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21-Year-Old Zuckerberg: Facebook Does 400 Million Page Views With 50 People. Google Needs 5,000.

By Mark Zuckerberg · Founder Stories · 1 min read

Mark Zuckerberg wasn't worried about Google. He had 50 employees doing more page views than Google's 5,000.

Key Points

Technology is so cheap now that $100/month servers can scale to 300K users
Google: 250M page views, thousands of machines, 5,000 people. Facebook: 400M page views, hundreds of machines, 50 people.
As technology gets cheaper, the leverage shifts to people — hire the smartest ones
Small companies are nimble. Smart people plus zero bureaucracy equals speed.

Google does 250 million page views a day with 5,000 employees. Facebook does 400 million with 50.

The Leverage Gap

In 2005, a 21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg wasn't worried about Google. Here's why. Google served 250 million page views a day. They had hundreds of thousands of machines and 5,000 employees.

Facebook served 400 million page views a day. With hundreds of machines. And 50 employees. The math spoke for itself.

"At no point in the past could you leverage such a small amount of money to touch people in the way you can today."

Smart People Are the Only Thing That Matters

As technology gets cheaper, the leverage point shifts to people. Servers are commodity. Code is commodity. The only thing that's not commodity is intelligence.

Zuckerberg's strategy was simple. Stay small. Stay fast. Hire the smartest people you can find. Zero bureaucracy. Let them build cool things. A 50-person company with brilliant engineers will outrun a 5,000-person company with meetings.

"As technology becomes more generic and less expensive, the leverage point becomes the people. It's really important to get the most intelligent people."