Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Which is another counterintuitive thing. You’d think like, oh great, I want to build this as big as possible. Mark clearly wants to conquer all these other schools. The best way to do that is to have all this live content come right to them from Harvard. I think he realized that had he done that, it would’ve socially inhibited sharing within Harvard. The scarce commodity is trust. That is the important lesson here. It’s also a very convenient infrastructure decision, where if these two systems truly don’t need to talk to each other, that’s great. Put different servers in different data centers. Don’t worry about overloading the database. Don’t worry about number of writes per second and reads per second. It’s great. If every school gets its own server rack, you end up not having some of these issues that the other social networks have. Friendster’s out there trying to compute second degree friends of friends, which is this crazy hard computer science problem, especially as the global number of people growing. It’s an N-squared problem. Facebook is over here (or the Facebook at the time) in the land where they’re keeping N small. Even anything that’s N-squared is contained within that school, and their servers aren’t falling over and taking 20+ seconds to load pages the way that the Friendsters of the world are. This is such an interesting point because technology infrastructure advantage has always been a core part of Facebook, even back to this very beginning. What’s interesting is that it flips at some point as Facebook grows and eventually becomes open to everybody. Their competitive advantage becomes their tech is so good and their infra is so good that they can do everything you were just talking about that Friendster couldn’t do and that MySpace couldn’t do. But in these early days, their competitive advantage is actually like, no, we’re scale out, not scale up. Then Mark was totally willing to just flip the bit later.…

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