Mark Zuckerberg admitted that he used to be like a robot and had trouble communicating

“One strange thing about Zuckerberg is that if he has nothing to say, he doesn’t fill the space with small talk. He has no concept of small talk,” Paul Graham, co-founder of startup incubation fund Y Combinator, recounted meeting Mark Zuckerberg around 2007 in a podcast. The Social Radars aired last weekend.

Graham said that before the meeting, venture capitalist Ron Conway warned about Zuckerberg not being good at socializing and that there would be large silences in the conversation. However, the silence of the twenty-year-old man who had studied at Harvard University was more annoying than expected.

“That made me extremely confused. I didn’t realize the importance of small talk until I missed it. He just stared at the other person if he didn’t know what to say,” Graham shared.

Zuckerberg himself also admitted to having difficulty communicating during the process of taking his social networking platform from an idea in a Harvard dorm room to one of the largest companies in the world with a capitalization of about 1.5 trillion USD.

“Before, I had a lot of difficulty expressing myself. I was like a robot,” Zuckerberg told NBC News year 2019.

In 2024, Zuckerberg reiterated this on Threads, saying comments about his clumsiness used to make things pretty bad, but have improved over time. “Being clumsy and receiving negative feedback about how I express myself has definitely made me be more careful and prepare my words more carefully. Although it’s still not my strongest point, I’m gradually feeling more comfortable being myself,” he wrote.

Graham commented that Zuckerberg is still a good speaker because he was very young when he started his business. He also said that his clumsiness did not reduce Zuckerberg’s popularity in the Y Combinator world at that time. The founders love and sympathize with Zuckerberg because they are of the same age. The lack of chatter didn’t stop his message from resonating.

Zuckerberg is not the only high-ranking executive who has had difficulty communicating. Before developing his vibrant style, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was quite reserved. “I was very shy as a child. Even when I went to university, I was still extremely shy,” he shared at Oxford University Business School.

In the autobiography The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder Warren Buffett, Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, admits that public speaking used to cause him physical discomfort. “I was so scared that I couldn’t do it, I would even vomit. In fact, I once arranged my life so that I never had to stand in front of anyone,” Buffett recalled.