Eduardo Saverin: Facebook's 'Biggest Risk' is Growing Too Fast

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The biggest threat to Facebook's business may simply be that the company grows too fast for its own good, at least according to co-founder Eduardo Saverin.

"The biggest risk is to grow too fast, which is actually a huge asset, but ironically, I think that's one of the biggest risks," Saverin said in an interview Thursday at The Wall Street Journal's Unleashing Innovation conference in Singapore, where he now lives. "When you grow too fast, it's hard to iterate, educate."

Saverin noted that Facebook has achieved mass scale at a much faster pace than other technologies like phones and televisions, which may be great for user numbers, but the downside is that governments and consumers are still adapting to the impact that Facebook has on society, particularly in terms of privacy. "There is a risk of privacy misunderstands or lack of education," he said.

Beyond this, Saverin alluded to companies like Google, which are trying to compete with Facebook in the social space and could pose a threat down the road.

"There are a lot of technology companies out there with tremendous resources and engineering and very experienced talent that are trying to enter the space of creating a social graph, an interest graph," Saverin said.

Saverin, for his part, has been mostly out of the spotlight recently after renouncing his U.S. citizenship and moving to Singapore right around the time of Facebook's' IPO. Some accused Saverin of leaving the country to avoid paying taxes on his roughly $3 billion stake in Facebook, but Saverin contended that he was moving simply to live and work in the Asia startup scene.