Favourite Entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg Childhood
BiographyMarkElliot 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. Marks 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 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 a program
CourseMatch, which helped students choose their subjects on the
basis of lists of courses from other users.
FaceMash A Fun Site for VotingIn 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 Zuckerbergs 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 Narendras partners were
twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The father of the Winklevoss
twins, Howard Winklevoss, is a successful 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 Marks 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 companys votes, 35% Eduardo
Saverin, and 5% went to newcomer Moskowitz. Another friend of Mark,
Chris Hughes, was assigned as the Press attache of Facebook.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 persons 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 ofPayPal, 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 aFacebook epidemic started.
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, isnt it?Lawsuits against FacebookThe 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 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. He found users who were involved in the newspaper and
browsed their logs (i.e. history) of incorrectly entered passwords
in Facebook. Zuckerbergs expectations were met: two employees of
the newspaper absentmindedly tried to login Facebook with passwords
from their mailboxes. Silicon Alley Insider wrote that Zuckerberg
got lucky: he had a chance to read the correspondence about him
between the editorial office and HarvardConnection.The Winklevoss
twins and Narendra filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, but the
court rejected their claim. They were persistent and filed another
lawsuit. This time the court examined the code sources to
understand whether they were actually stolen. But the truth was
still not clear. The examination results were not announced. In
2009, Zuckerberg agreed to pay $45 million ($20 million in cash,
and the remaining amount in Facebook shares) ConnectU as part of
the court settlement. The case was closed. By that time ConnectU
had less than 100,000 users, Facebook boasted about 150 million
users.The Winklevoss twins yet did not calm down and filed a
petition in the U.S. Court of Appeals, but they were denied a
retrial. According to their lawyer Jerome Falk, the appellate court
refused to take a review of the case based only on the parties
settlement agreement, which states that members of the trial after
the signing of the document does not have the right to resume the
trial. In counsels view, the decision was illegal, as Mark
Zuckerberg in a proceeding in 2008 provided false information about
the companys value.On May 17, 2011 Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss
filed another lawsuit against the owner of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg
to the U.S. Supreme Court. That was the latest attempt of the
brothers to make the court to reconsider the case.How Facebook
Makes MoneyIn 2013, the turnover of Facebook, Inc. reached $7.87
billion and net income $1.5 billion. The growth rates are also
impressive: three years turnover has increased six-fold.Basis
earnings of Facebook come from contextual ads on the pages of
social network. Growing number of users and the time they spend on
the site is converted into advertising revenues. 85% percent of
cash-flow that went through the company last year was earned
through contextual advertising.Most of the rest 15% are deductions
from purchases made through the Facebook payment system. These are
mostly not real, but virtual goods. For example seeds, fruits and
vegetables, purchased by fans of the popular game Farmville
developed by Zynga.
Despite the apparent frivolity, virtual goods is a serious
business, and the Facebook report confirms that. The company
estimates that in 2010 the global market turnover for virtual goods
reached $7 billion, and by 2014 it rose to $15 billion.At the
beginning of January 2013, Facebook Inc. started testing the
service of paid private messaging. Facebook charges $1.00 for a
private message that you can send to the users who are not in your
friend list. And the message goes directly to their Inbox folder,
instead of Other one. But Facebook went further and realized that
some users are worth more than a $1. If you want to send a message
to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and get into his inbox, you might
have to pay $100 for this exclusive option. This is another very
simple way to generate additional revenue.Acquisition of Instagram,
Oculus Rift and WhatsAppMark Zuckerberg is a great strategist and
he keeps acquiring companies that continue their operation as
independent entities under Facebooks umbrella.In April 2012,
acquired mobile photo sharing app Instagram for $1 billion in cash
and stock. Initially, it was an iOS application developed by Mike
Krieger and Kevin Systrom. Now Instagram application is available
on Android OS as well.In March 2014, Facebook closed acquisition of
Oculus Rift for $2 billion. Oculus Rift is a virtual reality
hardware engineered by Oculus VR Company headed by Palmer Freeman
Luckey. Facebook paid $400 million in cash plus 23.1m Facebook
shares, with a further $300 million in incentives if it hits
certain milestones in the future.In October 2014, Mark Zuckerberg
completed purchase of WhatsApp for $22 billion. Facebook paid $4.59
billion in cash and 177,760,669 shares in the company. WhatsApp is
an instant messaging application founded by Jan Koum and Brian
Acton in 2009.
WhatsApp Co-Founders Brian Acton (left) and Jan Koum (right)
Mark Zuckerberg: TIMEs 2010 Person of the YearIn January 2010,
TIME magazine named Facebook founder, CEO and 26-year old
billionaire Mark Zuckerberg the Person of the Year 2010.Lady Gaga,
James Cameron and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, were
struggling for this title that year. However, TIME magazine chose
his hero. The social network created by Mark connected almost every
tenth person on the planet, Richard Stengel, TIME editor-in-chief
explained their choice. According to him, Today, Facebook is the
third largest country in the world that knows about its citizens as
much as no government on planet does.According to TIME, in the past
year no one else had such great impact on the world than the
current winner. Marks popularity is so high that in 2010 David
Fincher shot a movie The Social Network in which the main role of
Facebook founder was brilliantly played by Jesse Eisenberg.
Previously, TIMEs persons of the year became the United States
presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.In 2010, Forbes magazine
admitted Mark Zuckerberg as the youngest billionaire in its list to
the state of $4 billion.In the rating of the 400 richest people in
the United States, published by Forbes magazine in 2014, Zuckerberg
took 11th place with a net worth of $34 billion.
Mark Zuckerbergs LifestyleCurrently Zuckerberg lives in the Palo
Alto in a $7 million estate that features 5 bedrooms a saltwater
pool, and over 5,000 square feet of property.
Mark Zuckerbergs Wife Priscilla ChanOn May 19, 2012Mark
Zuckerbergmarried his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan in Palo
Alto, California and finally they happy live together.We hope you
have enjoyed reading Mark Zuckerberg biography and breathtaking
success story of Facebook and it has inspired you to new
discoveries.
Bibliography The Following Website used for collecting
information about this Entrepreneur:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
www.biography.com/people/mark-zuckerberg-507402
mashable.com/category/mark-zuckerberg/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
http://businessideaslab.com/mark-zuckerberg/
https://www.google.co.in
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