When Fast Company first wrote about Mark Zuckerberg, in the spring of 2007, he was just 22 years old and his young company, Facebook, had just 19 million users. Our magazine cover line, “The Kid Who Turned Down $1 Billion,” seems almost quaint in hindsight, given Facebook’s $400 billion market cap today and its 2 billion global users. But it was Zuckerberg’s first cover, and a lot has transpired since then.
I recently sat down with Zuckerberg at Facebook HQ—a sprawling campus that’s only a few miles from the company’s original Palo Alto offices but a world apart in scale and sophistication. Our meeting was not a nostalgic revisiting of the past, but part of an examination into what continues to drive Facebook in the present and what role it wants to play in the future.
Fast Company‘s newest cover story highlights Zuckerberg again, a decade later, under the headline “Put Your Values To Work.” In recent months, many companies and company leaders have struggled to align their social, political, and business priorities. Zuckerberg himself has been forced to grapple with controversies around “fake news” and “filter bubbles”—one of many topics we touched on.
What follows is an edited transcript of our dialogue. While our cover story presents several different models for aligning a company’s values with its business, Zuckerberg explains here how and why Facebook’s core operations are mission-driven, what critics misunderstand about the company’s motivations, and why being a work-in-progress is part of the plan.
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