“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.
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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”.
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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.
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More about Mark Elliot Zuckerberg
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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.
Young Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook
 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”. |
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| 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.
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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.
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Recognition
Zuckerberg won the 2007 Crunchie Award for “Best Startup CEO”.
He was the Time Magazine 2010 Person of the Year.
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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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