Highlights Of Mark Zuckerberg’s First Post-IPO Interview At TechCrunch Disrupt

Clearly one of the most anticipated segments of TechCrunch Disrupt, which enters its third and final day today in San Francisco, was a one-on-one interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg - the first time the young tech billionaire has gone on record since his company’s IPO back in mid-May. Zuckerberg addressed the jam-packed audience on topics regarding his company’s questionable performance on Wall Street, the future of the Facebook Phone, and a number of other items surrounding the future of the social network.

Zuckerberg considered his company’s IPO in May to be “disappointing”, saying that “good enough is never good enough” for he and his team, and that they will continue to move forward building a superior experience for their users by learning from their mistakes. “What we have now is not as good as it can be,” he said.

Zuckerberg points out that his company made a developmental error by relying too heavily on HTML5.

“The biggest mistake we have made as company was relying too heavily on HTML5 [for mobile], rather than native code,” he said. “Native is how we will be moving forward with our iOS and Android apps."

Zuckerberg was also quick to eliminate any inclination that his company is working on a Facebook Phone.

“It’s always been the wrong strategy for us,” he told the packed San Francisco Design Center. “Let’s say we build a phone – we’re not, but if we did, we could maybe get 10 or 20 million people to use it… that doesn’t move the needle for us.”

The young tech billionaire also made it very clear that the company will continue to place mobile at the forefront of all strategy and development initiatives.

“On mobile, there will be more users and we will make more money than we do on desktop," he said. “There is no room for ads on mobile, we'll have to find a way to integrate ads on our platform."

He then mentioned that mobile web views for Facebook exceed native iOS and Android combined and then proudly stated, "Now we are a mobile company - all the code we are writing is mobile." Zuckerberg also says that Facebook is working on a natural language query system to function as social search.

“Search is interesting. We do over a billion queries a day and we're not even trying."

Lastly, Zuckerberg was asked if he was still having fun:

"Yes, but for me it's not really about fun though, it's about the mission,” he replied. “We go through these waves. And there are times when people think everything we do in the world is awesome, and then there are times when people are really pessimistic. I would rather be in the cycle when people underestimate us, because I would rather be underestimated. Then we can really excite and amaze people."

Some more notable quotes taken from the Zuckerberg interview:

"We don't build services to make money, we make money to build better services."

"Building a mission and building a business goes hand in hand."

"Instagram is great, but everything we wanted to achieve we can do better together, as one company. We have no agenda for Instagram besides helping them grow... no specific need for infrastructure integration.”

"I do everything on my phone, I rarely uses desktop now. That's the future."

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Hisham Dahud is a Senior Analyst for Hypebot.com. Additionally, he is the head of Business Development for Fame House and an independent musician. Follow him on Twitter: @HishamDahud