Do you know when Facebook hit a rough patch in its toddler days, Zuckerberg flew to India, visited a temple, and spent almost a month traveling around the country?
At a townhall with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Mark Zuckerberg revealed a new historical fact about one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable companies.
During Facebook’s early, darker days, when Zuckerberg was fielding buyout offers amidst tough competition, Steve Jobs told him to visit a temple in India, where the Apple co-founder had also experienced life-changing spiritual reflection.
“Early on in our history when things weren’t really going well – we had hit a tough patch and a lot of people wanted to buy Facebook – I went and I met with Steve Jobs and he said that to reconnect with what I believed was the mission of the company, I should go visit this temple in India that he had gone to early in the evolution of Apple, when he was thinking about what he wanted his vision of the future to be,” Zuckerberg explained on stage Sunday morning, as he hosted India Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a town-hall style Q&A.
So, Zuckerberg flew to India, visited the temple, and spent almost a month traveling around the country. He says that seeing the way that people connected made him feel that the world would be much better if everyone had a stronger ability to connect.
“That reinforced to me the importance of what we were doing, and that is something I will always remember,” Zuckerberg says.
Facebook, of course, pushed through its rough patch, and Zuckerberg rejected acquisition offers, growing the site from a dorm-room experiment into one of the largest tech companies in the world. Today in India, where millions of people are coming online for the first time, it’s often one of the first websites people experience thanks to the efforts of Internet.org, a Facebook-led initiative to give people access to certain websites for free.
“India is very important to the history of our company,” Zuckerberg said.