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Mark Zuckerberg: You Can't 80/20 Everything

By Mark Zuckerberg · Product & Building · 1 min read

The famous 80/20 rule — you get 80% of the benefit from 20% of the work. But you can't 80/20 everything. There have to be certain things that you are just the best at.

Key Points

Zuckerberg and Moskovitz manually parsed course catalogs for every school they launched at
Dustin wanted to skip it to expand faster. Zuckerberg said no — it set the quality bar.
You can't 80/20 everything. There have to be certain things you go way further on than anyone else.

You can't just 80/20 everything. There have to be certain things that you are the best at — that you go way further than anyone else.

The Manual Work

Zuckerberg: We had to do some manual work for every school we released Facebook at. We parsed the course catalogs to make sure the data was clean. Dustin was like — we could expand so much faster if we didn't have to have course catalogs for each school.

We had this really long debate about what quality meant for us, the community we wanted to establish, the culture of it.

Dustin said we'd expand faster without course catalogs. We debated what quality meant for us.

Clean Data Set the Tone

Zuckerberg: In retrospect, maybe it wouldn't have had a huge difference on how things played out. But it definitely set this tone — there's a lot of clean data on Facebook. You can rely on it. It feels like a college-specific thing. That was valuable early on for setting the culture.

It set the tone. A lot of clean data. You can rely on it. Valuable for setting the culture.

You Can't 80/20 Everything

Zuckerberg: There's the famous 80/20 rule — you get 80% of the benefit from 20% of the work. But you can't just 80/20 everything. There have to be certain things that you are the best at. That you go way further than anyone else to establish this quality bar and have your product be the best thing out there.

Whether we had to do that specific one or something else — we had to do enough of those things, or else we just wouldn't have been the best service out there.

You can't 80/20 everything. There have to be things you go way further on than anyone else.