Mark Zuckerberg is co-founder and CEO of
the social-networking website Facebook, as
well as one of the world's youngest
billionaires.
Synopsis
Born on May 14, 1984, in White
Plains, New York, Mark Zuckerberg
co-founded the social-networking
website Facebook out of his college
dorm room. He left Harvard after his
sophomore year to concentrate on the
site, the user base of which has grown
to more than 250 million people,
making Zuckerberg a billionaire. The
birth of Facebook was recently
portrayed in the film The Social
Network .
Early Life
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on
May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New
York, into a comfortable, well-
educated family, and raised in the
nearby village of Dobbs Ferry. His
father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a
dental practice attached to the
family's home. His mother, Karen,
worked as a psychiatrist before the
birth of the couple's four children—
Mark, Randi, Donna and Arielle.
Zuckerberg developed an interest in
computers at an early age; when he
was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to
create a messaging program he
named "Zucknet." His father used
the program in his dental office, so
that the receptionist could inform
him of a new patient without yelling
across the room. The family also used
Zucknet to communicate within the
house. Together with his friends, he
also created computer games just for
fun. "I had a bunch of friends who
were artists," he said. "They'd come
over, draw stuff, and I'd build a
game out of it."
To keep up with Mark's burgeoning
interest in computers, his parents
hired private computer tutor David
Newman to come to the house once a
week and work with Mark. Newman
later told reporters that it was hard
to stay ahead of the prodigy, who
began taking graduate courses at
nearby Mercy College around this
same time.
Zuckerberg later studied at Phillips
Exeter Academy, an exclusive
preparatory school in New Hampshire.
There he showed talent in fencing,
becoming the captain of the school's
team. He also excelled in literature,
earning a diploma in classics. Yet
Zuckerberg remained fascinated by
computers, and continued to work on
developing new programs. While still
in high school, he created an early
version of the music software
Pandora, which he called Synapse.
Several companies—including AOL
and Microsoft—expressed an interest
in buying the software, and hiring
the teenager before graduation. He
declined the offers.
Time at Harvard
After graduating from Exeter in
2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard
University. By his sophomore year at
the ivy league institution, he had
developed a reputation as the go-to
software developer on campus. It was
at that time that he built a program
called CourseMatch, which helped
students choose their classes based
on the course selections of other
users. He also invented Facemash,
which compared the pictures of two
students on campus and allowed
users to vote on which one was more
attractive. The program became
wildly popular, but was later shut
down by the school administration
after it was deemed inappropriate.
Based on the buzz of his previous
projects, three of his fellow students
—Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron
and Tyler Winklevoss—sought him out
to work on an idea for a social
networking site they called Harvard
Connection. This site was designed to
use information from Harvard's
student networks in order to create a
dating site for the Harvard elite.
Zuckerberg agreed to help with the
project, but soon dropped out to
work on his own social networking site
with friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris
Hughes and Eduardo Saverin.
Zuckerberg and his friends created a
site that allowed users to create their
own profiles, upload photos, and
communicate with other users. The
group ran the site—first called The
Facebook—out of a dorm room at
Harvard until June 2004. After his
sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped
out of college to devote himself to
Facebook full time, moving the
company to Palo Alto, California. By
the end of 2004, Facebook had 1
million users.
The Rise of Facebook
In 2005, Zuckerberg's enterprise
received a huge boost from the
venture capital firm Accel Partners.
Accel invested $12.7 million into the
network, which at the time was open
only to ivy league students.
Zuckerberg's company then granted
access to other colleges, high school
and international schools, pushing
the site's membership to more than
5.5 million users by December 2005.
The site then began attracting the
interest of other companies, who
wanted to advertize with the popular
social hub. Not wanting to sell out,
Zuckerberg turned down offers from
companies such as Yahoo! and MTV
Networks. Instead, he focused on
expanding the site, opening up his
project to outside developers and
adding more features.
Zuckerberg seemed to be going
nowhere but up, however in 2006, the
business mogul faced his first big
hurdle. The creators of Harvard
Connection claimed that Zuckerberg
stole their idea, and insisted the
software developer needed to pay for
their business losses. Zuckerberg
maintained that the ideas were
based on two very different types of
social networks but, after lawyers
searched Zuckerberg's records,
incriminating Instant Messages
revealed that Zuckerberg may have
intentionally stolen the intellectual
property of Harvard Connection and
offered Facebook users' private
information to his friends.
Zuckerberg later apologized for the
incriminating messages, saying he
regretted them. "If you're going to
go on to build a service that is
influential and that a lot of people
rely on, then you need to be mature,
right?" he said in an interview with
The New Yorker . "I think I've grown
and learned a lot."
Although an initial settlement of $65
million was reached between the two
parties, the legal dispute over the
matter continued well into 2011,
after Narendra and the Winklevosses
claimed they were misled in regards
to the value of their stock.
Zuckerberg faced yet another
personal challenge when the 2009
book The Accidental Billionaires , by
writer Ben Mezrich, hit stores.
Mezrich was heavily criticized for his
re-telling of Zuckerberg's story,
which used invented scenes, re-
imagined dialogue and fictional
characters. Regardless of how true-
to-life the story was, Mezrich
managed to sell the rights of the tale
to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, and
the critically acclaimed film The
Social Network received eight
Academy Award nominations.
Zuckerberg objected strongly to the
film's narrative, and later told a
reporter at The New Yorker that
many of the details in the film were
inaccurate. For example, Zuckerberg
has been dating longtime girlfriend
Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American
medical student he met at Harvard,
since 2003. He also said he never had
interest in joining any of the final
clubs. "It's interesting what stuff
they focused on getting right; like,
every single shirt and fleece that I
had in that movie is actually a shirt
or fleece that I own," Zuckerberg
told a reporter at a start-up
conference in 2010. "So there's all
this stuff that they got wrong and a
bunch of random details that they
got right."
Yet Zuckerberg and Facebook
continued to succeed, in spite of the
criticism. Time magazine named him
Person of the Year in 2010, and
Vanity Fair placed him at the top of
their New Establishment list. Forbes
also ranked Zuckerberg at No. 35—
beating out Apple CEO Steve Jobs—on
its "400" list, estimating his net
worth to be $6.9 billion.
Philanthropic Causes
Since amassing his sizeable fortune,
Zuckerberg has used his millions to
fund a variety of philanthropic
causes. The most notable examples
came in 2010. In September of that
year, he donated $100 million to
save the failing Newark Public Schools
system in New Jersey. Then, in
December 2010, Zuckerberg signed the
"Giving Pledge", promising to donate
at least 50 percent of his wealth to
charity over the course of his
lifetime. Other Giving Pledge members
include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett
and George Lucas. After his
donation, Zuckerberg called on other
young, wealthy entrepreneurs to
follow suit. "With a generation of
younger folks who have thrived on
the success of their companies, there
is a big opportunity for many of us
to give back earlier in our lifetime
and see the impact of our
philanthropic efforts," he said.
Going Public
Zuckerberg made two major life
changes in May 2012. Facebook had
its initial public offering, which
raised $16 billion, making it the
biggest internet IPO in history. How
Zuckerberg's company will handle this
influx of cash remains to be seen. But
Zuckerberg may be looking at more
acquisitions. He personally negotiated
the company deal to buy Instragram
the previous month.
After the initial success of the IPO,
the Facebook stock price dropped
somewhat in the early days of
trading. But Zuckerberg is expected
to weather any ups and downs in his
company's market performance. He
holds more than a quarter of its
stock and retains 57 percent control
of the voting shares.
On May 19, 2012—a day after the IPO
—Zuckerberg wed his longtime
girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. About 100
people gathered at the couple's Palo
Alto, California home. The guests
thought they were there to celebrate
Chan's graduation from medical
school, but instead they witnessed
Zuckerberg and Chan exchange vows.
In May 2013, Facebook made the
Fortune 500 list for the first time—
making Zuckerberg, at the age of 28,
the youngest CEO on the list.
No comments:
Post a Comment