Case Study of the Profile of a Young Entrepreneur

Case study of the profile of a young entrepreneur - Mark Zuckerberg

AN ENTREPRENEURSHIP PROJECT REPORT

Submitted by

Sindhu Bharathi

Class: 11 Arts

Subject: ENTREPRENEURSHIP

THE INDIAN HIGH SCHOOL

DUBAI

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7th June 2010

THE INDIAN HIGH SCHOOL, DUBAI

BONAFIDE CERTIFICATE

Certified that this project report “PROJECT REPORT AND MARKET SURVEY

ON Mark Zuckerberg”

is the bonafide work of “Sindhu Bharathi” who carried out the project work under my supervision.

Teacher In-charge

Mrs. Priya Godwani

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Acknowledgement:

I’d like to thank my teacher, Mrs.Priya for her guidance as well as

encouragement on this project. I’d also like to thank my parents as well as

friends for being there throughout with me,

Sindhu.

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Table of Contents Chapter Name: 

Page No.

1 Early life

2   Facebook

2.1   Founding

2.2   Moving to California

2.3   Facebook Platform

2.4   Facebook Beacon

2.5   ConnectU Controversy

2.6   Microsoft investment in Facebook

2.7 Facebook in 2010

2.8   Movie

3 Appendix

4 Glossary

5 Bibliography

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Mark Elliot

Zuckerberg:The mastermind Of

Facebook

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Mark Elliot Zuckerberg ,born on May 14, 1984, is an American

entrepreneur best known for co-founding the popular social networking

site Facebook. Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook with fellow

classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes while

attending Harvard. He is currently one of the youngest billionaires in the

world with personal wealth of US$4 billion in 2010.

Early lifeZuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York to a Jewish family and raised

in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He started programming when he was in middle

school. Early on, Zuckerberg enjoyed developing computer programs,

especially communication tools and games. Before attending Phillips Exeter

Academy, Mark went to school at Ardsley High School. “At high school, he

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excelled in the classics. He transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy where he

immersed himself in Latin. He also built a program to help the workers in his

father's office communicate; he built a version of the game Risk and a music

player named Synapse that used artificial

intelligence to learn the user's listening habits. Microsoft and AOL tried to

purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he decided to attend Harvard

University instead, where he joined Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity.  In

college, he was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad.

Zuckerberg (right) with Robert Scoble in 2008.

FoundingZuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004. The idea for Facebook came from his days at Phillips Exeter Academy which, like most colleges and prep schools, had a long-standing tradition of publishing an annual student directory with headshot photos of all students, faculty and staff known as the "Facebook". Once at college, Zuckerberg's Facebook started off as just a "Harvard-thing",with some financial help from a friend Eduard Servin, until Zuckerberg then decided to spread Facebook to other schools and enlisted the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They first spread it to Stanford,Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell and Yale, and then to other schools with social contacts with Harvard. Only months later when it was officially a national student network phenomenon, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to pursue their dreams and run Facebook full time. In August 2005, theFacebook was officially called Facebook and the domain Facebook.com was purchased for a reported $200,000.

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Moving to California

Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California, with Moskovitz and some friends.

They leased a small house which served as their first office. Over the summer,

Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel who invested in the company. They got their first

office during the summer of 2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group

planned to return to Harvard in the fall but eventually decided to remain in

California. To date, he has not returned as a student to college.

Facebook Platform

On May 24, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a Facebook Platform, a

development platform for programmers to create social applications within

Facebook. This announcement sparked a great deal of interest in the developer

community. Within weeks, many applications had been built and some

already had millions of users. Today, there are more than 800,000 developers

around the world building applications for Facebook Platform.

On July 23, 2008, Zuckerberg announced Facebook Connect, a version of

Facebook Platform for users.

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Facebook Beacon

On November 6, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a new social advertising

system at an event in Los Angeles. A part of the new program, called Beacon,

enabled people to share information with their Facebook friends based on

their browsing activities on other sites. An eBay seller, for instance, could let

friends know

automatically what they have for sale via the Facebook news feed as they list

items.

The program came under heavy privacy concerns from both privacy groups

and individual users. Zuckerberg and Facebook failed to respond to the

concerns quickly, and on December 5, 2007, Zuckerberg ultimately wrote a

blog post on Facebook taking responsibility for issues with Beacon and

offering an easier way for users to opt out of the service.

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ConnectU Controversy

Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya

Narendra accused Zuckerberg of fraudulently letting them believe he would

help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com (later called

ConnectU).  They filed a lawsuit in 2004 but were dismissed without

prejudice on March 28, 2007. It was refilled soon thereafter in U.S. District

Court in Boston, and a preliminary hearing was scheduled for July 25, 2007.

At the hearing the judge told ConnectU parts of their complaint were not

sufficiently pled and gave them the ability to refile an amended complaint. On

June 25, 2008, the case was settled and Facebook agreed to pay a $65 million

settlement.

As part of the lawsuit, in November 2007, confidential court documents were

posted on the website of Harvard alumni magazine 02138. They included

Zuckerberg's social security number, his parents' home address and his

girlfriend's address. Facebook filed to get the documents taken down, but the

judge ruled in favor of 02138.

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Microsoft investment in Facebook

On October 24, 2007, Facebook Inc. sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft Corp. for

$240 million, rejecting a competing offer from online search leader

Google Inc. This would indicate that Facebook had a market value of $15

billion at the time of the sale. A software update for Microsoft's Xbox 360

games console has been released which added support for Facebook, Twitter

and Last.fm

Facebook in 2009

As of May 2010,Facebook has claimed that it has attained over 400 million

users.

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MovieThere is a movie based on Mark Zuckerberg and the surrounding creators

of Facebook, called The Social Network. It is currently set to release in 2010,

and stars Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake. Another Hollywood venture

based on the life of Zuckerberg ,The Accidental Billionaires film will be

directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)

and reportedly has a $US47 million ($56.5 million) budget.

Forbes profile of mark:World's youngest billionaire leading his addictive social networking site Facebook to an inevitable public pay-day. Firm became "cash-flow positive" last year, instituted dual-class voting structure akin to what Google put into place before it held its 2004 offering. Fresh-faced entrepreneur launched Facebook from Harvard dorm room in 2004. Left school for Silicon Valley later that year; bagged initial $500,000 investment from PayPal cofounder

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Peter Thiel. Last May Russian investment firm Digital Sky agreed to buy stock from Facebook employees; deal priced company at $10 billion. Shares continue to change hands on private equity exchange SecondMarket; recent transactions put the value at upwards of $15 billion. Growing rapidly: in past 12 months user base has surged 130% to 400 million.

Facemash

Zuckerberg created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room.

Mark Zuckerberg invented Facemash on October 28, 2003, while

attending Harvard as a sophomore. The site represented a Harvard University

version of Hot or Not, according to the Harvard Crimson. That night,

Zuckerberg was blogging about a girl who had dumped him and trying to

think of something to do to get her off his mind:

I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 p.m. and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] Facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous Facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.—9:48 pmYea, it's on. I'm not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can't really ever be sure with farm animals...), but I like the idea of comparing two people together.—11:09 pmLet the hacking begin.

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—12:58 am

According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash "used photos compiled from

the online Facebooks of nine Houses, placing two

next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person". To

accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's

computer network and copied the houses' private dormitory ID images.

Harvard at that time did not have a student directory with photos and basic

information and the initial site generated 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views

in its first four hours online. That the initial site mirrored people’s physical

community—with their real identities—represented the key aspects of what

later became Facebook.

"Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value

as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools (maybe even

ones with good-looking people...)," Zuckerberg wrote in his personal blog.

"But one thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well.

Someone had to do it eventually..." The site was quickly forwarded to several

campus group list-servers but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard

administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of

security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and faced

expulsion, but ultimately the charges were dropped.

Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social

study tool ahead of an art history final by uploading 500 Augustan images to a

website, with one image per page along with a comment section. He opened

the site up to his classmates and people started sharing their notes. "The

professor said it had the best grades of any final he’d ever given. This was my

first social hack. With Facebook, I wanted to make something that would

make Harvard more open," Zuckerberg said in a TechCrunch interview.

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The Facebook

TheFacebook

TheFacebook on February 12, 2004.

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The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in

January 2004. He was inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard

Crimson about the Facemash incident. "It is clear that the technology needed

to create a centralized Website is readily available," the paper observed. "The

benefits are many." On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched

"TheFacebook", originally located at theFacebook.com.  "Everyone’s been

talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard," Zuckerberg told The

Harvard Crimson. "I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a

couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can

do it in a week." "When Mark finished the site, he told a couple of friends.

And then one of them suggested putting it on the Kirkland House online

mailing list, which was...three hundred people," according to

roommate Dustin Moskovitz. "And, once they did that, several dozen people

joined, and then they were telling people at the other houses. By the end of the

night, we were...actively watching the registration process. Within twenty-

four hours, we had somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred

registrants."

Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which

Zuckerberg called the next logical step. At that time, high school networks

required an invitation to join.  Facebook later expanded membership

eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple

Inc. and Microsoft. Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to

everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address. In October 2008,

Facebook announced that it was to set up its international headquarters

in Dublin, Ireland.[45]

Facebook has been highly used in the years 2009-2010. It has crossed the

visits of Google in some continents. And recently, Facebook.com was the top

social network across eight of individual markets in the region, Philippines,

Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong and

Vietnam, while other brands commanded the top positions in certain markets,

including Google-owned Orkut in India, Mixi.jp in Japan, CyWorld in South

Korea and Yahoo!’s Wretch.cc in Taiwan

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Facebook : The Complete Biography

AvailabilityUnlike its competitors MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, hi5, Bebo and others, Facebook isn’t available to everyone — which explains its relatively low user count. Currently, users must be members of one of the 30,000+ recognized schools, colleges, universities, organizations, and companies within the U.S,

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Canada, and other English-speaking nations. This generally involves having a valid e-mail ID with the associated institution.

Surveys & Studies

A large number of surveys and studies have been conducted around Facebook – some with interesting results. For instance, according to an internal September 2005 survey, approximately 85% of the students in the supported colleges had a Facebook account, with 60% of them logging in daily. A survey conducted by Student Monitor revealed Facebook was the most “in” thing after the iPod and tying with beer, and comScore Media Metrix discovered users spend approximately 20 minutes everyday on Facebook. Another 2005 survey said 90% of all undergraduates in the U.S. use either Facebook or MySpace regularly, and a detailed questionnaire analysis by Chris Roberts revealed that 76.2% never click on its ads. Perhaps the most amazing statistic of all may be that Facebook is the 7th most trafficked site in the U.S.

Business & FundingGiven the situation other social networks on the web are facing, Facebook is in a good position financially. For its initial funding, it

received $500,000 from Peter Theil, co-founder of PayPal. A few months later, it was also able to get $13 million from Accel Partners, who are also

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investors in 15 other Web 2.0 startups, and $25 million from Greylock Partners, making their overall venture equal to approximately $40 million.

For users, Facebook’s core service is completely free and ad-supported. In fact, in August 2006 Facebook signed a three year deal with Microsoft to provide and sell ads on their site in return for a revenue split. The deal followed an announcement from Facebook’s direct competitor MySpace who signed a similar deal with Google. The youthful demographic that both the services attract is highly prized amongst advertisers and should return a good amount of revenue for both the services to stay alive – and profit. Another deal which made news in July was Facebook’s agreement with Apple to give away 10 million free iTunes samplers to Facebook users. A deal has also been signed to provide Facebook credit cards.

The ServiceNow, let’s look into Facebook – the service itself, and some of its features, highlights, and the things that got Facebook where it is today.

Facebook Profiles

As Facebook has evolved, so have its profile pages – new fields have been added and users can share more information than before.

A typical Facebook profile consists of a number of different sections, including Information, Status, Friends, Friends in Other Networks, Photos, Notes, Groups, and The Wall. Most of the sections are self-explanatory but some are specific to Facebook.

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Facebook Photos

With over 1.5 million photos uploaded daily, one of Facebook’s most popular features has been the ability to upload photos. Users can upload unlimited photos from their cell phone or through its Java-based web interface. Facebook is one of the few services to offer an unlimited quota with their only restriction being a 60-photos-per-album limit – this is much appreciated by Facebook’s college demographic.

The process of uploading photos is very simple. Users create albums which they can assign limitations to (e.g. visible to my friends only) and upload photos within them. The album is then put into their profile, and other users with right credentials have the ability to see and comment on them. Facebook also gives the feature to share the photos with a simple web link or send them via AIM or by e-mail. What’s more, users can also order prints online through a simple integrated interface.

Facebook GroupsJust like every other social network, Facebook has something called ‘groups.’ Users can create new ones or join and participate in existing ones. This is also displayed in their profile and is a good indication of hobbies and interests a person might have.

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There are two kind of groups, a normal group and a secret group, which isn’t shown on the profile. A normal group is just like any other, but users can also create and invite others into secret groups. These can be used for collaborating on university projects, and provide a way to have closed discussions. About 80% of the groups are ‘fun-related’ and companies can even sponsor groups – as is the case with, for example, the Apple users group.

Facebook Events

Another Facebook success is their ‘events’ feature, which provides the ability to organize, be part of, and plan for events. This feature has been extremely successful when it comes to organizing parties.

Along with organizing and joining events, users can also invite and recommend others to an event. This feature, however, has raised some controversy as it is generally the start of underage drinking and dry campus violations. Colleges and universities use the feature to catch planning of such events before hand and investigate those that are over. In any case, it’s one of the most popular features of the service and even beats some of the competing products made specifically for this purpose.

Facebook Developers

On August 2006, Facebook offered a free Developers API called Facebook Developers. This essentially gives anyone access to

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Facebook’s internals and lets programmers create widgets, mashups, tools and projects based around Facebook.

This is an important feature for Facebook since it makes it the first major social network to give access to its API. Although it is limited to 100,000

requests a day, it’s more than enough for a decent web app to come through. What’s more, a selection of applications have already been created. FaceBank is a promising tool which lets you ‘keep track of depts and shared expenses with friends.’

Another interesting application is lickuacious which lets you ‘rank your friends by wall popularity.’ The Wall, of course, is Facebook’s comments feature.

Facebook NotesFacebook’s Notes addition launched in late august 2007. The service is called Facebook Notes, and allows users to write a Facebook blog. All notes are displayed in the user’s profile, and other members can add comments.

Notes possesses an important feature, which is the ability to import and syndicate an external blog, although unlike Technorati, doesn’t allow you to claim one only to yourself (e.g. it’s possible to claim the New York Times syndication feed easily in one’s Notes). The service allows HTML to be included in the posts, although JavaScript and Flash are disabled. You can attach photos and also post via cell phone by sending your notes to [email protected]. Another interesting feature is tagging – tagging a post with a username will automatically send it to that specific user. The Notes feature has been well received.

The Future24

Facebook is a massively successful social networking service that grew to prominence in virtually no time. It’s not hard to see why: its features and tools are highly appealing, and Facebook users are extremely well networked in real life. Rumors of an acquisition continue to circulate, with some estimates putting the price in the billions of dollars. In the short term, however, Facebook plans to go it alone, continuing to build out one of the world’s most successful social networks.

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Appendix

Appendix:

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Fact or Fiction??:A report from an Australian journalist, Asher Moses.Mark Zuckerberg wanted more than money from his Facebook discovery.

The story behind the world's most popular social networking site has a bizarrely Australian twist. In 2004, aboard the yacht of a Sun Microsystems executive, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and friends apparently dined on a koala.

Or so says Ben Mezrich, the multimillionaire American novelist who has built a career – and scored several lucrative film deals – from charting the success of young geeks who strike it rich.

"Whenever I see a young person with a Ferrari I try to follow them to find out how they made their money," Mezrich told the Herald.

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His latest, The Accidental Billionaires: Sex, Money Betrayal and the Founding of Facebook, which charts the rise of Facebook from Harvard dorm room project in 2004 to today's multibillion-dollar force, will be released in Australia on Tuesday. Before the book was finished, the actor Kevin Spacey and the writer Aaron Sorkin – creator of The West Wing – had signed on to transform it into film.

Some of the more saucy tales were destined for the big screen, such as Zuckerberg and the early Facebook investor Eduardo Saverin getting busy with groupies in adjacent bathroom stalls. Or the time Zuckerberg was picked up by a Victoria's Secret model at a San Francisco party.

But it's difficult to separate fact from fiction.

Zuckerberg refused to be interviewed for the book and many of the salacious tales appear to have been provided by Saverin, who was pushed early from the company and became embroiled in a legal battle with Zuckerberg.

Mezrich frames the story around Zuckerberg and his co-founders creating Facebook as a way to pick up women, to party and to get into a private Harvard club. Zuckerberg is portrayed as a back-stabbing genius with a fetish for Asian women.

The book is marketed as non-fiction, and Mezrich insists it is a true story based on interviews with hundreds of sources and extensive court documents. But he admits some scenes and dialogue were based on a "best guess" from what sources told him.

In his 2002 book Bringing down the House – the story of six MIT maths geniuses who scammed Las Vegas casinos with Blackjack card-counting techniques – Mezrich admitted to fabricating some characters and situations.

But despite reviewers calling his latest work "non-fictionish" and "fluffy lad lit", Mezrich's narrative non-fiction style – he likens it to Hunter S. Thompson – is well received by Hollywood.

"I always think of a film as I write the book. I write very cinematically. I'm not interested in people sitting in front of computers," Mezrich says. "I'm into the salacious details and I love the sex and the money – that's sort of been my genre from the beginning."

Once Facesmash transformed to Facebook, Zuckerberg's former Harvard classmates, the twin Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, sued him claiming he stole their idea and source code for Facebook when they asked him for programming help in 2003. The case settled last year for $US65 million, chump change for Zuckerberg considering the 25-year-old is now the

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world's youngest billionaire, based on Facebook's most recent valuation of $US6.5 billion.

Last year, another Zuckerberg Harvard buddy, Aaron Greenspan, who was working to develop a social networking site around the same time as Zuckerberg, petitioned to have the Facebook trademark cancelled. He claimed he came up with the Facebook name and that Zuckerberg stole some of his ideas.

Greenspan and Zuckerberg settled for an unknown amount but not before Greenspan was able to release Authoritas, his account of Facebook's inception.

Facebook has refused to publicly buy into the argy-bargy, disputing the accuracy of Mezrich's book but not commenting on specifics.

Mezrich cannot understand why Zuckerberg would take issue with being portrayed as an intelligent if socially awkward chick magnet. He does not regret his year-long failure to speak with Zuckerberg because the latter would have tried to airbrush some of the more saucy details.

And Mezrich stands by the koala yarn. "It was a time in their lives when they were running around being wooed by every venture capitalist in Silicon Valley . . . these were just kids who were given something and they thought it was part of their adventure.

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Glossary Developers API -

An application-programming interface (API) is a set of programming instructions and standards for accessing a Web-based software application or Web tool. A software company releases its API to the public so that other software developers can design products that are powered by its service.

For example, Amazon.com released its API so that Web site developers could more easily access Amazon's product information. Using the Amazon API, a third party Web site can post direct links to Amazon products with updated prices and an option to "buy now."

MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, hi5, Bebo, twitter –

Other social networking sites

HTML –

Hypertext markup language – the programming used to create websites and webpages . Usually used to indicate the web address of a site .

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Bibliography:

WWW.WIKIPEDIA.COM – The early life of Zuckerberg. WWW.MASHABLE.COM

WWW.GOOGLE.COM – Photos

WWW.NYDAILYNEWS.COM – Controversies

WWW.FORBES.COM –

Wall Street Journal - article

Gulf News - article

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