Peter Thiel recounts the most important moment in the history of Facebook

“The most important moment in the history of the company was in July of 2006 when Yahoo offered us a billion dollars. Zuckerberg was 22 at the time, and he owned a quarter of the company. It was just a college site. We had maybe $35 million in revenues, no profits, and so we had a board meeting.”

That Monday morning, Zuckerberg started off the meeting saying:

“Well, this is a formality. Obviously we’re going to turn this down.”

Thiel and the other investors on the board urged Mark to think it through a little bit more:

“Mark, you’d make a quarter of a billion dollars. There’s a lot you could do with this money.”

Mark responded:

“Well, I don’t know what I’d do with the money. I’d probably just start another social networking site, but I kind of like the one I have, so why would I get rid of it?”

Ultimately Mark was able to convince the board not to sell Facebook to Yahoo by convincing them that there was a whole set of products that Facebook was planning to build that Yahoo was not valuing properly.

Thiel reflects:

“And he was right. The future is never valued in these things.”

Full video: Forbes “How To Build The Next Billion Dollar Startup | Forbes“ (Oct 2014)