According to the social media site, Facebook saw more than 1 billion daily active users on average in September this year. Despite the high-profile job, Kelly knew since high school his real goal was to start his own business.
“There are a lot of interesting problems in the world, and it’s a shame if I don’t use the connections and capital and knowledge I’ve built up to try to tackle one of those problems,” he said.
He hasn’t decided on a specific business plan, but said one of the most important traits of the Internet is its ability to connect people of various cultures and backgrounds. He said he will hone in on a few specific ideas over the next few months.
“That’s one big power of the Internet that’s been kind of lost that was there early on,” Kelly said. “You didn’t interact with your friends and family as much early on with the Internet, you interacted with total strangers, which opened you up to new worldviews.”
Kelly was interested in technology when he was young and learned programming skills in chat rooms and online forums with other users while still in high school. He was mostly interested in online games, and learned to build websites to host them.
He went to Bowling Green State University to study finance and business, and decided to market a game he developed.
A New York-based company called Large Animal Games became interested and eventually hired him. There he developed the skills that eventually landed him a job at Facebook.
He had several positions at the social media firm, but said the most rewarding was working with Facebook Lite, an attempt to develop an app that would work on older technologies often used in developing parts of the world. Often, Kelly said, people in Africa, India and Southeast Asia use lower-technology phones that don’t have the same capabilities.
“The next billion people on the Internet are using completely different devices,” Kelly said. “They’re new to the Internet, they’ve never had an email address, they don’t even know what a desktop computer does. Figuring out how you build products that makes Facebook valuable and also works really well for people in those regions and on those devices is really important and also really challenging.”
Kelly said he was able to move up the corporate ladder at Facebook in part because he joined at a time when the company was growing rapidly, and in part because he was able to meet people who regularly challenged him and were passionate about their work.
“The recurring theme was I got my foot in the door in a very perpendicular way and then I built relationships with people that allowed me to access and prove myself and opportunities popped up over time,” he said.
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