Highlights Of Mark Zuckerberg’s First Post-IPO Interview At TechCrunch Disrupt

Clearly one of the most anticipated segments of TechCrunch Disrupt, which enters its third and final day today in San Francisco, was a one-on-one interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg – the first time the young tech billionaire has gone on record since his company’s IPO back in mid-May. Zuckerberg addressed the jam-packed audience on topics regarding his company’s questionable performance on Wall Street, the future of the Facebook Phone, and a number of other items surrounding the future of the social network.

Zuckerberg
considered his company’s IPO in May to be “disappointing”, saying that “good
enough is never good enough” for he and his team, and that they will continue
to move forward building a superior experience for their users by learning from
their mistakes. “What we have
now is not as good as it can be,” he said.

Zuckerberg
points out that his company made a developmental error by relying too heavily
on HTML5.

“The
biggest mistake we have made as company was relying too heavily on HTML5
[for mobile], rather than native code,” he said. “Native is how we will be moving forward with our iOS and
Android apps."

Zuckerberg was
also quick to eliminate any inclination that his company is working on a
Facebook Phone.

“It’s
always been the wrong strategy for us,” he told the packed San Francisco Design
Center. “Let’s say we build a phone – we’re not, but if we did, we could maybe
get 10 or 20 million people to use it… that doesn’t move the needle for us.”

The young tech billionaire
also made it very clear that the company will continue to place mobile at the
forefront of all strategy and development initiatives.

“On mobile,
there will be more users and we will make more money than we do on
desktop," he said. “There is no room for ads on mobile, we'll have to find
a way to integrate ads on our platform."

He then mentioned
that mobile web views for Facebook exceed native iOS and Android combined and then proudly stated, "Now we are a
mobile company – all the code we are writing is mobile." Zuckerberg also says
that Facebook is working on a natural language query system to function as
social search.

“Search is
interesting. We do over a billion queries a day and we're not even
trying."

Lastly, Zuckerberg was asked if he was still
having fun:

"Yes,
but for me it's not really about fun though, it's about the mission,” he
replied. “We go through these waves. And there are times when people think
everything we do in the world is awesome, and then there are times when people
are really pessimistic. I would rather be in the cycle when people underestimate
us, because I would rather be underestimated. Then we can really excite and
amaze people."

Some more
notable quotes taken from the Zuckerberg interview:

"We don't
build services to make money, we make money to build better services."

"Building a
mission and building a business goes hand in hand."

"Instagram
is great, but everything we wanted to achieve we can do better together, as one
company. We have no agenda for Instagram besides helping them grow… no
specific need for infrastructure integration.”

"I do
everything on my phone, I rarely uses desktop now. That's the future."

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