Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg came out of his foxhole Tuesday and made his first public appearance since his social network’s catastrophic IPO in May at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.

He called the IPO’s aftermath – which has seen its price crater by half – “disappointing” and protested that he cares about his stockholders but reiterated that he’s more interested in building value over the long-term.

In a televised and webcast half-hour interview he told inquisitor Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, that the reason Facebook’s mobile strategy – on which its monetization and ultimate survival depends – is in disarray is because Facebook originally depended on HTML 5 and HTML 5 failed it.

The company “bet too much on HTML 5,” he said.

Facebook started implementing HTML 5 two years ago and was implementing it in some mobile widgetry called Face Web. It lost at least a year before it realized that it wasn’t going to work and needed to go native to support the shift to mobile devices.

The new native rewrite will be “ready when it’s ready,” he told Arrington.

At the beginning of the year Facebook reorganized its development crews to spread responsibility for features across the company. They are all focused on mobile, Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg no longer codes since Facebook coders are responsible for maintaining their code and he doesn’t have the time.

He repeatedly told Arrington that Facebook is not doing a phone. Even if it sold tens of millions of the things it would be small potatoes next to the 950 million people on Facebook.

Facebook stock rose 4% during the after-hours interview.