What phrase did Facebook use as its early motto under Mark Zuckerberg?

Facebook used “Move fast and break things” as an early motto under Mark Zuckerberg. The phrase captured the company’s preference for rapid experimentation and frequent product changes during its high-growth years.

Facebook’s culture emphasized shipping software quickly, testing features with real users, and treating mistakes as part of innovation. The motto became one of the best-known expressions of Silicon Valley’s startup philosophy, especially the belief that speed can matter more than perfect initial execution.

The company later replaced it with “Move fast with stable infrastructure,” reflecting its much larger scale and the greater consequences of outages, privacy problems, and platform changes. The shift illustrated how startup habits can become harder to apply as a technology company grows.

The phrase is sometimes incorrectly attributed to Google or Apple. It was associated specifically with Facebook’s early engineering culture and internal management philosophy.