Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook's approach to building product, Steve Jobs on agency, and Amazon's first job posting

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook's approach to building product

“Phase one is to build a thing that sparks some joy and that people appreciate. Then from there, you want to get to something that is retentive, so that people who have a good experience with the thing come back and want to keep using it.

Those two things are not always the same. There are a lot of things that people think are awesome but may not always come back to. I think some of what people are seeing now around ChatGPT is part of that. This level of AI is like a miracle. It’s awesome. But that doesn’t mean that everyone is going to have a use case every week.

So first is creating the spark. Second is creating retention. Then once you have retention, you can start encouraging more people to join. If people aren’t going to be retained by it, why would you ask people to go sign up for something?

So step one is spark. Step two is retention. Step three is growth and scaling the community. And only at that point is step four, which is monetization.

We take a while to go through all those.”

Source: Mark Zuckerberg on The Verge

2: Steve Jobs on agency

“When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

But life—that’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know, if you push in, something will pop out the other side—that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It's to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, because it’s kind of messed up in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.“

Source: Steve Jobs Secrets of Life

3: Amazon’s first job posting

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

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