Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said when he first moved to Silicon Valley, at the age of 19-years, he “didn’t know anything about building a company,” and that “at the time, a lot of tools for building a company weren’t as built out as they are now.”

Zuckerberg said in an interview at the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit in Utah, United States that Facebook wouldn’t be based in Silicon Valley if it were launching out today.

According to Zuckerberg, “Back then it was a lot more complicated.”

He said it was difficult for Facebook to lease servers and data centers and to raise capital from investors. 

“It really felt like it was going to be impossible,”he said. 

However, things have drastically changed over the past few years. For someone starting a new startup, it is a lot easy to reach out to customers through social media, and expansion of server capacity is possible with Amazon Web Services cloud platform.

“I think the world is in a different place now,” Zuckerberg said. ‘‘I think the infrastructure exists for people to able to do stuff like this in more places.”

For Zuckerberg, there are several advantages to start a new company outside of Silicon Valley.

“Silicon Valley is like an all-tech town and there is not much of a diversity of how much people think about things as you’d like, in a lot of ways.”

For long, Silicon Valley has been considered as the hub of tech innovation. Apple, Google, Facebook, and Uber are known for attracting the best talent for high-tech jobs. But Silicon Valley is getting a lot of competition from cities like New York, which many say will take the crown from Silicon Valley as the tech innovation center of the world.

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer.
He could be contacted at udohrapulu@gmail.com