Cofounder, Meta
Facebook's co-founder Eduardo Saverin & Franck Nazikian, CHINICT's founder.
Facebook's co-founder Eduardo Saverin talks with CHINICT's founder & president Franck Nazikian - at the 8th annual edition of the CHINICT conference - China's #1 Tech Conference - on May 25th 2012 in Beijing at Tsinghua University Science Park.
About Eduardo Saverin
Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Meta Platforms and co-CEO of B Capital, has spoken about the impact of artificial intelligence on business and society. In a May 2025 interview with AIBRASIL, Saverin described AI as a "key paradigm shifting technology" and said that the most important application of AI is not in creating fundamental large language models but in integrating AI into workflows so that users do not have to take an extra step to use it. He stated that the majority of productivity gains in businesses could be achieved with a proper application layer and workflow integration, rather than requiring significantly more advanced models. Saverin also discussed the societal challenges of AI, including job displacement, and said that entrepreneurs and companies should balance profit optimization with societal benefits. In a March 2025 appearance at the Web Summit in Qatar, Saverin commented on the advancement of DeepSeek, stating that "innovation can and should come from anywhere" and that such developments are "very positive for the industry" because they make core models more accessible from a pricing standpoint. He said that DeepSeek is good for certain types of functions while other models are better for others, and that choice in foundational models will drive more access to AI. Saverin also noted that the news of DeepSeek's capabilities should not cause companies to decelerate spending on AI infrastructure, but rather accelerate it because the return on investment per dollar is higher.
Transcript (22 segments)
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Host0:08
My next guest is actually the co-founder of a tiny company a few years ago and pretty big company now called Facebook, and he was the first investor also in Facebook. So this interview is very interesting, obviously, especially for those of you who can understand Portuguese, because we're going to do everything in Portuguese. Is it okay? Sure, right, okay, fantastic. So please give a warm welcome to Eduardo Saverin.
Okay, we're going to switch to English. No problem. So Edo, I'm really delighted to have you on board this year. It's really an honor, it's a big pleasure to have you here, especially because I thought that over the past weekend you had been probably celebrating like crazy, right?
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Eduardo Saverin1:58
Well, it's been an exciting week and few weeks, and actually few years really. So of course there's a celebration with the IPO, but it's really just a step in the process. So as a practical matter, nothing really has changed. The company just keeps going forward, and my life as well.
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Host2:17
Okay, that's great. When you took the decision to basically get involved in this fantastic project, did you realize that you were onto something that could potentially become humongous?
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Eduardo Saverin2:33
You could never imagine this, really. Meaning at the time we were college students and we were just building a product for ourselves. It really was we wanted to develop a system where we could have a better college experience. We wanted to be able to find students in our classes, we wanted to be able to network for jobs later, we wanted to do the typical things college students do. So never would have imagined that a product built for ourselves for our own personal use would have become one, ubiquitous right through time, now all demographics, all ages, all languages, all countries, religions, everyone is using it, and that's humbling. That's never to have been expected. For it to have been such a great financial success, taking my life savings, putting to this company and now being as large as it is, never would have expected. But really the most phenomenal thing that I would say none of us could have imagined is the real impact that it's giving to the world, right? Because we've been one of the pioneers in bringing people and technology for people to become from passive to active on the web and in technology from being anonymous to identified. Really on top of that, really helped create voice, democratizing voice, and you've seen that in how it's helped in political, charity, natural disasters like the recent Japanese tsunami, and innovation like yourselves here. These types of platforms have helped lower the capital requirements, increase the ability to distribute in a very fast way, so responding really quickly. Never would have expected to have this across the board impact.
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Host4:14
Actually, very few people know that before Facebook you had been a pretty successful entrepreneur yourself, able to make quite a significant amount of money for a student at the time. I mean it was over $300,000 if I'm not mistaken, something like that, right?
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Eduardo Saverin4:32
I'm not really sure where that comes from necessarily. What I was really pre-Facebook, I was really into chess, meteorology, science, but I was at the time president of the Harvard Investment Society, but I'm not really sure where that number comes from.
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Host4:50
Okay, but at least you had the funding that Mark didn't have at the time, and you could claim to be the very first investor with your own money in Facebook. If there were not this very first investment, there might have never been any Facebook.
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Eduardo Saverin5:07
Well, meaning of course, as you all know as well, because I'm sure a lot of you in the audience are putting your companies together, of course you need capital to some degree. In this case it was my life savings that were put together that my family and friends through times had given me, my birthday parties and other events in life. I just took everything that I had and put into this company. It's about passion. I'm sure all of you here putting your companies together would do the same thing if you really believe in your idea.
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Host5:36
So right now you're investing in plenty of companies. What are your criteria when you consider an investment in a company?
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Eduardo Saverin5:49
So the first thing to me is really about the idea that it's a game changer. So I'm really passionate, meaning Facebook has created this and other social platforms an identity system on the web, and that really can be used today to basically, you know, top down disrupt a lot of verticals in a lot of industries. So the first thing is that it's a big idea, but the second and most important is a team and it's about passion. I'm not investing today, you know, I don't have outside investors, limited partners, it's my own money, and really for sort of my life I want to be working with people that are truly passionate about what they're doing and the idea and what they're going for is huge and is transformative and will create a real impact on the world. So big picture, that's what I look for.
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Host6:35
How many companies have you been investing in so far?
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Eduardo Saverin6:40
I don't know if I know the exact number, but I've done plenty of them and they focus from seed stage investment to sort of series A where they're between, you know, two to five million series A, and I've done growth stage, but really sort of my focus today is more on that series A, seed type round.
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Host6:59
So how many game changer companies in your mind? I mean how many new next Facebook do you have in your portfolio? I don't know if you can share this information with us, we're probably pretty interested in knowing that.
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Eduardo Saverin7:12
I hope every single one of them will be a game changer, but there's a lot of companies that I invested in that I'm very, very passionate and very excited about. I'll give you some examples. One of them is Jumio, which is actually trying to transform the payment space. The idea here is, which I think is quite critical, is we're going across a lot of platforms today. It's not just about the PC, it's about the mobile phone, and being able to transact is quite critical for the monetization of mobile and all these other types of ideas coming out. So Jumio is basically taking any cell phone worldwide and turning it into a credit card swiper, and it does this without any hardware. You'd see companies like Square, you actually have a dongle that you have to put there, just doing this with the camera as is. But they're also going further into identification of IDs as well. But big picture, the reason this company's exciting is the growth that it's gone through is just phenomenal. It's actually grown a lot faster than I've seen any Facebook in the beginning from a fundamental perspective. I think it's been announced I invested in the company pre-product, and today it launched about, at this point about nine months ago, it's already announced that it's about 100 million revenue run rate, highly profitable. It brought in cash from Andreessen at about $25 million worth of it, Citibank recently, so it's been a very high scaling company. So from a company perspective as well, it's been very exciting.
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Host8:42
So as you know we're both citizens of the world. So besides the US, which are the most interesting marketplaces right now for you to invest? There's probably Brazil, I would guess, maybe China also?
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Eduardo Saverin8:59
Yeah, so I'm really excited about global investments. I'm not really looking at country-specific type ideas to just, you know, internationalize something to that particular country. I'm looking at things that are overall disruptive globally. So right now I'm actually living out here in Asia. I moved to Singapore about three years ago, and one of the reasons is I find this market quite exciting and I'm here learning about the market. I didn't come here with sort of some preconceived notion that I would know what was going on here, just learning and starting to invest in the region. So one of the markets of interest clearly is Asia. If you look at the growth of the internet and mobile phone, it's huge. In terms of the market share, Brazil and other emerging economies are of extreme interest as well.
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Host9:46
So if I am an entrepreneur and I'm looking for money and I'm looking for having Eduardo Saverin on board, what should they do?
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Eduardo Saverin10:00
It's all about being passionate. So for me today I don't have a formal vehicle yet to invest, I'm just investing personally. Later there might be announcements, but nothing to say today. But to reach out to me, and things that I look for are companies that are transformative, you have to be very passionate, and really be hitting a huge market as I was saying before. So it's all about that, I don't know how to describe it.
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Host10:34
Okay, Edo, if you have an announcement you should definitely do it. You know, China is a great place to do that. We have over two million people watching us live online, so feel free.
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Eduardo Saverin10:45
Thank you for having me here.
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Host10:49
All right, thank you so much.