21 year old Mark Zuckerberg explains why he isn’t worried about competition from Google

When asked if he was worried about Google eventually competing against Facebook in a 2005 guest lecture at Harvard, a 21 year old Mark Zuckerberg gave the following reply:

“I think that one of the cool things about this time in technology is that individuals are leveraged and able to do way more than they had really ever been able to do before… Instead of worrying about who’s the big player and what Google is going to do next? You can just get a lot of stuff done.”

He points out that Facebook was able to scale to 300,000 users and 400 million page views per day with just 50 people and servers that cost only $100 per month. Meanwhile Google was doing 250 million page views a day with hundreds of thousands of machines and 5,000 employees.

Mark argues:

“The most important thing is to have smart people. As technology becomes more generic and less expensive, the leverage point becomes the people.”

Mark believed that if he could recruit more intelligent people, Google’s resource advantage wouldn’t matter. He also believed Facebook’s small size was an advantage:

“When you’re a small company, then you can be really nimble and get a lot of stuff done, and there’s relatively little bureaucracy. So if you have smart people who can take advantage of that to build cool things, then that’s a [big advantage].”

Full video: CS50 “CS50 Lecture by Mark Zuckerberg - 7 December 2005“