Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…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. It’s effectively counter positioning. They’re building the Facebook in such a way that the use cases don’t require incredibly sophisticated technology to accomplish those feature sets. There’s this funny chicken or the egg thing here and I think the answer like many chicken or the egg is both. Mark, at the moment he conceives of an idea, thinks through the technical requirements and the user experience. They’re co-mingled in the product development process. I really do think even at age 19, he was aware of the scaling benefits in addition to the user experience benefits of launching in this way. Totally agree. Okay, fun bit of trivia about Harvard’s leave policy that we referenced earlier. Do you know what else Mark does on the same evening that they launched Columbia?…

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