Category: Business Process Outsourcing

Time Code: 0:00:08.3
[Theme music]
David Kirkpatrick: Hello. I’m David Kirkpatrick. I run something called “Techonomy Conference” which is a place where technology leaders come together with business and government leaders to talk about how technology is changing everything. Conference happens in November, south of San Francisco.
Now, I met Mark Zuckerberg in 2006 when he was 22 years old and Facebook had nine million users. I was so impressed with him from that very first meeting and impressed with his long term vision and the scope of his thinking that I ended up writing a book called “The Facebook Effect” which by the way is published in both Spanish and Catalan.
And now Facebook has 1.2 billion users. So from September of 2006, 9 million, today, 1.2 billion. It’s the largest communication service of any type that’s ever existed.
There’s one movie that portray Mark as an anxious, angry and vindictive person. But that is not the way I have ever found him. In fact it’s actually his sincerity and his earnestness that most impresses me. He thinks a lot about how his company is changing the world for the better. And I think, when you hear him talk you’re going to understand what I mean.
So, Mark, please come out and join me.
Okay, Mark. So, clearly there’s one topic that we have to start with. It’s been on everybody’s lips for the last week or so. You bought WhatsApp for $19 billion which all of us, once we got over, you know, our shock at that, you know, some of us feel like we understand it. But tell us here at the Mobile World Congress, which is really the world’s major gathering of mobile communications – which is an industry that WhatsApp is a big part of, why did you do it and what does it mean?
Mark Zuckerberg: Well, WhatsApp is a great company and it’s, it’s a great fit for us. Already almost half a billion people love using WhatsApp for messaging. And it’s the most engaging app that we’ve ever seen exist on mobile by far – that’s 70% of people who use WhatsApp use it every day – which kind of blows away everything else that’s out there.
What we see is that WhatsApp is on a path to connecting more than a billion people. And there are very few services in the world that can reach that level. And they’re all incredibly valuable.So, when we have the opportunity to be a part of his journey, I was just really excited to take you up on that and to help him realize his dream of connecting a lot more people.

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