Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama on Entrepreneurship | Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2016

Lesson 1Entrepreneurship begins with purpose

Well, it's really inspiring to be here with so many great entrepreneurs and to hear about all the work that you're doing, and it's an honor. So thanks for having me. To me, entrepreneurship is about creating change, not just creating companies. And the most effective entrepreneurs who I've met care deeply about some mission and some change that they're trying to create. And often they don't even start because they're trying to create a company. And that's how I think about my connection to all of us here, is when I was getting started, I cared deeply about giving everyone a voice and giving the people the tools to share everything that they cared about, and bringing a community together. And it started small in one university. And I didn't think it was going to be company at the time. As a matter of fact, I was pretty convinced that at some point someone would build something like this for the world, but I thought that that would be some other company that already had thousands of engineers and was used to building stuff for hundreds of millions of people around the world. And what ended up happening was that no one built it, so we just kind of kept on going. People said at each step along the way, what you're doing, all right, maybe college students like it, but no one else is going to like it and there's not going to be any money in doing this. So you only really do it if you care, if you're passionate about doing it. And then it started growing, and people said it would be fad and it would never be a good business. But you keep going because you care, not because you're trying to create a business. And then there's the shift to mobile where people thought that it wouldn't be a sustainable business. And through each of these things, the entrepreneurs who I think build things that last for a long time keep going because they care fundamentally about the change that they're trying to create in the world. And they're not in it just to build a company. And I carry that with me today. So today we live in a world with more than 7 billion people, but more than 4 billion of us are not on the Internet. And we talk about having an equal opportunity to be able to create a change in the world, and I think that's a really hard thing to do if you don't have access to some of the basic infrastructure and technical tools that are necessary to build these kinds of technical products. So I kind of think about what we're doing today very similarly to how I thought about where we were at the beginning. I get people all the time who come to me and say, all right, well, you're investing billions of dollars in trying to put Internet connectivity in places where we don't get paid for it. It's not something that we'll make any money from for a very long period of time, if it works out. But it's this deep belief that you're trying to make a change. You're trying to connect people in the world. And I really do believe that if you do something good and if you help people out, then eventually some portion of that good will come back to you. And you may not know upfront what it's going to be, but that's just been the guiding principle for me in the work that we've done. And I hope that some of the work that we do can play a role in empowering you and so many more entrepreneurs to build the next great companies. Sure. Well, we have a developer program all over the world, where we go around, and it's called FbStart. And we give entrepreneurs free access to tools and some of them, a lot of the tools that people can use are free from Facebook and other places. But in order to help get started with businesses, we give to different companies tens of thousands of dollars' worth of Facebook tools to get started. But it's also important to help people learn how to use the tools, so we do these entrepreneurship workshops around the world for those people who are starting to create technical companies, but also for small businesses, which are I think an important part, maybe less the focus of this summit, but that's a huge part of what we try to do around the world, and help people get on the Internet and connect with people that they're trying to sell their products to. And we have more than 50 million small business pages that are on Facebook, and a large number of them use it as their primary presence for communicating with people and attracting new customers. So that's a pretty good basic tool that's out there. The biggest thing that I'm personally focused on is connectivity, though. I mean, I think for you guys, and we talked about this a little bit backstage, I think you're mostly in places that have reasonable connectivity. I mean, you were talking about how sometimes when you go home it's not so good, but in general, I think for a whole other big population, wave of folks, this really is a blocking factor. If you grew up and you never used a computer or you've never had access to the Internet, it's often hard to even imagine what you're missing out on. And this is a local problem, but I think we need to do a better job of empowering folks in different countries to be able to spread connectivity. This isn't something that the U.S. or some American company can come in and do. In the places where it's worked it's been in partnership with local companies and local entrepreneurs and local governments. And that's also something that I'd love you guys' advice on how you think we could be doing a better job of spreading connectivity to enable not just you guys, but other entrepreneurs who haven't even had the opportunities that you've had to build things as well.