Edible Apple

Check out this insightful interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over at BusinessWeek. Say what you will about Facebook, but Zuckerberg seems to have a good head on his shoulders. For such a young kid, he has an impressive knack for focusing on longterm goals and not getting bogged down in the day to day FUD that has been hovering over the company in the wake of their sluggish stock performance.

How do you get to 2 billion users? And do you want to make a prediction of when you get there?
No. The big thing is obviously going to be mobile. There are 5 billion people in the world who have phones, and a billion people using Facebook. There are actually already 600 million people using Facebook on phones, so that’s growing really quickly. And as more phones become smartphones, it’s just this massive opportunity.

People at Facebook stress the company’s culture of moving fast and breaking things. At some point are you moving fast just for the sake of moving fast?
I actually think as we’ve gotten more mature, we’ve focused a little bit less on the “break things” part of “break things and move fast.” I would like Facebook to always operate as fast as a company that’s 10 times smaller than we are. So if we’re at 1,000 engineers, I’d like us to be moving as fast as a company that has 100 engineers. If we can do that sustainably, then when we get to the size of some of the biggest companies in the space, we’ll be moving at a much faster clip than them. It’s also more fun and it means you can learn more.

via Business Week