On Feb. 13, Fortune's Adam Lashinsky interviewed David Fischer, Facebook's vice president of business and marketing partnerships, at a conference on the future of media hosted by Stanford's Graduate School of Business. A lightly edited transcript of their conversation, as well as questions from the audience, follows.

ADAM LASHINS KY: Good morning, David. Good morning, everybody.

DAVID FISCHER: Good morning, Adam.

ADAM LASHINSKY: I'm going to start with some history. An interesting comparison between Google and Facebook is that -- Google and Facebook did not start as advertising platforms. [The founders] didn't have that in mind at all, presumably. And you came into both companies at a time when there was no revenue or no infrastructure for revenue, and said, "All right. Let's build one." Explain how you started from really I think from a business perspective a blank sheet of paper.

DAVID FISCHER: Yeah, I think -- I'll take these two cases, but I think it's true for a lot of companies, successful companies in the Valley and beyond, about defining a business model and where that comes in the process of it. One of the things that was interesting when I was at the [Stanford Graduate School of Business] and then went to Google that struck me is, you know, when you talked about building a company there it always started with the business plan and monetization plan. And for Google, for Facebook, for lots of companies, it started with a consumer plan and what was going to be a great product for consumers, and monetization came later and not in a straight line. It was not linear, it was sort of bumpy to get there and figure it out.

Now, it turns out that the companies -- these two companies that I've been at and I'd say for a lot of companies, advertising is a phenomenally good, efficient model that works really well. When I was at Google we got this question a lot, and at Facebook we get this question is "When are you going to diversify in your revenues?" But when you're talking about companies that have hundreds and thousands of advertisers, that [are] around the world, that's a fairly diversified stream, and it actually is quite efficient to -- you know, as margins or other things you care about on the business side goes -- it's a good business to be in. So that's sort of the starting point. So there's lots of ways you can think about monetizing those companies or other companies. I just happen to like the advertising model.

Now, how you actually build it, I think what's interesting is -- with respect to the two companies -- is in the DNA, they're similar in so many ways compared to most large successful companies, and if you compared, you know, took any set of ten companies in history in this country and the world you'd say, "Oh, there's a lot of similarities there." But Google at its core was a company built on the what: information and discovering information. And Facebook is a company built on the who: on people. And so that advertising model works effectively in both cases, but it starts from a different place, the company starts from a different place, and we can maybe talk a little bit more about that. In terms of how you actually build it, the key to any of these things, as I'm sort of a business guy, and you need an effective product. And so it starts with a lot of partnership figuring out building something that will -- how do you show the right ad to the right person at the right time and create a sense of value. That doesn't happen day one. In both cases you need to kind of go in fits and starts, but I think the idea is that it adds real value when you have people engaged and spending time and, you know, in a place like Facebook spending more time than anywhere else in the web, and you'll have the opportunity to show them some useful commercial material, you create value in that.

ADAM LASHINSKY: From a historical perspective, what I find so interesting is that I personally did not understand that Google was a publisher or later that Facebook was a publisher. I missed that. I think a lot of people missed it. But you, Larry and Sergey didn't miss that. Mark didn't miss that. And you came in at both company's stages and said -- you know, you executed that vision. And I'm using publisher in a very loose term. I wonder if you even agree.

DAVID FISCHER: Yes. It took me a while. Like I got my career started as reporter, so I also did not jump to the word "publisher" as quickly as you did, probably because we think about a publisher as something slightly different. But as a creator of content in a world in which if you think about it that way, it certainly -- I think the publisher piece works. And in some ways in Facebook, I think it's much more apt as a descriptor, because everyone, the whole notion of what makes Facebook work is you creating, everyone is a content creator, everyone is a publisher. That dynamic is, if you want to talk about what sets the companies apart, that's a critical piece in terms of what distinguishes them.

译者：刘进龙/汪皓