TechinAsia 2016 Singapore Eduardo Saverin

One of the key things that I bring, it's also very important to be there for them, to help them curate their brand, their story. And this is not just outward-facing brand, but it's really the internal story: what are you building, what are you trying to achieve? This really enables the team to trust you, to create a consistent story of where you're going, enables your customers, your clients to also trust you, and allows you to focus when you have a very strong sense of what your path is as well. And it's important to curate that upfront, all the way to things that are more common, but it's quite critical to operational advice, to how to best manage your capital, when should you fundraise, what valuation should you fundraise at, should you fundraise even though you might not need money given the market cycles. And most importantly, the go-to-market strategy across the board. If you look at startups, the key number one point of failure is go-to-market. You can build phenomenal technology, but can you get enough people to utilize it or pay for it? And that's a focal area where, as I described before, one of my emphases today is opening the eyes of entrepreneurs to partnering with very large businesses as a path to accelerate their growth. It's something clearly during my early Facebook days that we did fine without doing. And frankly, I understand that a lot of entrepreneurs might not naturally gravitate towards working with CEOs of global 500 companies, and the DNA match might not be there at the surface. But my viewpoint is that's an example of a path in certain regulated industries and very traditional verticals that might end up proving very successful. But you need to be there to help the entrepreneur and hold their hands.

Absolutely. I mean, talking about Facebook, I'm always humbled by where the company is today and the type of impact that it really has made on the world by democratizing voice and innovation. It can be quite distracting sometimes, it can be distracting as well, it could be an overpowering, always in-your-face thing if you want it to be. But we never could have imagined from our dorm rooms where this would have taken, which drives really one of the key early lessons and learnings from the experience. The first one is really about product-market fit. We were college students at the time and we were building a product to serve ourselves, so we could truly listen to our customers. We were our customers initially, especially in the very early days. And we were also doing something very simple. It's very important for you to start with a simple concept as well, which was basically taking a physical handbook called the Facebook, particularly at Harvard at that time, they had a physical printed book for the freshman class. I actually happened to have not existed because I missed the picture submission deadline, so I wasn't even part technically of the college on that basis. Just taking that simple Facebook and digitizing it and transferring the ownership of the profile to the students, which basically meant that I existed and people could actually know that I'm a student there if they wanted to reach me. And second, it could make sure that as an example, people that hated that first-day photo that they took didn't have to live with it for all four years of their college time. So we empowered students in that way. But this product-market fit enabled us to grow, and in particular, enabled us to create a community that had real trust from the get-go. One of the key innovations for Facebook is really building the first real identity community at scale. And the way we did that was by aggregating small, tight-knit communities. And the innovation was very simple: .edu address to authenticate and replicate a physical written notebook. So the product-market fit stuck with us. And as we went from colleges to high school students to work networks and eventually to the public, this philosophy remained. But not because we were our users across the board, across all demographics, across all religions, languages, etc., but because we were listening to them through data analysis, through fast iteration, and through A/B testing. So we always remained listeners, be it because we were our own consumers or because we were deploying data analytics to assess it. And that was, I would say, a really critical early point for Facebook. But the second one was our decision to not build everything ourselves but open up to the world, which was a realization that not all the smartest people worked for us. At that time, in fact, very few people worked for us. And we had built a key asset, which was the social graph and eventually the interest graph, which is basically the connections of individuals with other individuals and connections of individuals with things of interest. That was valuable for us, but our users would get the most benefit of anyone from the world to deploy their application on top of the platform. And that key decision enabled us to have staying power for the long term.