Facebook Co-Founder Mark Zuckerberg stopped by the Y Combinator's Startup School for a rare interview over the weekend, and pretty much everything he had to say is of value to entrepreneurs starting out today.
One of the biggest things he hammered on, though, was why you don't need to move to Silicon Valley to start a tech-based company. In fact, Zuckerberg says if he were starting Facebook today, he'd have stayed in Boston.
But still, he has no regrets: He also predicts if he had stayed in Boston back when Facebook actually started, it probably would've crumbled. "I knew nothing, so I had to be out here," Zuckerberg said. "If you're a beginner and you don't know anything about this stuff, it's actually an excellent place to be because a lot of the stuff that you wouldn't understand how to do on your own, like I didn't, I could just get help from a lot of other people."
Regardless of where your business is located, though, Zuckerberg says one of the biggest mistakes you can make is "mess[ing] up by moving too slowly and trying to be too precise... in a world that's changing really quickly, the only strategy where you're guaranteed to fail is not taking any risks and not changing anything. [But] you have to take risks."
To clarify, those should be calculated risks, but his point is that you should take risks, period. "The people who are making the product decisions [should] also understand all the technical trade-offs," he added.
Really, all of it's good stuff. Check out the video of his interview over at justin.tv. Zuckerberg's section starts around the 44-minute mark.
