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Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, 'Good job, great quarter '... And I'll say, 'Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago. I'm working on a quarter that'll happen in 2021 right now.'

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We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served - as shareholders and in all other ways - by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.

Those quarterly results were fully baked three years ago. So today I'm working on a quarter that will happen in 2020, not next quarter. Next quarter is done already and it's probably been done for a couple years.

It's not easy to work here, but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about.

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

I actually remember very specifically the night that I launched Facebook at Harvard. I used to go out to get pizza with a friend who I did all my computer science homework with. And I remember talking to him and saying I am so happy we have this at Harvard because now our community can be connected but one day someone is going to build this for the world.

In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it and the board tried to fire me and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because I hadn't done a good job communicating. I don't want to blame them. I hadn't done a good job communicating the long-term vision because I didn't, I wasn't thinking about that at the time.