It is the first time I’ve listened to Dwarkesh Podcast, but it seems to be high quality and I’ll be listening to more episodes than his interview with Mark Zuckerberg.
In addition to the AI discussion, I find Mark Zuckerberg’s comment on how he thought about not selling Facebook a good general approach:
If you like what you are doing, like your company and would build the same company again, why sell?
The full question and answer:
“Dwarkesh Patel 00:06:47
This is a total detour, but I want to ask about this while we’re on this. We’ll get back to AI in a second. In 2006 you didn’t sell for $1 billion but presumably there’s some amount you would have sold for, right? Did you write down in your head like “I think the actual valuation of Facebook at the time is this and they’re not actually getting the valuation right”? If they’d offered you $5 trillion, of course you would have sold. So how did you think about that choice?
Mark Zuckerberg 00:07:08
I think some of these things are just personal. I don’t know that at the time I was sophisticated enough to do that analysis. I had all these people around me who were making all these arguments for a billion dollars like “here’s the revenue that we need to make and here’s how big we need to be. It’s clearly so many years in the future.” It was very far ahead of where we were at the time. I didn’t really have the financial sophistication to really engage with that kind of debate.
Deep down I believed in what we were doing. I did some analysis like “what would I do if I weren’t doing this? Well, I really like building things and I like helping people communicate. I like understanding what’s going on with people and the dynamics between people. So I think if I sold this company, I’d just go build another company like this and I kind of like the one I have. So why?” I think a lot of the biggest bets that people make are often just based on conviction and values. It’s actually usually very hard to do the analyses trying to connect the dots forward. “