"Working with a lot of people at the same time is a task. I really like making stuff and getting stuff done. One of the things I really liked about Facebook was that I could always move so quickly. I wrote the original application in, like, nine days at the end of January"
About this Quote
Speed is Zuckerberg's preferred morality, dressed up as personality. He frames collaboration as friction - "a task" - and positions solitary making as the pure, almost virtuous act: building, shipping, moving. The subtext is a familiar Silicon Valley creed: process is for people who can't code, and deliberation is just procrastination with nicer stationery.
That "nine days" detail isn't an accident. It's a founder myth in miniature, a brag that sounds casual because it's meant to. The offhand "like" and the compressed timeline work as status signals: he isn't merely competent, he's dangerous in the way a fast scaler is dangerous - able to outrun oversight, rivals, even his own second thoughts. It's the rhetoric of inevitability. If something can be built that quickly, the implication goes, it was destined to exist; asking whether it should exist becomes quaint.
Context matters: Facebook's early origin story is routinely told as dorm-room spontaneity, a scrappy sprint that beat slower institutions. This quote keeps that legend intact while quietly justifying the platform's later culture of relentless iteration. "Move fast" becomes not just an engineering preference but a governance strategy: if you treat coordination as a drag and speed as identity, you end up with products that ship before anyone has agreed on the consequences.
The line reads like efficiency talk, but it's really power talk. The person who moves fastest sets the terms everyone else has to live with.
That "nine days" detail isn't an accident. It's a founder myth in miniature, a brag that sounds casual because it's meant to. The offhand "like" and the compressed timeline work as status signals: he isn't merely competent, he's dangerous in the way a fast scaler is dangerous - able to outrun oversight, rivals, even his own second thoughts. It's the rhetoric of inevitability. If something can be built that quickly, the implication goes, it was destined to exist; asking whether it should exist becomes quaint.
Context matters: Facebook's early origin story is routinely told as dorm-room spontaneity, a scrappy sprint that beat slower institutions. This quote keeps that legend intact while quietly justifying the platform's later culture of relentless iteration. "Move fast" becomes not just an engineering preference but a governance strategy: if you treat coordination as a drag and speed as identity, you end up with products that ship before anyone has agreed on the consequences.
The line reads like efficiency talk, but it's really power talk. The person who moves fastest sets the terms everyone else has to live with.
Quote Details
| Topic | Startup |
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