Mark Zuckerberg has called Facebook's stock market debut disappointing but said the company was set to bounce back. "Some days are hard, some days kick ass," the firm's billionaire co-founder told an audience at TechCrunch's Disrupt conference in San Francisco in his first interview since the company's disastrous initial public offering in May.
Zuckerberg has come under intense criticism since the IPO. The company's share price is close to half the $38 (£23.5) price it reached at the launch and the company and its advisers are being sued by angry investors.
The price collapsed due to fears that the company was not prepared for the dramatic shift to mobile devices, an area in which the company has struggled to make money. But after Zuckerberg offered a robust defence of Facebook's mobile strategy, shares rose 4% in after hours trading.
"The performance of the stock has obviously been disappointing," said Zuckerberg. He said the big question in people's minds was how well the social networking company would do in mobile.
Zuckerberg said that IPO rules had prevented the company from updating people on Facebook's mobile developments and that "a lot of things have changed".
"I think it's easy for a lot of folks without us being out there talking about what we are doing to fundamentally underestimate how good mobile is for us," he said.
Zuckerberg said mobile had more users and those people were spending more time on Facebook. He said the firm expected to make a lot more money off those users in the long run.
Questioned about the atmosphere inside the company, Zuckerberg said the collapsing share price had brought pressures. He has faced criticism about claiming he was more interested in Facebook's "mission" than in making money.
"It is definitely true that the primary thing that makes me excited about what we are doing is the mission, but I also think that from the beginning we have had a healthy understanding that we need to do both," said Zuckerberg. He said "it doesn't help" motivate staff that the share price had fallen so hard but said the future looked brighter.
Zuckerberg ruled out the prospect of Facebook launching its own mobile device. Arch-rival Google has increasingly moved into the hardware business with phones and tablet devices. He said such a move would make no sense for Facebook.
But he said he was interested in Google's core product - internet search. He said that the "legacy" in search was about keywords triggering responses from search engines like Google or Bing. Social search would give people more specific answers to questions like "what sushi restaurants have my friends been to in New York and liked".
Zuckerberg also defended his $1bn purchase of Instagram, a loss making photo-sharing site that now has over 100m users. "They are this super-talented group of engineers that are building this amazing product," he said. He said Instagram would remain a standalone company.
"There's no doubt we are a mission driven company," said Zuckerberg. "The thing that gets us excited is making the world more open and connected. But you can't just focus on that."
