On the Call: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook released its first earnings report as a public company on Thursday, and while the results matched Wall Street’s expectations, investors sent its stock sharply lower amid worries about revenue growth and other issues.

In a conference call to discuss the results CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered an analyst’s question about people’s use of Facebook and about the size of Facebook’s workforce.

QUESTION: Have you seen any trends in terms of engagement with the younger cohorts? Anything that indicates a decline in engagement? And the broadly, how do you think about the size of the company, Facebook relative to other leaders in the technology space, runs pretty thin. You’ve tried to have a pretty lean organization. As you think about the three elements or the three broad growth areas for the company in the future, do you think you — is there any change in your thinking about how big the company physically needs to be?

ANSWER: So just to take the first one first, I think what we’re seeing is pretty steady growth and engagement in all these cohorts, including the younger ones. So really nothing out of line with the overall metrics there. On your second question about the overall size of the company, we’ve always been significantly smaller per employee compared to the number of people who we serve in the world, so it’s really baked into the company that we have to build systems and software that take into account the leverage that employees here have, and that’s actually one of the reasons why a lot of people love working here and one of the biggest reasons why people cite for wanting to join the company and staying here.

So it’s also effective as strategy, right? I mentioned we believe that all these consumer products and maybe even more than consumer products that people use will become social over time, but we can’t build all those things ourselves so we focused on building this platform.

Over time it might make sense for us to build more of these things ourselves, but because of the scale that we’re at, we really focus on the three things that I laid out today. This shift toward mobile is incredibly important, building the highest quality applications and products is really critical, building a platform so that the million and more developers who use Facebook can build these products is the highest-leverage thing that we can do. And we think that social ads are just going to monetize much better than non-social ads as we increase the percent of our overall advertising that has social context in it.

So that’s kind of where we are and we’re basically growing by trying to find as many talented engineers as we can for the most part. But I think for the foreseeable future we’re just going to be way smaller than other companies that address significant or comparable-sized user bases.

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