Interest can stand in for a plan, up to a point
Facebook grew from a dormitory project without a grand design. Its rollout was still planned carefully, one campus at a time, and that detail matters.
If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.
Facebook started in February 2004 as a directory for Harvard students, written in a dormitory by a sophomore who had already built a string of side projects for fun, including a music player and a tool for picking courses. Nothing in its first months resembled a strategy for connecting the world. Within a few weeks it had opened to students at Columbia, Stanford and Yale, and by that summer its founders had moved to Palo Alto to keep up with demand.
The line from Zuckerberg circulated widely in late 2010, the year a film about Facebook’s early days came out; its original setting has not been traced. It describes the path above fairly. Interest in the work kept him building, and the building produced the next step without a map.
The mechanism is worth spelling out, because it is not magic. Someone who enjoys a project keeps iterating on it long after a person working to a plan would have stopped to evaluate. Each iteration exposes something about users that no plan could have predicted. Over time those small discoveries add up to a direction, and the direction looks, in hindsight, like a plan.
Two caveats keep the line honest. The first is that Facebook’s growth was not unplanned in the narrow sense. It opened college by college, and it paced those openings to what its servers could handle. That is a plan, just not a master plan. The short horizon was the point: the next campus, not the next decade.
The second is money. Working on what one likes is easier when someone else is paying for the servers, and Facebook took outside investment within months of moving west. Many people who follow their interests without a plan run out of savings before the interest pays off. For them, having no plan simply means having no warning.
The line also fits some businesses better than others. Web software can be changed daily, so learning by building is cheap. A company that needs a factory or a drug approval cannot discover its plan by doing, because the first step commits years and large sums before any user appears. Those founders need the master plan the line says to skip.
A fair reading keeps the part about interest and drops the part about plans. Interest is what sustains the many small experiments a young product needs. A short plan, a few steps ahead and revised often, keeps those experiments pointed somewhere.