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Zuckerberg says Jobs advised him on Facebook

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Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg was moved that Apple’s Steve Jobs admired him for not “selling out.”

“I know that’s one of the ways in which -- in which we saw eye to eye on kind of what we were trying to do in the world,” Zuckerberg said in an hour-long interview with Charlie Rose airing Monday.

Zuckerberg also said Jobs coached him on how to build a management team that is “focused on building as high quality and good things as you are.”

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Before he died on Oct. 5, Jobs gave younger entrepreneurs advice, according to his biography published last month. Jobs, who told biographer Walter Isaacson that he admired Zuckerberg for not selling his company, had dinner with Zuckerberg and acted as his mentor.

At 27, Zuckerberg is one of the richest people in the U.S., according to Forbes, and is preparing to lead Facebook, which has 800 million users, for an initial public offering as early as next year.

Zuckerberg and Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, said during the interview that Jobs did not propose that Apple buy Facebook.

An IPO isn’t something Zuckerberg said he spends “a lot of time on a day-to-day basis thinking about.”

“We’ve made this implicit promise to our investors and to our employees that by compensating them with equity and by giving them equity, that at some point we’re going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly, in a liquid way,” he said. “Now, the promise isn’t that we’re going to do it on any kind of short-term time horizon. The promise is that we’re going to build this company so that it’s great over the long term, right. And that we’re always making these decisions for the long term, but at some point we’ll do that.”

Zuckerberg told Rose he was trying to stay grounded: “I spend a lot of time just, you know, with my girlfriend and my dog.”

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