At an event on Sunday at Facebook’s headquarters in California, Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg shared a story of his life which inspired him to become what he is today as he hosted a Townhall Q&A for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“India is personally very important to the history of our company,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. Mark Zuckerberg says that a trip to India at the urging of Steve Jobs played a crucial role in Facebook’s development.

Mr. Zuckerberg did not say which temple but said that Mr. Steve Jobs had been there when he was thinking about his vision of the future for Apple. “Early on in our history when things weren’t really going well – we had hit a tough patch and a lot of people wanted to buy Facebook – I went and I met with Steve Jobs and he said that “to reconnect with what I believed was the mission of the company,” I should go visit this temple in India that he had gone to early in the evolution of Apple, when he was thinking about what he wanted his vision of the future to be,” Zuckerberg explained on stage.

So that is when Zuckerberg flew to India, visited the temple, and spent almost a month travelling around the country. He says that seeing the way that people connected made him feel that the world would be much better if everyone had a stronger ability to connect.

“Seeing the people, seeing how people connected, having the opportunity to feel how much better the world could be if everyone had a stronger ability to connect reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing and that is something that I have always remembered over the last 10 years as we have built Facebook.”

“There is a lot of optimism in India. You came to India, a temple, with hope. And see where you reached. Your experience shows hope. There is something special about India,” Mr. Modi said. “I hope that will not just be something to enhance your company’s bank balance. I hope you will be the voice of millions and billions of people all over the world,” Mr. Modi added.

Facebook, of course, pushed through its rough patch, and Zuckerberg rejected acquisition offers, growing the site from a dorm-room experiment into one of the largest tech companies in the world.