Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook's f8 developers conference in April in San Francisco.
Now we know why
Facebook is so unafraid to make mistakes, whether it is the company’s
privacy stumbles or new products that fail, like Facebook Home and
Slingshot.
Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s co-founder and chief executive, thinks mistakes are good.
Addressing questions from Facebook users Thursday at his second town hall meeting with the public,
held at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., and
live-streamed on the web, Mr. Zuckerberg said that successful people not
only learn from their mistakes but spend most of their time making
mistakes.
“If you’re successful,
most of the things you’ve done were wrong,” he said. “What ends up
mattering is the stuff you get right.” If you get a few big things
right, he said, “you can make some pretty important changes in the
world.”
As with his first town hall, Mr. Zuckerberg covered a range of topics, like the company’s privacy policies and its new tool that allows people to search past Facebook posts.
Asked if the social
network would ever add a dislike button, he said the company was
thinking about it. Mr. Zuckerberg said that while there isn’t likely to
be a button that says “dislike” because of the potential for hurting
people’s feelings, the company is trying to find a way for users to
express a wider range of emotional reactions, such as sadness, to a
post.
He joked with some of
the questioners. When someone asked what his favorite pizza topping was,
he said that if you’re going to eat pizza, you might as well go all the
way and put fried chicken on top.
Another questioner, a
woman who said she lives near Facebook’s headquarters, told him, “Thank
you for upping the price of my house.”
Mr. Zuckerberg
replied, “That’s the first time anyone has ever thanked me for having
Facebook raise housing prices,” a reference to community concerns in San
Francisco and elsewhere in the Bay Area about tech millionaires driving
out longtime residents.
He discussed the
importance of software programming skills. “If you can code, you have
the power to sit down and make something and no one can stop you,” he
said. He predicted that schools would eventually require everyone to
learn a little coding because it sharpens analytical skills that are
useful in a wide variety of professions.
Discussing Facebook’s
role in public conversations, such as racial discrimination by police,
he said, “We want to give everyone a voice.” He cited Facebook’s role in
opening up discussions in places like the Middle East, but he avoided
mention of the company’s recent censorship of some anti-government posts
in Turkey or his courtship this week of Chinese Internet regulators, who insist on tight control over online discussion.
Addressing a question
about children’s use of Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg, who has no children,
said that banning technology use by children wasn’t a solution. But “I
would not allow my child under the age of 13 to use Facebook.”
(Officially, the company bans the use of the service by anyone under 13,
in part because of restrictive American privacy laws that apply to
younger children, but many parents allow their underage kids to use the
service anyway.)
Mr. Zuckerberg also
admitted that he was having a lot of trouble fulfilling his 2014 New
Year’s resolution of writing a thank-you note to someone every day.
“There are people who
see the beauty of things,” he said. “And then there are people who see
things and want to make them better, and I tend to be the latter,” he
said, drawing laughs from his executive team sitting nearby.
