Original artwork, not a still
Move fast and break things.
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
The line is a startup creed: shipping imperfect software quickly beats polishing it, and breakage is the price of learning. It spread far beyond Facebook as shorthand for Silicon Valley's attitude, and after the Cambridge Analytica scandal critics turned it into an accusation, asking what else was being broken, including, as one Observer editorial put it, democracy itself. Meta's later list of values brought 'move fast' back.
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In context
May contain spoilersShow the scene
It was a working saying inside early Facebook: a 2009 Business Insider profile described it as Zuckerberg's prime directive to his developers, and a 2011 IEEE Spectrum piece quoted a Facebook engineering leader saying it was the company's motto. It reached the public in 2012, when Zuckerberg's letter to prospective investors ahead of the stock-market listing presented it as a saying at Facebook and one of the values of what he called the hacker way. In 2014, as Facebook's platform grew to handle huge numbers of calls from other companies, the company officially changed it to 'move fast with stable infrastructure'.
Sources (3)
- Snopes: Did Mark Zuckerberg say 'Move fast and break things'?Fact-check bodyReference checked
- Barry Popik: 'Move fast and break things'Dated citationsReference checked
- Wikiquote: Mark ZuckerbergQuotes about ZuckerbergReference checked
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