Mark Zuckerberg: if I set up Facebook now I wouldn't choose Silicon Valley

'Silicon Valley is a little short-term focused and that bothers me,' says founder of social networking site

Mark Zuckerberg knows that this time next year Facebook will be a public company, or preparing itself for a blockbuster public offering.
In a rare interview this weekend, the 27-year-old founder of the social networking site spoke candidly about culture, commitment and clingers-on at Silicon Valley's hottest ticket.
Most interestingly, Zuckerberg said he would have bypassed the Valley if he were that 21-year-old Harvard student starting Facebook tomorrow. "If I were starting now I would do things very differently," he told Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingstone in the interview.
"I didn't know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it's not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me."
It was here that Young Zuck got nostalgic. Harking back to the sophomore summer of 2004 when he moved into that house in the Valley, Zuckerberg dismissed The Social Network's portrait of it as a party den beset with booze and attractive Californians, but added that Facebook was only months away from feeling like a proper company.
"It was not like in the movie, there was no drinking. We all just lived in a house, iterated, kept going," he said. "It wasn't until we got our first office in Palo Alto that things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company."
You get the impression that the next 12 months for Zuckerberg are going to be a specific form of hell. Before the end of this year, he will shift the company's entire Palo Alto operation – currently split between two offices, one for developers and another for the corporate types – to one huge campus in nearby Menlo Park. In April, Facebook will be forced by regulators to report its first set of financials, and within months Zuckerberg will be off to tout the company around Wall Street. And if the reports are accurate, Facebook will go public with a value of about $70bn before the end of 2012. That's some big corporate change.
What does Zuckerberg make of all this? "If you go through some big corporate change, it's just not going to be the same," he told Livingstone, referring to the rejected Yahoo bid in 2006. "If we sold to Yahoo, they would have done something different, if you want to continue your vision of the company, then don't sell because there's inevitably going to be some change."

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