♪ emily: by now, you know his story. the kid who started the social network in his harvard dorm room. grew it to 1.4 billion users. he became one of the wealthiest men in the world. but mark zuckerberg may not be done changing the world just yet. taking facebook public has only made it bigger. using billions to expand his empire into photos, messaging, even virtual reality. internet.org may his most audacious that yet featuring an , epic battle with google, drones, lasers, stratospheric hot air balloons, to bring the

internet to the farthest corners of the earth. and win billions of new users in the process. our guest today on this special edition of "studio 1.0" is facebook founder and ceo mark zuckerberg. first of all, you are a year and a half into this. tell me your vision. and tell me what inspired you to do this. mark: when people are connected, we can just do some great things. we have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, new kinds of communication. we bring people that we care about closer to us. it really makes a big difference. the internet is how we connect to the modern world. but, today, unfortunately, only a little more than 1/3 of people have any access to the internet at all. that is around 2.7 billion people. and that means 2/3 of people in the world don't have access to so that seems really off to me. there are all of these studies

that show in developing countries, more than 20% of gdp growth is driven by the internet. there have been studies that show if we connected one billion more people to the internet, 100 million more jobs would be created and more than that would be lifted out of poverty. there is this deep belief at facebook that technology needs to serve everyone. connectivity cannot just be a privilege for people in the richest countries. we believe connecting everyone in the world is the challenge of our generation. that is why we are happy to play a small role in that. emily: what do you believe has been your biggest achievement? what has been your biggest setback? what have you had to compromise on? mark: what we have learned is there are very few barriers to connectivity. they are not necessarily what you would've thought upfront. the first one is that people do not have any access to a network. it is a technical barrier. even if they had a phone and could pay for data, there was no equivalenceld be no

of a cell phone tower to have access. that's what people think about when they think about not having conductivity. there are projects like satellite and drones that we are working on to help create conductivity and technical solutions in areas where there aren't that today. that is important, but it turns out that is a small part of the problem. only about 15% of people who aren't connected are not connected because of a technical barrier. the next barrier is affordability. a lot of people who have access can afford to pay for it. the solution is to make it more efficient, make it so the work -- the network of infrastructure that operators are using is more efficient, so the apps people use consume less data, and there is a lot of work going into that. we made the facebook app on android, for example, i think it uses about five times less data than it used last year. that directly goes towards making it cheaper to use. we have made a bunch of these tools open for those to use. it turns out that the biggest hurdle is not technical or

affordability, it is the social challenge. the majority of people who aren't connected are in range of a network and can afford it, but they actually don't know why they would want to use the internet. it kind of makes sense if you about it. if you grew up and never had a computer, and you never used the internet or a computer, and someone asks if you want to buy a data plan, your response would be what's a data plan and why would i want to use this? that ends up being the biggest challenge, and one that we can have the most value by giving people some free basic services and by working with operators to help people understand what they can use the internet for to be an on-ramp for everyone. we are working on all these things. emily: facebook is a for-profit company. why call it .org? is this a nonprofit? is this charity? mark: if we were primarily focused on profits, the most reasonable thing for us to do would be to really just focus on the first billion people who are using our products. the world is not set up equally.

the first billion people who are using facebook have way more money than the rest of the world combined. so from a business perspective, it actually doesn't make a huge amount of sense for us to put the emphasis in this that we are right now. the reason why we are doing that is two things -- one is mission. we are here to help connect the world and we take that really seriously. and to some degree you can't really do that if 2/3 of the world doesn't even have access to the internet. we just turned 10 as a company, and we decided that our next 10 years, we want to take on some really big challenges in the world, like helping everyone get online. that is important for us and a lot of other internet companies and fulfilling this mission overall. over the long-term, it could be good for our company as well. if you look at it on a 10, 20, 30 year time horizon, a lot of these countries will develop and, over time, they will be important. most people do not make investments for 30 years down the line in terms of products that they are going to be building. emily: you said a year ago when

you spoke with david kirkpatrick that you couldn't construct a short-term model by which this becomes profitable. do you have a better idea now? when will this become profitable? mark: no, i don't have a better idea. the reality is that if people -- if a lot of people can't afford to pay for data access in these places, then they probably are not big ad markets. it is probably not a place where they will be particularly profitable in the near term. in fact, we will probably lose a bunch of money just because supporting facebook as a service and storing the photos and content that people want to store -- share costs money. we will probably not offset it by making much. emily: you said connectivity is a human right. you want to do good things. if that is the case, why not give access to the complete internet? why just a few specific apps? mark: it comes down to how the economics of how this works. most of the media that is consumed is rich. if you look at things like text messages, services like search or wikipedia or health or financial information, that can be delivered for relatively cheaply.

and it can often consume less than 1% of the overall infrastructure. if you are thinking about building something that operators are going to offer for free, it needs to be pretty cheap for them to do. we basically figured out a series of services that people can offer and it will still be profitable for the operators. the model we consider this to be most similar to his 911 in the u.s. even if you haven't paid for a phone plan, you can always dial 911 and, if there is a crime or health emergency or fire, you can get basic help. we think the internet should have something equivalent to this as well. if you do not have a data plan, you should have access to basic health information, basic communication tools. and it will vary from country to country. when we launched in zambia -- there, hiv is a big issue. one of the free services that the government wanted to include were services you can learn about hiv and learn about different aspects of maternal

health. different places are going to have different tools to include in this 911 for the internet. emily: you have spoken to top ad execs who have want to expand to developing markets. they are excited to advertise through internet.org. how does that benefit users? mark: i'm not sure they will in the near term. we need to work out a model with operators and governments and local partners that is profitable for them, so that we can keep growing the internet. we found out in some of these countries -- the philippines, indonesia, zambia, kenya. you offer a little bit of the internet for free, and as more people start using data and accessing internet and using these tools, more people start paying for data. once they understand what they would use the internet for, people understand why they would want to pay for data, and the operators end up making more

money. it is more profitable. they can take that money and reinvest to make it better infrastructure for everyone in the country. that ends up being very important. we have focused on for the last couple of years is how he can -- we can build a model that is sustainable for everyone and delivers free internet to people. originally, we had thought maybe working with other kinds of partners would be important, but at this point we think we have a sustainable model working in multiple countries now and there is a lot of momentum. a lot of countries are coming online. operators are coming into us to roll out the internet.org model. i expect to see a lot over the next year. emily: does that mean no advertising? mark: i don't think it is necessary to subsidize and make this a cheap model. emily: for facebook, specifically? mark: again, in a lot of these countries, there is not a big ad market yet. it is not that we won't do it eventually, but right now for our business, the main thing we need to do is -- we our focused a lot on the quality of the ads. doing that in the developed world, in u.s., asia, europe, it is actually going to be the

biggest driver of profitability and revenue, not trying to make ad markets out of countries that are just coming online. emily: once you get people connected, once you have the power to reach them, how do you use that power? mark: are you talking about us, or people specifically? emily: i am talking about facebook. mark: for us, it is all about enabling people. we worked with airtel in zambia. they were our first partner to roll out a suite of basic services. within weeks we heard amazing stories coming in of people using the internet. an expectant mother using the internet for the first time to look up safety and health information for how to raise her child. a poultry farmer using facebook and setting up a page in order to sell multiple times more chickens than he had been able to before. the university student using the internet to use wikipedia to look up the information and save money on books that she needed for an exam. it is pretty crazy. within weeks, these new experiences start to come back. that's really what we are here to do. the internet is a big enabler

that helps connect people to the modern economy. if we can help do that, then that is amazing. emily: what's the likelihood internet.org could help you get back into china? ♪

emily: what kind of data are you gathering about these users, and how do you use that data? mark: it is not an different -- any different from how people use facebook normally. the biggest thing we had to do to make internet.org work is to connect with the different operators in these countries, for example airtel in zambia, to make it easy to buy data when they want to do more things. for example, you may be browsing facebook and see a link to news or see a video you want to watch. you know that is rich media, so that cannot be covered for free. we can make it so if you tap on it, it is easy to pay. it is good for everyone. it lets them discover why they would want to consume content on

the internet. it makes it so that airtel and our partners can continue investing and make a broader internet for everyone. and it gets more people online. emily: google is working on google loom and google fiber. what you think about their approach to connecting the world? mark: the thing is connecting everyone is going to be something that no single company can do by themselves. i am really glad that they and a lot of other companies are working on this. internet.org is a partnership a -- a partnership between a number of different technology companies, nonprofits, and governments. there are folks who are doing things that are contributing to internet.org. there are companies that are doing things that are separate. that is going to be necessary. there is a lot of technology that needs to be developed in order to tackle all three of those major barriers that talked -- that i talked about -- technical, making it so that

people have a network near them, affordability, and social. i am very positive on it. emily: have you had any talks about potentially partnering with google? would you ever partner with them? mark: our team has been in contact with them. our folks have been talking to them. when we launched in zambia, google was one of the services in the services.org suite. that is valuable, because in addition to health services and jobs and different government services and communication tools, people need to be able to search and find information. whether we work with google or other countries -- companies on that, that is an important thing. i would love to work with google. they are a great search product. >> bill gates has criticized project loon. saying when you are dying of malaria, i suppose you will look up and see that balloon and i'm not sure how it will help you. have you heard from bill? how do you respond to that? mark: bill and i have had a few conversations about this and other things we have worked on together.

i think the reality is that people need a lot of things in order to have good lives. health is certainly extremely important. we have done a number of things at facebook to help improve global health, and i am excited to do more there, too the. reality is that it is not an either/or. people need to be healthy and have the internet as a backbone to connect them to the economy. the internet creates jobs. it is one of the things that facilitates health. for example, in the most recent ebola outbreak, i asked folks who were involved in containing the outbreak what can we do to help. the number one thing they said is help us get connectivity. we need wire up these ebola treatment units to coordinate the response, so that people know and can count those who have come into contact with folks who have ebola. so it ends up being important. it is not an either/or. it ends up being important. i am certainly not here saying that connectivity is more important than health -- that would be ridiculous.

i hope we can improve all of these things over time. emily: one of the things we've been finding, we have been getting some notes from zambia, i believe it was something like 200,000 something facebook users. but 300,000 people using everything else. i wonder how much people care about the basic services compared to facebook. mark: facebook is one of the big services people want to use. when of the main reasons people get online in a developing country is to connect with people. messaging services like whatsapp and facebook messenger are some -- facebook messenger and social network services are some of the most important services that people want to use. to some degree, it is not that surprising, but i think more people are using these other services. emily: messenger is part of the suite as well. will whatsapp be part of the internet.org suite as well? mark: it is going to be different on a country by country basis. some countries have 911, others have health and crime. some have more things in it than the u.s. does.

internet.org is kind of going to be like that, too. in each country, the government and local operators will need to figure out what services they want to include. emily: google has android. how do you overcome not having the hardware? not having android? mark: our strategy is to build things people want to use. facebook is the most used app. whatsapp and messenger and instagram are some of the next most used apps. so, at some level, i think that as long as we are building services that people really want to use and that help people's lives, then it is not as big of a deal. it is certainly a little bit stressful. we feel like we can help people more or deliver our services a little bit better if we had more partnerships with the operating systems that we were using to build our stuff, but it is not something that i'm that stressed about at this point.

because as long as we stay focused on building our own stuff, i think that is the right thing for us to stay focused on, not worrying about what other people are going to do. emily: you said you hoped for more than one billion people by 2020. do you think you can get there? ♪

emily: so drones and lasers -- you have a whole lab now working on this. when will facebook drones and lasers be ready for launch? mark: we will be testing some in the near future. i would be probably mistaken if i gave you an exact date. but that is one of the big technical barriers. there are a lot of people who do not live in range of a network. drones and satellites and laser communication is one way to do it. microwave communication is another. they are going to be some of the solutions for providing more cost effective connectivity to people where there are no existing cell phone towers or infrastructure like that.

emily: facebook is going to be ramping up spending. how much of that is going to internet.org and these efforts, the nasa, where you are working on all this other cool technology? mark: we are definitely investing a lot on this. emily: we were talking about china -- your mandarin has gotten pretty good. what is the likelihood that internet.org can get facebook back into china? mark: i don't know. that is not our priority right now with internet.org. some countries reach out to us and say that connectivity is a priority and a lot of people use facebook. if there is a way to work together to do that. for example, in malaysia, i was meeting with one of the leaders in the government there. making sure that citizens are connected is one of their top priorities. similar in indonesia. india, i think, as well.

there are a lot of priorities around making sure everyone can get connected. it makes sense for us to try to prioritize countries that are reaching out to us proactively for this. emily: how will you judge that this has been a success? 10 years ago, your vision was to get one billion people on facebook. people thought that was so audacious. so, if that's not audacious, what is it? mark: the goal is to make it so that a person can walk into a store in any developing country, buy a phone, and get access to some free, basic internet services. that's the primary goal for people around the world. once we have made it so this system is working in every country, that will be -- that is step one. and then step two is making people use it. which will be its own multiyear challenge. without the internet -- it is one of the best ways to teach people about what services are out there. a secondary goal is to make it so that this is a profitable

thing for the whole international operator community. because that is how you make this sustainable. this can't be something that is just charity for these operators around the world. this will work if providing free, basic services actually for them tog a way get more paying customers and people online. then they can spend more money to invest and build faster networks and reach more people. the signs that we have from the early countries that we are in suggest that both of those will be true. that is what i look the most forward to over the next 10 years. if we can make it so free, basic services are available in a hundred or more countries and a billion or more people can get connected, then that is going to be a huge win for all these people who will now have access to new information on jobs and health care and education and communication tools that they just didn't have before. emily: you hope for more than a billion people by 2020. do you think you can get there? mark: we will see.

emily: ok. thank you very much, mark. ♪

♪ emily: he's been called the start-up whisperer of silicon valley. reid hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of linkedin, and an investor in some of the most successful companies of all time, including facebook. yet, the man with one of the most impressive resumes in silicon valley wasn't always on track to be an entrepreneur. a student of philosophy, hoffman at one point pursued a career in academia. but he took his first job out of school at apple, then later joined the now legendary paypal mafia. now a partner at greylock, hoffman sits on seven boards. he is the author of "the start-up of you," and now a new book, "the alliance." r