Mark Zuckerberg on why a "ragtag group of children" built Facebook when Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo couldn't: Zuckerberg returns to a question he's thought about from time to time: why was his small team able to build Facebook when much bigger companies didn't? "It wasn't like it was a super novel idea. There was Friendster before, there was MySpace, there's all this stuff. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, they all had versions of it. Why didn't they do it?" It wasn't talent or resources. If anything, the odds were against him: "We were like a ragtag group of children. And they had all these serious engineers and serious infrastructure." So what was the difference? According to Zuckerberg, big companies lose because they can't see the value in new ideas early enough: "I kind of think the reason is because people doubt new ideas before they come to fruition." He traces the exact sequence of doubt that social networking had to survive: "The narrative with social networking is like, this is just a college kid thing. Okay fine, maybe not college kids, but it's probably a fad. Maybe it seems like it's going to be around for a while, but it's probably not going to make money. Okay, it's making money, but the switch to mobile is going to be pretty hard. And then by the time we figured that out, it was too late. The companies had lost their advantage." The failure, he suspects, rarely comes from a total absence of belief. Somewhere inside every big company, someone saw it: "There's probably some team buried deep inside those companies that believed in it, and probably some VP person who is like, eh, that's probably not the biggest priority, and just pours sand in the gears." His conclusion is a prediction about where opportunity actually lives. Even when a large company holds an obvious distribution advantage, he doesn't think it protects them: "I would guess that big companies are going to fumble two-thirds of those." And the opportunities that don't come with an obvious incumbent advantage, the ones that plug into existing distribution channels are, in his words, "just kind of free."