Despite any potential threat that Path might be to Facebook, Path CEO Dave Morin says that Mark Zuckerberg supports the company and even uses the product.

"We're friends on Path," Dave said on This Week in Startups. "Mark's a great supporter. He gives me great advice."

Dave, a former Facebook Senior Platform Manager, was one of the original members of the Facebook team platform team but left to start Path in 2010.

"I don't think I'm reacting to anything," Dave says. "I think that we believe there's a market opportunity now because Facebook has decided to leave it behind. Facebook has become default public which is a very important distinction."

Facebook has become one of the biggest, most valuable media companies but in the process of becoming that, it has left behind certain use cases, Dave says.

"To me, that's totally fine," Dave says. "If it wasn't for Facebook, we wouldn't even have the conversation around privacy, we wouldn't have an identity platform on the Internet...I look at what Mark has done as paving a way for us to be a company that is 100% focused on close friends and family because ultimately, the original vision of the Facebook platform was all about becoming this operating system -- this identity platform for the Internet and for the world."

Since launching Path 2.0 in late November, its user base has skyrocketed with people sharing at a rate of 12 moments per second.

Dave says that they have seen around a 10x or more increase in active users. "It's actually more than that," he says. As Techcrunch recently reported, the company is seeing 30x the number of daily users, growing from 10K to 300K in two and a half weeks.

"We didn't expect it," Dave says. "We really tried to build a great product. Halfway through the year we just kind of decided we'd give it another shot. We expected it to be a better version than the first one but we weren't expecting it to take off like that."

When Path first launched as a photosharing app in November 2010, it did not catch on but now that Path 2.0 is gaining popularity, Dave realized how to effectively iterate.

"Stay in the problem long enough to get to the most simple solution," Dave says. "Simplicity takes time. You can't produce simplicity over a weekend."

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