Mark Zuckerberg: preference

Transcript context

…But it does feel like the way that you make bets is like if we have great engineering, then that can take care of the speed part. That's many iterations or multiple at-bats and then the— Well, great engineering and speed and iteration are actually two different values. They're not necessarily at odds, but I think there are a lot of great engineering organizations that try to build things that are super high quality and have good competence around that. But there's a certain personality that goes with taking your stuff and putting it out there before it's fully polished. I'm not saying that our strategy or approach on this is the only one that works. I think in a lot of ways we're the opposite of Apple and clearly their stuff has worked really well too. They take this approach, we're going to take a long time, we're going to polish it, we're going to put it out, and maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture. For us, I think that there are a lot of conversations that we have internally where you're almost at the line of being embarrassed about what you put out, because you want to put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback. You obviously want to test things that are reasonable hypotheses, so if it's so ineffective, then you're not testing a good hypothesis. That doesn't work. But I do think a lot of the conversations that we have are like okay, well, we can get this to be a lot better if we work on it for another couple of months or whatever. I do just think that you want to really have a culture that values shipping, getting things out, and getting feedback more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out. I think if you want to wait until you get praised all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version you were going to ship. And it's just about making sure what the thing that the company is known for or its brand can withstand all the little damage that you do to it by shipping stuff that's not quite ready.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.