Ben Silbermann Quotes

Our management team strongly believes that the key opportunity of our business does not only come from just the increase in terms of number of users but also how we continue to enhance the value of our platform for our users.

Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers.

Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn't really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn't until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.

Bebo has an opportunity to prove its products and services. Bebo plays in a very competitive space; it has big market share in specific countries. An AIM profile vs. a Bebo profile are very different experiences.

I don't think Yahoo can be Facebook tomorrow, and don't think Yahoo wants to be Facebook.

Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It's hard to break into a network once it's formed.

It's not 100 per cent clear to me what's working about Snapchat.

Frankly, the hardest pieces of feedback we got in the U.S. was, 'I would love if more of our friends were on Path. It's hard to get them to join.'

Hotmail went from zero to 12 million users with zero marketing steps. Not a penny was spent on sales and marketing, which was astounding. It showed us the power of the network effect.

If you look at companies with upside potential, Twitter's right there. They've established a brand in a world where it's extremely difficult to establish a brand. It's a global brand, people recognize it, people want to let you know what their Twitter handles are, etc.

I think there are a lot more people that don't use Pinterest in the world than do use it, so for most people, that first experience is really, really important. I think feeling really close and in touch with that first user experience is pretty basic to making it better every day.

I do believe that Instagram has put a stake in the ground and we're growing more quickly than anyone. Is there something in there we could do to make it a multi-billion dollar business? I think we can figure out something along the way.

Something like Pinterest would scare the hell out of me. With $5 billion valuation - regardless how sound those numbers are - wouldn't be one that I would start, given what I would consider the risk of failure.

We're not interested in bombarding our users with, 'Hey, play this game, play this game, play this game.' It gets annoying, it gets in the way of messaging, and it gets in the way of staying in touch with people who are important to you.

It feels like my hard work has paid off, but at the same time, I still have the impostor, you know, syndrome. I still feel like I'm going to wake up, and everybody's going to see me for the hack I am.

As long as our user base continues to grow, at some point it will have critical mass, and at some point it will tip, and at some point, people will just have to use WhatsApp because their friends are using WhatsApp.

I think the rise of A.I. is bigger than the rise of mobile. Large companies are sometimes as worried about startups as startups are about large companies. Ultimately, it will be about who delivers the best service or product.

I've always been very competitive, and a part of that is pushing your boundaries - taking a risk and being able to live with the loss that comes with taking a risk.

Apple is a failure because they missed social? Nobody would say that, because they are having great success.

There's a blizzard of metrics that social sites and messaging sites put out there.

I think the private sector for the most part, the vast majority of employers in America, they wake up in the morning, and they have a bottom line. This is how much they make, this is how much their expenses are; they certainly need to break even just to stay in business, and they need to make a profit in order to survive long-term.

I can't imagine that companies are uninteresting if they don't have a billion users. But I do believe, to have mass scale, you have to be in the many-hundreds-of-millions-of-users range, and there are not that many companies that get there.

The biggest challenge to thriving in the marketplace is identifying the strategic moves that will keep us ahead of the competition.

Can anyone create an enduring business on the Web, where it's easy to build new companies, and when survival depends on the whims of fickle users? The big lesson of 'Digg' may be simply this: if someone offers you a ridiculous amount of money for a company that wasn't that hard to build, don't think twice. Take the money and run.

It's like, 'How can I reverse engineer what it takes to gain followers on a platform?' And I'm curious about how it works. And I'm the same way with people. I'm curious about what makes them tick.