Move Fast And Break Things: Mike Shropefer on Facebook's culture of innovation

Move fast and break things. Fail Harder. What would you do if you weren't afraid?

Facebook is attempting to innovate faster as it grows larger, rather than become a lumbering giant, overtaken by younger, more nimble startups.  Mike Schroepfer showed us some unexpected ways that Facebook keeps up it's unusual 'culture of innovation'.  Amongst them:

• Walls plastered with mottos like "move fast and break things" and "fail harder."
• Requiring every new engineering recruit to make a change to the live site within one week of starting.
• Regular 24-hour "Hackathons" where everyone pulls an all-nighter on anything they want to do.  And not just engineers-- the legal team, CEO and marketeers will be there, eating pizza at 3 in the morning.

On the same day that Facebook announced its new seamless messaging service, Schroepfer told us that the phenomenal growth of Facebook isn't most impressive when you look at numbers of users, or even time spent on the site, but rather in how many interactions people are having-- the sheer amount of photos, videos, messages and status updates people share via Facebook truly is staggering, and growing ever more quickly.

Yes, there have been 'user revolts' and privacy concerns, but Schroepfer said that while people may complain about a new feature, the data doesn't lie.  In other words, while there may be small vocal opposition to a new feature, if their analytics show a huge rate of uptake, then clearly people are using the feature and finding it useful.  And while Facebook gets slack every now and then for it's approach to privacy, Schroepfer countered saying that Facebook probably offers you more control and more detailed control of your privacy settings than any other site or service.

And who does he see as Facebook's competitor?  Well, there's always Google....

Check out Mike's talk here below: