for us, but at the same time you can kinda get the sense that that's just the beginning of where this can go.

"I mean there's hundreds of millions more people in the world, billions, who connect and share with their family, friends, co-workers, people around them, and that's really what we're going after for the long term."

On privacy and previous issues:

"If you take for example your mobile phone number, this is an example that we sometimes use, no one wants to share their mobile phone number with 100 million people, but you do want to share your mobile phone number with maybe a hundred friends or something like that.

"If you have the control to be able to say 'hey I just want to share this with these people' then you're able to put it up. If not then you're probably not going to share that information. Giving people complete control over their privacy actually, while creating a safe environment, also makes it so that people can share more information. It's a really important part of what we do."

"What we've learned from those experiences is just exactly how important privacy is. This is something that we have focused a lot of effort on from the beginning, but those events just even served as a reminder, is that we just need to keep on focusing on it."

On future income:

"Right now it looks like it's going to be from advertising, and I think that we have a really good business that's been built there. Certainly not from exploiting data in a way that, in a way that people don't want it to be shared. That's just the contract we have with people."

On Facebook's expansion around the world:

"We've said pretty clearly that at this point we're not comfortable censoring content or doing anything like that in China, but at the same time it is available, the services is available in China, in Chinese. It's available all over the world."

Profile

Mark Zuckerberg is the 24 year-old mastermind behind Facebook.

The son of a New York dentist, Zuckerberg launched the social networking site from his room at Harvard in 2004.

It quickly spread from universities to homes and offices, with current estimates suggesting it has up to 100 million members.

Forbes magazine this year declared Zuckerberg "[the] youngest billionaire on earth and possibly the youngest self-made billionaire ever."