- Paul Graham said that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg could not perform small talk in his early days.
- "This was before he learned to imitate a normal person," Graham said on "The Social Radars."
- Zuckerberg has acknowledged his awkwardness and said he's "more comfortable just being me" as he gets older.
Mark Zuckerberg didn't always talk like a CEO. In his early Facebook days, he sometimes didn't talk at all.
Before his so-called glow up, Zuckerberg was a more awkward Harvard student turned tech leader. Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham saw Zuckerberg in those early years. On "The Social Radars" podcast, he described a young Facebook founder who couldn't keep up a conversation.
Graham said he remembered when Zuckerberg first came to speak to a Y Combinator founder class; he and the hosts estimated it was around 2007.
"This was before he learned to imitate a normal person," Graham said.
At the time, Zuckerberg wouldn't try to fill the gaps in a conversation with small talk, Graham said. He called it "surprisingly disconcerting."
"If there wasn't anything that he felt like saying, he would just go like this," Graham said. He leaned into the camera and widened his eyes. "He would just stare at you."
Graham said that he didn't realize how important small talk was until he met "the lack of it."
Host Jessica Livingston, also a Y Combinator cofounder, asked whether "Ron" introduced the two. She doesn't give a last name, though she's likely referring to venture capitalist Ron Conway.
Graham responded that "Ron" had actually warned him about Zuckerberg's awkwardness in conversation.
"He said, 'Alright, you're going to meet Mark. Now, I warn you, there's going to be some big gaps in the conversation,'" Graham said.
Zuckerberg has since become better at speaking. In a 2024 Threads post, the Meta CEO wrote that, when he was 19, he "didn't know anything about running a company, communicating publicly, etc."
"Being awkward and getting negative feedback on how I came across definitely made me more careful and scripted," he wrote. "Still not my best thing, but getting a bit more comfortable just being me as I get older."
Zuckerberg's awkwardness didn't make him any less popular among the Y Combinator crowd. Graham said that the founders liked him because he was in a similar age demographic at the time.
"He's super famous and very rich, but he doesn't seem like he's a different species of animal," he said.
