Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: “Is this going to destroy the company? If not, let them test it.”

When it comes to launching your product, imperfect is perfect. Sometimes, the most important question you can ask isn't, “Is this good enough?” Rather, you can emulate Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and ask, “Is this going to destroy the company? If not, then let them test it!”

That’s just one of the many counter-intuitive, genius-level lessons Mark casually provides in today’s episode of the Masters of Scale podcast (released the day before Mark gives his first Harvard commencement speech). I sat down with Mark for a rare 90-minute interview and I learned a few things I never knew about him — from the first social network he ever launched (that would be ZuckNet), to the long bus ride from school that started him thinking about online social behavior, to one of his proudest accomplishments (the testing framework that lets Facebook keep innovating).

I’ve long believed that if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late. This is one of the secrets behind successful blitzscaling, and Mark embodies this approach. He explains how they’re able to run 10,000 versions of Facebook at any given time, and surprise guest Sheryl Sandberg explains why — when a summer intern accidentally crashed the entire Facebook website for half an hour — they hired him, instead of firing him (That intern certainly lived up to Facebook's original mantra of "move fast and break things").

I’d love to hear your own experiences of moving fast and breaking things. What embarrassing early effort allowed you to succeed in the long run?

Please write a short post on LinkedIn to engage the wider community. Tag your post #mastersofscale so I can find it. And if you’d like, Tweet it at me (@ReidHoffman) and @MastersOfScale. The producers of the show and I will be on the lookout for the best examples to feature in the future!

P.S. Congratulations to Mark and the Harvard class of 2017. Enjoy commencement on Thursday!