Mark Zuckerberg on why experience isn't all that important

“I started Facebook when I was 19, so I can’t really believe that experience is all that important or else I would have a hard time reconciling myself and the company. At Facebook, we invest in people that we think are just really talented even if they haven’t done that thing before.”

For Facebook, this applies to people who are fresh out of university all the up way to Facebook’s CFO David Ebersman who took the company public, even though he had never taken a company public before.

As Mark explains, the key to hiring well is to just hire really talented people. And you can often assess raw talent from the different things that they’ve done, such as side projects and other accomplishments.

Of course Mark answer doesn’t always apply—sometimes experience is important. But overall his core argument is solid: people don’t necessarily need to have done a job before to do it well.

One of the things Mark believes Facebook as done very well is give talented people at the company a lot of opportunity regardless of their experience. He points out that there are twelve different product groups at the company—eleven of the twelve people running them did not join the company running a product group or reporting to him.

As he points out, when you create opportunities like this for people, it keeps your best people engaged and attracts the best talent to your company.

Source: Y Combinator “Mark Zuckerberg : How to Build the Future”