Zuckerberg: not 'cool', movie about him 'hurtful'
At today's AMA with Mark Zuckerberg, we all got the opportunity to submit questions for the Facebook CEO to answer. Some of what popped up was kind of hilarious, and some of what Zuck said was actually insightful. If you'v ever wondered what made Facebook and it's founder tick, today's AMA is a good glimpse into that. Besides, you also get to find out some really neat stuff, like what Mark thought of The Social Network, or why he's always in a grey tee shirt.
If you're ever wondering why Zuck built Facebook, it seems like it was a bit of an accident. Zuckerberg said he didn't really aim to start a company, per se. Facebook was more of a project than a mission, according to its billionaire founder. When asked if Facebook was losing its cool, Zuck said "My object was never to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person."
On the movie "about" him, The Social Network — Zuckerberg said it was very much elaborated. According to him, not much about it was accurate, save for his name and that he started Facebook:
I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this in a while. I kinda blocked that one out. It was a very interesting experience to watch a movie that was supposedly about my life. The reality is that writing code and building a product is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about. A lot of the stuff they probably had to embellish and make up. If they were really making a movie, it would've just been me at a computer coding for two hours straight. And these people want to make money.
I haven't met the writer of the movie. I met [Jesse Eisenberg] once. They went out of their way in the movie to try to get some interesting details correct like design of office, but with overarching plot about why we're building Facebook or how we did it, they just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful. I take our mission really seriously. We're here not to just build a company, but to help connect the world and help people connect to people they love. The thing that I found most interesting about the movie was that they made up this plotline about how I decided to create Facebook to attract girls.
One important piece of context is the woman I'm married to who I've been dating for ten years, I was dating her before starting Facebook. If somehow I was trying to create Facebook to find more women, that probably wouldn't have gone over well in my relationship. There were glaring things made up about movie that made it hard for me to take seriously. But we had some fun with it. We knew everyone at Facebook was gonna want to see it. So we actually took the whole company to go see it the day it came out.
As for the grey tee shirt Zuck always wears? He considers it a fussy thing to worry about what to wear daily, and he'd rather not make that decision, instead focussing on making Facebook great. I'm pretty sure a white tee now and then wouldn't kill him, but whatever.
On the topic of diversity, Zuckerberg says it's everyone's responsibility to make sure there are more women and non-white-dudes in tech. He considers each team leader at Facebook responsible for their team's diversity, and he pointed out that having a diverse team is actually beneficial on just about every level.
Source: Facebook