Steve Jobs once told Mark Zuckerberg to visit an Indian temple when Facebook hit a 'tough patch'
Mark Zuckerberg once spent nearly a month traveling around India because Steve Jobs suggested it would help him reconnect with Facebook's mission.
Zuckerberg shared the story for the first time publicly on Sunday during a town hall with Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India.
The Facebook founder and CEO described a "tough patch" in the early days of Facebook, when some people thought he should sell the company to one of the interested buyers. So Zuckerberg went to see Jobs, who he described as one of his mentors. Jobs, he said, told him to visit a temple in India that he had visited.
"...he told me that in order to reconnect with what I believed as the mission of the company I should visit this temple that he had gone to in India early on in his evolution of thinking about what he wanted Apple and his vision of the future to be," Zuckerberg said during the town hall, according to a video of the event.
"So I went and I traveled for almost a month, and seeing the people, seeing how people connected, and having the opportunity to feel how much better the world could be if everyone had a stronger ability to connect reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing and that is something I've always remembered over the last 10 years as we've built Facebook."
Zuckerberg, of course, didn't end up selling Facebook, and instead opted to take the company public. Now, nearly 1.5 billion people use Facebook each month, and the company currently has a market capitalization of over $254 billion.
"You went to a temple with a lot of hope, and look how much you've achieved since then," the Indian prime minister replied, according to a translation from NPR.
Skip to the 1-minute mark to hear Zuckerberg talk about visiting India: