Favourite Entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg Childhood Biography Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984 and grew up in the suburbs of New York, Dobbs Ferry. He was the second of four children and the only son in the educated family. Mark’s father, Edward Zuckerberg, is a dentist and mother, Karen Zuckerberg, is a psychiatrist. His father owned a dental practice next to the family house. Mark and his three sisters, Arielle, Randi and Donna were raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Mark got interested in programming yet in elementary school. The fact that the world is divided between programmers and users, Mark found out when he was 10 years old and got his first PC Quantex 486DX on the Intel 486. From Mark Zuckerberg biography we found out he was taught Atari BASIC Programming by his father and when Mark was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messenger, which he called “ZuckNet”. It made all the computers connected to each other and allowed to transfer messages between the house and dental office. His father installed the messenger on his computer in his dentist office and the receptionist could inform him when a new patient arrived. Mark also enjoyed developing games and communication tools and as he said he was doing it just for fun. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, even hired a computer tutor David Newman who gave his son some private lessons. Also being at high school, Mark wrote an artificially intelligent media player Synapse for MP3-playlists that carefully studied the preferences of 1 | P a g e Favourite Entrepreneur a user and was able to generate playlists ‘guessing’, which tracks user wants to listen to right now. Microsoft and AOL got unusual interest in Synapse media player and wanted to buy it out. However, the young talent rejected the offer of IT-giants and then politely rejected their invitation to cooperate. Just like that, Mark Zuckerberg refused from dozens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and work in one of the top IT-corporations. Soon Mark Zuckerberg studied at the Academy of Phillips Exeter, an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. He showed good results there in science and literature, receiving a degree in classics. He also showed a great talent in fencing and even became the school captain of the fencing team. Yet Mark Zuckerberg stayed fascinated by coding and wanted to work on the development of new software. In 2002, after graduating Phillips Exeter, Zuckerberg entered Harvard University. By his second year at the Ivy League he had gained a reputation as a software developer on campus. It was then when he wrote 2 | P a g e Favourite Entrepreneur a program CourseMatch, which helped students choose their subjects on the basis of lists of courses from other users. FaceMash – A Fun Site for Voting In 2003, once summer evening when Mark Zuckerberg suffered from insomnia in the Harvard dormitory room, he got an idea to create a site called FaceMash. Mark decided to hack the database of Harvard, where the students uploaded their profile pictures. He quickly wrote a program that randomly selected two pictures of two random female students and put them next to each other, asking “Who is hotter?”, giving the option for voting. The process was in full swing and site was visited by most of the students in Harvard. When the number of visitors exceeded the limit, the server crashed due to overload. Mark appeared before the committee on computer hacking. Of course nobody told Mark Zuckerberg ‘Well done!’ and he received a disciplinary action, and had noticed that such kind of things cause stormy interest in society. By the way, Harvard has refused to comment on the incident up till now. The Rising of Facebook About ten months before the Zuckerberg’s FaceMash epic, one of the students of Harvard – Divya Narendra – had already spoken with the idea of creating a social network exclusively for Harvard students, many of whom were suffering from emotional stiffness. And not have ‘aliens’ engaged into the network, Narendra suggested using Harvard email address as the main username. Divya Narendra’s partners were twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The father of the Winklevoss twins, Howard Winklevoss, is a successful 3 | P a g e Favourite Entrepreneur financial consultant and put in his sons a lot of efforts and money – so the problem with the initial capital for the future network could be solved easily. In conversation with Mark Narendra said that the project would be called Harvard Connection (later renamed to ConnectU), and its members will be posted to the Internet their photos, personal information and useful links. The tasks of Mark Zuckerberg included programming of the site and creating a special source code, which would allow the system to work as quickly as possible. After a private meeting with Narendra and the Winklevoss twins, Zuckerberg agreed to join in the work, but the potential of his new partners he estimated it skeptically. While working on Harvard Connection he got a fantastic idea about his own social network. On February 04, 2004 he registered the domain name TheFacebook.com, now known throughout the world as Facebook.com. However, it functioned only within Harvard. After Zuckerberg and his partner Eduardo Saverin realized that there were already registered 4000 users, they have come to the conclusion that they needed the services of new programmers. One of them was a Mark’s neighbor, Darren Moskowitz, who further opened the Facebook service to students at Columbia University, Stanford, and Yale. Around the same time after the IPO, Zuckerberg owned 503.6 million shares. And now Zuckerberg controls nearly 60% of the company’s votes, 35% – Eduardo Saverin, and 5% went to newcomer Moskowitz. Another friend of Mark, Chris Hughes, was assigned as the Press attache of Facebook. 4 | P a g e Favourite Entrepreneur Some time later, the registration was opened to all students. The main condition was the availability of an email address in .edu zone, which also indicated a person’s belonging to education sector. It must be said that at first this tactic worked out nicely. The project attracted audience attention of sufficient quality. When a user was trying to sign up he had to fill out a detailed profile, and in addition to the email address in .edu zone it was requested to add a real profile picture. If people used avatars instead of real pictures their profiles were deleted. Soon Facebook went beyond the education sector, becoming more and more popular. Mark Zuckerberg started looking for investors. The first investments Mark received from one of the founders of PayPal, Peter Thiel, who is well known throughout Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel allocated $500,000 dollars and that amount was sufficient for immediate Facebook purposes. The project began to evolve rapidly. In less than a year after it was founded more than 1 million people joined the social network. For further development of Facebook they needed more investments. Accel Partners invested in Facebook $12.7 million dollars and then Greylock Partners added to this amount $27.5 million dollars. By 2005, Facebook became accessible for all educational institutions and universities in the USA. Zuckerberg still believed that his project is a social network for students, but the interest of users to Facebook grew exponentially. Then it was decided to make a registration accessible to the public. And after this a Facebook ‘epidemic’ started. 5 | P a g e Favourite Entrepreneur The main thing that immediately attracted users in Facebook, is that friends who meet in real life now could communicate with each other online. It was something new. Facebook audience grew rapidly, but the monetization of the project still remained unclear. Everyone expected that the main instrument should be context advertising. The fact is that every Facebook user fills sufficiently detailed profile, which can be used to show relevant advertisements. Obviously that would open up enough options to advertisers, who may be of interest to their audience. But Facebook continued just to build number of users. When they got over 50 million users, large companies began to offer Zuckerberg to sale them the project. So, one time even Yahoo! offered $900 million dollars for Facebook. Impressive sum, but it absolutely did not satisfy Mark. Facebook biography and Mark Zuckerberg success story is quite intriguing, isn’t it? Lawsuits against Facebook The Facebook project launch was accompanied by series of scandals. Six days later after launching the site senior students brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra accused Mark Zuckerberg in stoling their idea. They claimed that in 2003 hired Zuckerberg to make him complete the establishment of the social network HarvardConnection.com. According to their testimonies, Zuckerberg did not provide them the results of his work, but used the original source code to create Facebook. In the same year, Narendra and the Winklevoss twins launched their own network renamed to ConnectU. And they continued to attack on Mark Zuckerberg, complaining Harvard administration and The Harvard Crimson newspaper. Initially Zuckerberg urged journalists not to publish the investigation: he showed them what supposedly he did for HarvardConnection, and explained that those developments did not have 6 | P a g e Favourite Entrepreneur any relation to Facebook. But very inappropriately, another Harvard student – John Thomson – in personal conversations started saying that Zuckerberg stole one of his ideas for Facebook. The newspaper decided to publish the article and it offended Mark Zuckerberg very much. Zuckerberg took revenge on The Harvard Crimson. According to Silicon Alley Insider, in 2004, he breaks the mailboxes of two journalists from The Harvard Crimson, using the newly launched Facebook.