“The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open” “It’s OK to break things” “to make them better”
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is born American computer programming genius, young and energetic ideologist, envisioned entrepreneur and scientific brain behind the path breaking revolution in social networking systems; found and took up reins as President and CEO of Facebook in 2004. The way he transformed the social networking systems made communication, networking, knowledge sharing and connectivity jet fast and just a matter of a click.
The “Facebook”, which spread like magic from the dorm room of Harvard, founded by Mark Elliot Zukerberg in 2004, when he was just 19-year-old, with his fellow students and roommates, has become popular worldwide, with an extremely broad base of about 800million viewers, as of September 2011. Currently the Facebook is growing at tremendous pace with about 700,000 people using it per day. Today, one out of every 12 people is known to have Facebook account. These viewers communicate in 75 languages and use 700 billion minutes every month on facebook. As of 2011, Zuckerberg is a billionaire, with approximate personal wealth of around $17.5 billion.
Zuckerberg is named as the Person of the Year for 2010 by the Time’s Magazine for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live our lives. Amidst many controversies about the origin of the company and law suits filed against Facebook, in a very short spec of time, Mark was able to string up humans into a huge single social entity through Facebook network, which made a historical paradigm shift in human relations. Facebook has become a part –and- parcel of human lives through out the globe, with 50% of the people utilizing the network in the U.S and from countries outside the U.S, 70% of people have changed their lives with Facebook usage. Under the great leadership and guidance of Mark, total registrations to the site quadrupled over the previous year. The number of employees has tripled, as has revenue. This shows his determination, strong willpower and relentless hard work to execute his mission of connecting people around the world. He stood as a role model for all young upcoming businessmen with great ideas, which could transform the world.
Mark Zuckerberg thinks that lot comes from going to good schools, as he did. He believed that every child deserves good education, which is not happening right now. He just wants to do what he could do to lend everyone an opportunity to get educated. He wants to spread his wealth, so he announced that he would be giving $100 million to the Newark school system in charity, to help reform schools in U.S, in Sept 2011. Zuckerberg stated "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”. By this he joins Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in “giving away pledge”.
Rise of Facebook and Zuckerberg
The foundation and groundwork before starting the actual Facebook, took its birth in the Harvard. Zuckerberg developed an image of go-to software developer on the Harvard campus, in 2002. At that time, he built a CourseMatch program, which helped students to choose their classes based on course selection of other users.
In 2003, when Zuckerberg was in his sophomore year at Harvard, started a program called “Facemash”, with the help of his friends and roommates Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz, just to divert himself from the pressure he felt. Facemash placed photos of two undergraduates side by side, and asked the viewers to vote for one that is “hotter”. The site actually originated only for Harvard, but quickly grew to other colleges, then high schools and finally for anyone over age 13. However, the Harvard’s school administration quickly shut down the program, as Zuckerberg was charged for breach of privacy. Later on, the Harvard dropped the charges.
Based on the popularity gained by the previous projects, Zuck was sought to work on an idea of social networking site by three of his fellow students, Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, which 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 pursue his dreams. The controversy surrounding Facebook began quickly. A week after he launched the site in 2004, Mark was accused by three Harvard seniors of having stolen the idea from them. This allegation soon became a lawsuit, as a competing company founded by the Harvard seniors, sued Mark and Facebook for theft and fraud, starting a legal fight, which continues to this day. The case was dismissed due to a technicality in March 2007, but without a ruling and Zuck ended up paying a huge penalty.
In the year 2004 February, the same trio Zuck, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to pursue their dreams and run Facebook full time, they diverted their efforts to recreate Facemash and opened Facebook, the most popular social networking site. This site allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos, and communicate with other users. The group ran the site first called “The Facebook”, from the dorm room at Harvard, until June 2004. In 2004, an angel investor, Sean Parker (founder of Napster) became the company's president. The company was moved to Palo Alto, California and had 1 million users by the end of 2004. In August 2005, “the facebook” was officially called “Facebook”, and the domain facebook.com was purchased for a reported $200,000.
The network quickly expanded to other Boston universities, the Ivy League, and eventually all US universities. US high schools could sign up from September 2005, and then it began to spread through out the world and reached UK universities the following month. The network reached beyond educational institutions to anyone with a registered email address, as of September 2006. The site remains free to join, and makes a profit through advertising revenue. That's why you'll see banner ads on Facebook, and this is how they can manage to create such a great service to you for free.
The features of the site have shown a continuous development, during the year 2007. Users can now give gifts to friends, post free classified advertisements, and even develop their own applications (graffiti and Scrabble are particularly popular). Over time, Facebook has added many new features to their website. You'll now find a news feed, more privacy features, Facebook notes, the ability to add images to your blog and comments, importing other blogs into Facebook, instant messaging, and much more. In addition, new apps are born on Facebook every day. This month the company announced that the number of registered users had reached 30 million, making it the largest social-networking site with an education focus. Facebook has count worthy investors including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Accel Partners, and Greylock Partners. In 2007, Microsoft came forward and invested $246 million for a 1.6% share in Facebook. The next month Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing made a large investment too. Yahoo! and Google both offered to buy Facebook, but Mark Zuckerberg showed no interest in selling. Today Facebook is the second largest social networking site and stands behind Myspace, with approximately 150mn viewers a month.
More about Mark Elliot Zuckerberg
Born :Mark Elliot Zukerberg
May 14, 1984 (age 27)
White Plains, New York, U.S.
Residence :Palo Alto, California, U.S.
Country of citizenship :United States
Ethnicity :Jewish
Alma mater :Phillips Exeter Academy
Harvard University (drop out)
Occupation :CEO and President of Face book
Marital Status :Single
The top wig of social networking, Zukerberg of Facebook; was born in a Jewish family in White Plains, New York, in the year 1984, May14.He was brought up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, in a well to do, closely-knit family, with his three sisters Randi, Donna, and Arielle. Right from his childhood, Zukerberg was raised totally in a Jewish style and culture and by the time he turned 13, he named himself as an atheist. Zukerberg’s parents were well educated. His father, Edward Zukerberg was a dentist and he ran his practice attached to his home. His mother worked as a psychiatrist, until she gave birth to four children.
Zuckerberg did his schooling at Ardsley High School. He was an excellent; award winning student, bagged many prizes in Science, Math, Astronomy and Physics. He had a profound interest in computer programming, when he was in the middle school at a very young age of 12. He always enjoyed developing computer programs, communication tools, and games. He worked along with his friends on the computer and said that “computer games just for fun“. He had a bunch of friends who were artists. He said, they’d come over, draw stuff, and he'd build a game out of it. He created a computer-messaging program called “Zuckernet” by using “Atari BASIC”, which was used by his father at his dental office; the program helped the receptionist to inform his father about the new patient without calling aloud across the room. “Zuckernet” was also used within the family to communicate with each other. In response to Zucker’s interest in computers, his parents encouraged him by providing him with private computer tutor named David Newman, to work with Mark at home. Newman later told reporters “it was hard to stay ahead of the prodigy, who began taking graduate courses at nearby Mercy College around this same time”.
After his excelling junior days at Ardsley High School, Mark went to Phillips Exeter Academy, where he came up with a new computer program to help the workers in his father's office communicate. He also succeeded in building a new computer version called “Synapse” a game Risk and a music player, which used artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits. “Microsoft and AOL” raced to purchase “Synapse” and recruit Zuckerberg, but were unsuccessful. He rejected the deal as he wanted to attend Harvard University. Based on the popularity of his previous projects, three of his fellow students gave him an opportunity to work on a social networking site called “Harvard Connection”, which used information from Harvard's student networks in order to create a dating site for the Harvard elite. However, he could not work on it, as he dropped out from Harvard after his sophomore year, to concentrate on the social-networking website “Facebook”, which originated from his college dorm room. He also excelled in classical studies; and it was named that the non-English languages that Zukerberg could read and write were as many as French, Hebrew, Latin and Ancient Greek, on his college application. He was very good at fencing and starred as captain of the fencing team. He was well known in his college, in reciting lines from the epic poems.
The Facebook page of Zuckerberg shows his personal interests as openness, making things that help people connect and share what's important to them, revolutions, information flow, and minimalism. Zuckerberg’s favorite color is blue, so is the dominant color of Facebook. Moreover, blue is an exception for colorblindness, where as red and green show red-green colorblindness.
Zukerberg has a pathological indifference for money. He greatly followed the Buddhist philosophy of “Eliminating desire on materialistic things that really do not matter”. Although he is a young billionaire who overtook his Palo Alto neighbor, the late Steve Jobs of Apple, he led a simple and humble lifestyle. He stayed in a rental house nearby his office. He drove black Acura TSX, which is a live example of his simplicity.
Zuckerberg met Priscilla Chan, his girlfriend, a Chinese- American medical student at the University of California, San Francisco, originally from suburbs of Boston; at a party put on by his fraternity during his sophomore year. He has been dating with Chan since 2003. Right now he is busy learning Chinese as a part of his plan to visit China. In March 2011, news was out that soon their friendship is going to turn into a relationship. Recent reports also say that, Zuckerberg has purchased a five-bedroom house in Palo Alto for $7 million, in May 2011. The birth of Facebook was recently portrayed in the film “The Social Network”.
Five Business Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook
The world famous youngest billionaire entrepreneur of the decade, with an unwavering obsession to socialize people around the world, with advent of Facebook with its unique features like ever changing layout and questionable privacy practices, striving through debates, controversies and lawsuits, is none other than Mark Zuckerberg. Even though you are against Facebook or Zuckerberg, there is no point in argument because the site is consistently growing unstoppably, and has 700 million users worldwide. Here are five must learn lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, for every IT executive, to attain a spectacular success in their career.
Love What You Do
“Zuck” as called by his friends and colleagues is a workaholic, he is often found writing code even on holidays and weekends. In this competitive and ever-changing tech world, putting up long hours of hard work is a norm for success for everyone. If you don’t love the work you do, you will end up struggling and torturing yourself to reach your target.
"I'd never met anyone who would walk away from a billion dollars," said Terry Semel, who, as CEO of Yahoo!, offered Zuckerberg that sum for the company he had built. Zuckerberg refused, explaining it wasn't about the money.
Stay Focused
Through multiple lawsuits, angry accusations that he disregards users' privacy, even a hugely unflattering movie, Zuckerberg has remained relentlessly focused on managing and improving Facebook, as demonstrated by the company's continuous and growing success. His perseverance shows how important it is to keep your head in the game.
Be Willing to Change
"Every time Zuck looks at a product, it's as if he does so with fresh eyes. He isn't burdened by what other products are like or what the existing product is like," wrote Facebook engineer Andrew Bosworth in a primer for new employees that Facebook later posted for the public at large. "He doesn't care what he said yesterday, even if he was presented with the same product". This willingness to be flexible has likely come into play when Facebook was forced to make changes after encountering controversy over its privacy policies.
Simpler Is Better
MySpace is facing its second round of dramatic layoffs in less than a year and will wind up reducing its staff by much more than half. Therefore, it seems like a good moment to consider what Facebook did right and MySpace did wrong.
"MySpace, as the No. 1 social network site, was not very easy to use," notes Brandon Wade, founder of the websites SeekingArrangement.com and WhatsYourPrice.com. "Facebook is simpler, which makes it easier to use and faster to load. It has a simpler, better design."
By the way, if you've ever wondered why Facebook uses blue for nearly everything, the reason is that Zuckerberg has red-green color blindness and blue is one of the colors he sees best.
Be Media-savvy
During the privacy controversies, Zuckerberg broke out in a bad case of "flop sweat" while being video-recorded at a technology conference, an embarrassing moment that has been viewed more than a million times on You Tube. He has gotten much better in front of the cameras after that incident, notes Mark Scott, senior vice president of MSL Atlanta, a public relations and marketing agency.
"He likely brought some great communicators in to coach him on his messaging," says Scott. "For such a high-profile company, a put-together, confident CEO who can get his messages across in the media, in board rooms, at investor conferences, etc., is crucial to success, and Zuckerberg obviously understood that and has made some terrific improvements."
In fact, Zuckerberg has gotten so relaxed and image-aware that, far from suing or even protesting over his portrayal in The Social Network, he joined its star, Jesse Eisenberg, onstage at "Saturday Night Live." Eisenberg asked Zuckerberg if he'd seen the film, and what he thought of it.
"It was … interesting," Zuck responded.
Leadership lessons from Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg shares three most important lessons for aspiring leaders which were a great deal behind his meteoric success; here are the three:
Unyielding belief in a vision.
Mark Zuckerberg epitomized this leadership quality. He never gave up. Unyielding belief in a vision demands passionately defending your vision to naysayers and cynics. When you plan to do something that has not been done before, the critics are going to come out of every crack, cranny, and crevice. Welcome them because their resistance and opposition will generate feedback and data to enable you to sharpen and refine your vision. Use their agitation to feed and fuel your determination to succeed.
Where’s my millennial?
All leaders should ask this question. Mark Zuckerberg is a millennial and every company that is serious about competing and growing should have a few or an army of them. Every leader who is serious about influencing significant change should have a 17-29 year old out-of-the box, brilliant and curious thinker at the table. Millennial possesses critical thinking genius to create new trends, tension and templates. Invite, support, and celebrate them.
Keep trying something new.
If there is anything that is predictable about Facebook, it is the certainty that they are going to upgrade, tweak, adjust, or add a feature. With each feature enhancement, there is value added. In this post recessionary period, to remain relevant and competitive, you have to keep trying something new. This does not mean you metaphorically throw spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks. This does not necessarily mean that you depart from your mission, but it does mean that you may need to broaden the application of your mission.
Recognition
Zuckerberg won the 2007 Crunchie Award for “Best Startup CEO”.
He was the Time Magazine 2010 Person of the Year.
Inspiring Quotes by Mark Zuckerberg
“There is lots of stuff none of us have ever seen before. That’s good in some ways, but limiting in other ways.”
“It's not because of the amount of money. For my colleagues and me the most important thing is that we create an open information flow for people. Having media corporations owned by conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me.”
“I think there's confusion around what the point of social networks is. A lot of different companies characterized as social networks have different goals - some serve the function of business networking, some are media portals. What we're trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information, and share information.”
“When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power.”
“People are learning how to use the site and what’s OK to share. As time goes on people will learn what’s appropriate, what is safe for them and share the information accordingly.”
“We encourage you to participate and make your voice heard.”
“Our strategy is very horizontal. We're trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically we're trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social whether it's on the web, or mobile, or other devices.”
“Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.”
“If you do the things that are easier first, you can actually make a lot of progress.” “Understanding people, is not a waste of time”.
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