Early on, Facebook manually parsed every school's course catalog before launching there. Dustin Moskovitz argued they could skip it to move faster; Mark insisted the quality drop was unacceptable, even though in retrospect it may not have changed the outcome.
Key highlight
"There's the famous 80/20 rule where you get 80% of the benefit by doing 20% of the work, but you can't just 80/20 everything. There have to be certain things that you are just the best at and that you go way further than anyone else on."
Highlights (4)
The manual parsing work "set this tone where there's a lot of clean data on Facebook, you can rely on it, it feels like a college-specific thing—which was valuable early on for setting the culture."
Quality bars are cultural artifacts. The debate with Dustin wasn't really about course catalogs—it was "a really long debate about what quality meant for us and the community that we wanted to establish."
Pick the dimensions where you refuse to compromise. "There have to be certain things that you are just the best at and that you go way further than anyone else on to establish this quality bar and have your product be the best thing that's out there."
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