Mark Zuckerberg was born in one of the largest cities in the world - New York. The boy grew up in a large family: in addition to his mother, who was a psychiatrist, and his father, who worked as a dentist, he was surrounded by three sisters as a child. He became involved with technological progress already while studying in elementary school and was fascinated by programming. He was able to devote as much time as possible to his main hobby after the appearance of the first computer - this happened when he was a sixth grader. Soon he managed to independently create computer game, and then a whole program for recognizing the musical tastes and preferences of listeners.
Microsoft offered Mark $2 million for this invention, but the young man refused the reward. In addition to programming, Zuckerberg managed to practice fencing and master ancient languages, in which he showed serious interest. Higher education Mark received his studies at the prestigious Harvard, where he entered in 2002.
Facebook founder career
During his years at the university, Mark gained serious popularity due to a random idea - he created a website on which he posted photographs of Harvard students and made it possible to vote for those he liked. In a matter of hours, the number of visitors to the site increased by hundreds, and soon among the registered users there were not only students from Harvard, but also Stanford and Yale. This is how the prototype of the world famous social network Facebook, which was launched on February 4, 2004.
However, Mark also had ill-wishers, they were Divya Naredra and the Winklevoss twins, who initially put forward ideas to the university leadership about the possibility of additional communication between Harvard students. Zuckerberg was supposed to be involved in programming the future site, but it was never possible to implement the idea with such a composition. Therefore, after the creation of Facebook, Mark was accused of stealing other people's plans, but he categorically denied this, because the ideas about the social network were vague and unclear. Only he himself managed to put them into practice in the right way.
For further development of the project, which was not long in coming, Zuckerberg needed additional financial investments. We managed to get them again completely by accident - the famous programmer Sean Parker introduced Mark to successful businessman Peter Thiels, who decided to invest $500 thousand in Facebook. From then on, Mark began to focus exclusively on his social network and improve it; he even quit studying at Harvard for this. The success of Facebook after Thiels' help was obvious: already in the year of its creation it counted more than 1 million people as users. Zuckerberg earned $1.5 billion from this popular site, making him the youngest billionaire in human history.
In 2010, Mark became “person of 2010” according to the American Time magazine.
Personal life of Mark Zuckerberg
He spends most of his time working on Facebook. But romantic relationships are also present in his life - since 2002, he dated Priscilla Chan, whom he met while studying at Harvard. On May 19, 2012, Mark took .
They managed to surprise everyone they knew with their decision to get married and first announced to their loved ones that they were going to celebrate Priscilla receiving her doctorate in medicine. As soon as the guests arrived at their house, it was announced to them that in fact a wedding would take place here.
Photo: GettyImages/Fotobank.ru
Mark Eliot Zuckerberg(English Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, in English transcription Zuckerberg) is an American entrepreneur in the field of Internet technologies, one of the developers and founders of social Facebook networks. Mark Zuckerberg today is the head of Facebook Inc, a billionaire; his fortune in 2017 exceeded $74 billion.
Childhood and education of Mark Zuckerberg
Father - Edward Zuckerberg- practicing dentist. He did not give up his career as a doctor even after his son became a billionaire.
Mother - Karen Zuckerberg- psychiatrist.
The Zuckerberg family has four children. Mark, the only boy, was the second child. Mark's sisters - Randy, Donna, Ariel.
In the photo: Mark Zuckerberg with his sisters (Photo: instagram.com/zuck)
The biographies say that parents immediately noticed Mark Zuckerberg's great abilities. But he was raised in religious strictness, as was customary in Jewish families. But, apparently, something didn’t work out with religion, because now Mark openly tells everyone that he is an atheist.
Edward Zuckerberg gave his son his first PC (Quantex 486DX based Intel processor 486) when Mark was 10 years old. Edward Zuckerberg had plans to give Mark a good education. He was the first to teach his son the Atari BASIC programming language.
Mark sat at the computer for hours. His friends brought their primitive drawings, and Mark Zuckerberg created the first computer games based on them. According to the writer Jose Antonio Vargas, when "some kids played computer games, Mark created them."
As a schoolboy, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple, but quite acceptable software ZuckNet. Mark's father was delighted with his son's creation and installed ZuckNet in his office, being able to communicate with his assistant from home. Zuckerberg's ZuckNet is considered a "primitive" version of AOL's Instant Messenger, which came out the following year.
And little Zuckerberg came up with a computer version of the then popular game “Risk”.
Edward Zuckerberg hired a private tutor for his son, who immediately realized that it was already quite difficult to stay ahead of the knowledge of this prodigy Zuckerberg Jr., who was clearly destined for a career as an excellent programmer.
Mark Zuckerberg began his education at Ardsley School, then moved to the private school Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. There Mark was the first student in mathematics, astronomy, physics, natural sciences, foreign languages - there was time for all of this. When applying to college, Mark Zuckerberg indicated that he speaks French, Hebrew, Latin and Ancient Greek. Mark's friends recalled how easily he could quote passages from the Iliad in the original. In addition, Mark was actively involved in fencing, excelled in this sport and was captain of the school fencing team.
And yet Mark Zuckerberg put programming first. His abilities, which now manifested themselves in software development, attracted attention. While still receiving secondary education, Mark Zuckerberg developed the Synapse music player, which combined elements of artificial intelligence.
Programmer career Mark Zuckerberg
After graduating from school, Mark Zuckerberg entered the prestigious Harvard University, choosing, on the advice of his mother, to major in psychology. But programming continued to fascinate Mark. While still in his second year at university, he created a program for students, CourseMatch, which helped students at the beginning of each semester in choosing the courses they would like to study. Using CourseMatch, they could see the number of students enrolled in a given course and the names of those who had already signed up for it, allowing them to make informed choices. Zuckerberg's second project was Facemash, which played a major role in Mark's biography.
In the photo (left): Mark Zuckerberg begins his studies at Harvard University. Pictured (right): receiving a degree at Harvard University (Photo: AP/TASS)
A talented young man decided to use the Facemash software to create a communication masterpiece in the form of the social network “Facebook”, which was supposed to expand the communication of Harvard students across local network. His fellow students helped him with this Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin And Dustin Mockowitz. As friends recall, Mark did all this for fun.
By the way, Mark Zuckerberg had the idea for Facebook while he was receiving secondary education at the Phillips Exeter Academy private school in New Hampshire. This school had its own Facebook or “book of faces,” a directory with names, addresses and photographs of students. At Harvard, Zuckerberg took the initiative to create a similar network resource, but he was refused, citing privacy policy. I had to create Facebook for the whole world at once.
But first, after Zuckerberg hacked into secure sections computer network Harvard University and copied private photos, the site was closed by the administration and Mark was accused of violating security, copyright, and privacy. Zuckerberg had to apologize.
Facebook Career
However, he appreciated the scale of the idea and already on February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook at thefacebook.com. Zuckerberg left Harvard and invested all the money his parents had saved ($85,000) into the social network—he saw it as the best way to develop his career. In 2004, having moved to Palo Alto, Zuckerberg registered his project as entity, becoming general director"Facebook".
Zuckerberg, Moskowitz and other friends moved to Palo Alto in Silicon Valley, where they rented a small house that served as an office. Initially, they thought about returning to Harvard, but work dragged on.
At this stage, among Zuckerberg's friends, a role in the successful development of his career was played by Sean Parker, who found the first investors of Facebook - the founder of PayPal Peter Thiel And Reed Hoffman. Parker ensured that Mark Zuckerberg retained 3 of the 5 seats on the board of directors.
In 2005, Mark Zuckerberg purchased the Facebook.com domain for $200 thousand, and managed to get rid of the article “The”. At that time, the social network already had more than 5 million users.
In the photo: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Photo: DPA/TASS)
Finally, in 2007, Microsoft valued Mark Zuckerberg’s project at $15 billion and acquired a 1.6% stake in the company for $240 million. Further, the career of Zuckerberg and his brainchild only gained momentum.
In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg visited Russia. The billionaire took part in two programs on Channel One and spoke to students at Moscow State University. At the Moscow Facebook World Hack developer conference, Zuckerberg named the main advantage for developers as access to an audience of almost a billion people, this is the maximum number of users on the Internet.
In the photo: founder and CEO of the social network Facebook Mark Zuckerberg while walking along Red Square (Photo: Facebook press service/TASS)
In 2015, Facebook became the second most visited site in the world; the number of social network users reached one and a half billion people.
And Mark Zuckerberg turned out to be the youngest dollar billionaire with an official salary of... 1 dollar. The programmer also won the “titles” of one of the most influential people on the planet and the most successful businessman under the age of 40.
In the fall of 2018, Free Press wrote that Mark Zuckerberg could lose his post on Facebook. The news reported that the idea was put forward by Facebook investors back in June, and then some investment funds that own shares of the company also came out against Mark.
Personal life of Mark Zuckerberg
The founder of the social network Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in the world, is an absolute monogamist in his personal life - since his student days he has been dating an old girlfriend Priscilla Chan.
In the photo: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan (Photo: AP/TASS)
Priscilla Chan was born on February 24, 1985. Her parents were Chinese refugees who fled Vietnam by boat. Zuckerberg's wife is a pediatrician by training. Born and raised in Massachusetts, she studied at Harvard University and received her medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
Sophomore Mark Zuckerberg met his future wife at a fraternity party at Harvard. Since 2003, Mark and Priscilla began dating. In 2010, the future wife moved to Zuckerberg in Palo Alto.
On May 19, 2012, Mark Zuckerberg married Priscilla Chan. The couple celebrated Priscilla's receiving her doctorate in medicine, but when close friends and family showed up in the backyard of the couple's Palo Alto home, they were told they were attending a wedding. As the couple's representative said, the wedding was not timed to coincide with Facebook's IPO, but rather to coincide with the end of Priscilla's education.
On December 2, 2015, the couple had a daughter, Maxima Chan (Max), and on August 28, 2017, a second daughter, named August.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took maternity leave due to the birth of his second daughter.
In the photo: Mark Zuckerberg with his wife and daughters (Photo: instagram.com/zuck)
“I will spend one month of vacation with my wife and girls, and then we will spend a whole month together in December,” he wrote on his Facebook page. At the end of his message, Zuckerberg joked that he hoped his office would be "standing still" when he returned.
Mark Zuckerberg did the same after the birth of his first daughter. Zuckerberg explained this decision by the results of studies according to which the temporary departure of parents from work after the birth of a child has a positive impact on the family as a whole.
Zuckerberg's wife is a Buddhist; Mark himself has become a less zealous atheist over the years, in particular, he noted the importance of religion, including Buddhism.
Mark Zuckerberg's income
Mark Zuckerberg's fortune as of February 2016, according to Forbes, was almost $50 billion. And by the end of 2017, income from Facebook made Mark even richer; as of November 2017, Zuckerberg’s fortune was estimated at $74.2 billion. He is one of the five richest people in the world.
In the photo: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Photo: AP/TASS)
Facebook History
Important points in the biography of Mark Zuckerberg, programs created by him earlier. Creation of Facebook. Film "The Story of a Star Boy". Facebook headquarters is in Menlo Park. Company shares: their value and purchase. Book "The Age of Facebook".
Today it is difficult to find a person who has not heard of the Facebook website. This is the most popular social network that unites millions of users from different countries peace. The Facebook founder, when creating this site, could not even imagine that it would soon become so popular. The number of users is growing every day. The founder of Facebook is today a rich and famous person. The whole world knows about him. The founders of less popular sites can only envy him. This man deserves admiration. In general, Facebook developers did their best, thanks to which people got such a wonderful site.
But let's focus on the main figure, on creator of the site. If you are not yet familiar with the founder of Facebook, you will probably be interested to know about him. Shall we get started? The founder of Facebook, whose biography will be presented below, is a rather interesting person. He was born on May 14, 1984 in a town called White Plains, which is located in the state of New York. By the way, the name of the founder of the social network is Zuckerberg. And his name is Mark. The Facebook author lived in a large family: there were four children. He was born second. The head of the company had excellent educated parents: a psychiatrist and a dentist.
On his tenth birthday, his parents gave Mark his first computer - Quantex 486DX, it was then that he realized that there are two categories of people - users and programmers. The future owner of Facebook already understood that the former simply use the PC for personal needs, while the latter bring real benefits. Mark was very proud of his new computer and couldn't tear himself away from the monitor. The one who created Facebook many years later was just beginning to be interested in programming, tired of boring computer games. Soon Mark created a couple of small programs, including a computer version of the famous board game entitled "Risk". But this was far from his main achievement at that time. He also created the program Synapse. The boy invented it for his own personal use. The program was, in fact, an “intelligent” mp3 player that remembers information about which tracks, at what time and how many times the owner listens, so that he can then automatically turn on exactly what he likes at a certain moment. Information about this extraordinary program reached Microsoft, and they also learned about Mark himself. AOL also showed interest in his personality. But the little prodigy did not want to sell his program and refused to cooperate with these companies. Without any hesitation, Zuckerberg put an end to the opportunity to get a lot of money and become an employee of one of the best IT companies on the planet.
Now you know who invented Facebook. Amazing biography! And no wonder, because the one who founded Facebook simply must be an extraordinary person. You could say that Zuckerberg is a genius in his own right. Perhaps you will sometimes remember who created Facebook in order to take an example from him in some way. Biographies of great people motivate.
Creation of Facebook
Now let's talk about how Facebook was created. It is too interesting story. How was Facebook created? It all started at Harvard. The university had an intranet and there was a place where students uploaded their pictures and personal information. And young Zuckerberg suddenly wanted to have some fun: he created a program that selected any two photographs and made a comparison of who was more beautiful. Many students wanted to evaluate their appearance. By the end of the first day, 4,000 students visited the resource. At the moment when the number of visitors to the site reached 20,000, it broke down, unable to withstand such a load.
But the brilliant site had already been created at that time. When did Facebook appear? February 4, 2004. Now you know what year the site was founded. Quite a lot of time has passed since then. Today everyone understands that the date of creation of the company was a truly significant event. On this day the world changed. Facebook celebrated its birthday quite recently, a few days ago. Many remembered this date and were surprised at the transience of time.
When the site was created, people had no idea that it would become so famous. And this happened some time later. You can count how old is the social network. Neither more nor less - ten. Zuckerberg initially named the network "The Facebook". It was intended for university students. Young people liked the site mainly because they could be divided into groups, courses and companies that were in the educational institution.
When the site went live, Mark told reporters that the network was created in just seven days. He just came up with a website and wrote it right away. The owner of Facebook admitted that four people helped him. They also made significant contributions to the creation of the site. The owners of Facebook, except Mark, are E. McCollum, E. Severin, D. Moskowitz, and K. Hughes. Don't forget these people. The creators of Facebook did their best when creating the site. Thanks to them, we can now spend interesting time talking with friends, reading news and watching videos. The creators of Facebook gave us a brilliant site. Its genius is evidenced by the huge and constantly growing number of users. The creators of Facebook will forever remain in history. After all, they made a real masterpiece. Now you know how Facebook was created. Not in detail, of course, but at least a little.
"The Story of a Star Boy"
The history of Facebook, as you already understand, is very fascinating. If you want to know more, watch the documentary about him. It’s called “The Story of a Star Boy” (it’s a documentary, not a documentary, although it’s based on real events and turned out to be quite interesting). This film leaves no one indifferent. It contains the entire history of the creation of Facebook from beginning to end. Take a look and you won't regret it. The history of the creation of Facebook is described in most detail in this movie. From it you can learn what Facebook developers had to go through before they became famous. The film is so interesting that it is impossible to tear yourself away from the screen.
Facebook languages
What is Facebook written on? Used PHP, Java Script, ASP.NET, HTML, JQuery and many other languages. So it is impossible to give one answer to the question of what language the site is written in. It should be understood that this is a very large-scale project. Also on this moment even special extensions have been developed standard languages, which can be called virtually independent languages: FBML, FBJS, FQL.
Headquarters and office
The site's headquarters is located in the city Menlo Park. It's a pretty nice town. The Facebook office is also located here. Needless to say, everything is here top level. The Facebook office gathers many employees within its walls. Despite the crowd, this is a fairly cozy place.
Shares
How to buy Facebook shares? Find them at NASDAQ. They are indicated by letters FB. By the way, Dzhigurda recently bought shares in Facebook. He also said that he wants to meet with Zuckerberg to give him some useful tips regarding the site. 🙂
Corporation value
Another topic that interests many is the cost of Facebook. This really sparks curiosity. How much is Facebook worth? From 85 to 95 billion US dollars. Now you know how much Facebook costs. Agree, impressive? The cost of a corporation is incredibly high. Capitalization also occupies the minds of many curious people. The company's capitalization is 123 billion US dollars. This amount is amazing. The social network's income is surprising. Some may not even be able to sleep at night after learning these numbers. Monitoring the company shows that it has very good prospects.
"Facebook Era"
The Hollywood film tells the story of a Harvard student who needed a service to find and meet girls.
This version is as far from the truth as possible, Mark Zuckerberg told Matthias Dopfner in an interview for Die Welt am Sonntag.
At that time, Mark already had a girlfriend - Priscilla Chan, his current wife, and he himself was obsessed with the Internet. Google was a great tool for finding news, Wikipedia was easy to find the background information you needed, but it wasn't enough.
“There was no service that would allow us to find out anything about other people. I didn’t know how to create such a service, so I started working on other, less universal ones,” Zuckerberg told Dopfner.
He wrote a small app called Coursematch where people could mark what courses they were taking at university. He also created Facematch, as shown in the movie The Social Network. But as Zuckerberg says, it was just a joke.
Instead, Facebook came about because one student spent too much time programming and too little time studying. This is the story of how Zuckerberg turned a study service into a social network. And why didn't anyone do this before him?
But how did it become Facebook?
Mark Zuckerberg: In the end, everything happened thanks to a subject called “Rome of Augusta”, it was a course in the history of art. There were different pieces of art in class, you were shown several of them, and you had to write an essay about the historical significance of these pieces.
I didn't pay enough attention to the classes because I was programming at the time, and so when the time for the final exam came, I realized that I was finished, because I knew absolutely nothing about the subject.
That's why I wrote curriculum, which randomly showed you one of the works of art and you had to point out why exactly it was important in terms of history. I submitted this program to the public email and wrote, “Hey, I made a curriculum here,” and everyone started using it. And the program itself has become an excellent social way of learning.
In total, during my studies at Harvard, I made about ten similar programs. I thought it would be nice to combine their functions into one application through which people could share anything with others. This is how the first version of Facebook appeared.
How long did the development take?
It only took a couple of weeks to create the first version of Facebook because I already had a lot of things ready.
When did you feel like your idea could become something big?
I remember quite well the night I launched Facebook at Harvard. We used to go out for pizza with a friend we were doing computer science assignments with.
And I remember then saying that I was glad that we at Harvard had a network through which we could communicate, and that someday someone would make the same network around the world.
Then I didn’t even think that it could be us. No one said, “I hope we can turn this into something big.” I had no idea that this would be our doing. We were just students. When I think back over the past 12 years, what surprises me most is that no one has done this before. And I ask myself why this happened.
And really, why?
It seems to me that there were always reasons not to do this. At every stage people told themselves, “This is only for young people,” and no one worked on this idea as much as they could. Or “Okay, some people use this service, but it won’t make money.” Or “Yes, it seems to work in the USA, but it won’t work all over the world.” Or “Oh, it works, but it’s unlikely to work.” mobile devices" These are all excuses, as you probably know.
And you just went and did it
Yes. This was just the beginning of Facebook. Now, after 12 years of history, the company is investing in the technologies of the future, from artificial intelligence to virtual reality.
All sorts of fables about Facebook and its “real” owners are floating around the Internet. Some are sure that everything is run solely by Mark Zuckerberg, others are convinced that this social network is the product of intelligence services monitoring the Internet-active population. In fact, Facebook belongs to a number of shareholders who saw it as a profitable business project.
Facebook, of course, owes its existence to Mark Zuckerberg. It was this man’s enthusiasm that led the initially small project to the success we see today. The year of birth of the social network is officially recognized as 2004, and at that time Facebook was available only to Harvard students. Throughout the year, the social network has been actively growing, “capturing” students from American and Canadian universities. By that time, programmer Dustin Moskowitz and Mark’s classmate Eduardo Saverin had already joined Zuckerberg as financial director.
The turning point for the project was Mark’s acquaintance with Sean Parker, at that time already a well-known Internet entrepreneur. Sean was one of the first to see the huge business potential in the new product and convinced its founders to register Facebook as an independent company. As president of the newly formed company, Parker began searching for investors.
The first to respond to the tempting offer was Peter Thiel, the founder of payment system PayPal. Later, a response came from Reed Hoffman, another famous Internet businessman. Investments from investors and the active work of developers led to the fact that already in 2006, Facebook became an international social network.
In 2007, Facebook bought a 1.5% stake Microsoft company, who also got the opportunity to place their advertisements on the site. And already in 2009 it became known that Facebook was making a profit. At the same time, the company became a leader in profitability among Internet projects. To this day, she has not lost her position.
Current situation
Today, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is its main owner and CEO. He accounts for 28.2% of the company's shares. Programmer Dustin Moskowitz is also not out of business and holds 7.6% of the shares. The largest third-party investor to date is Accel Partners.
The company owns 11.4% of the shares. Russian representatives of Internet business are not giving up their positions either. Mail.ru Group holds a 5.5% stake in Facebook.
Thus, Mark Zuckerberg created and gave impetus to Facebook. But without support and active work his comrades, the project could very quickly wither and not gain the glory that it can boast of today.
Facebook: success story
There is not a person in the modern civilized world who has not heard about Facebook. The most successful business project of the 21st century, a breakthrough in the field of communications, a tool that can change the world, the most visited site on the Internet... All this applies to Facebook. What is the phenomenon of social networking? How did an average student turn a small website run from his dorm room into a $100 billion company in just a few years? The answer to this and other questions can be found by looking at the history of Facebook.
A few words about Zuckerberg
You can't start describing Facebook without talking about the company's founder.
The creator of the largest social network of our time, Mark Zuckerberg, was born on May 14, 1984 in the small town of White Plains, which is located near New York. Mark’s family was the most ordinary: his father worked as a dentist, his mother was a psychiatrist. Zuckerberg was the second child and had one older and two younger sisters.
Mark developed a love for programming at school. Already at the age of 11 he wrote websites, and in the ninth grade he created the computer game “Risk”. In addition, Zuckerberg, together with a school friend, came up with an MP3 player that could automatically create playlists based on user preferences.
But if you think that Zuckerberg was only good at programming, then you are very mistaken. Mark is a winner of school Olympiads in astronomy, mathematics, physics and languages. In addition, he was an excellent fencer and knew Hebrew, Latin, ancient Greek and French.
After graduating from a private school in New Hampshire, Mark was invited to work by two leading US IT companies - AOL and Microsoft. However, he did not agree, preferring to study at one of the most prestigious universities in the world - Harvard.
Zuckerberg entered the Faculty of Psychology. In his second year, he moved into the Kirkland House student dormitory. Here the talented student became even more interested in programming. In the early days, Mark created an online application called Course Match. This service made it possible to find out which Harvard students would take a particular course. This application very quickly became popular among students. Mark also earned extra money by making custom programs. Zuckerberg did not spend much time studying.
Facebook at its inception
Mark proposed to implement something similar at the university, but the management refused him. So Zuckerberg hacked into Harvard's servers and created a website called Facemash, where students could go and vote on photos that were submitted in pairs. In the survey, you had to choose your favorite photo. The site was rapidly gaining popularity, but it only existed for a few days, after which it was closed. Mark's actions caused outrage among the university leadership and several student organizations. The question of Zuckerberg's expulsion was raised, but Mark apologized, after which the charges were dropped.
This event occurred at the end of October 2003. In January 2004, Mark Zuckerberg seriously began developing a new project. On February 4th, thefacebook.com website went live. In just a month, more than half of Harvard students registered on the resource, with 70 percent of them accessing the site daily. Zuckerberg could not cope with the increasingly popular site on his own, so he brought his roommates to work on the project. Dustin Moskowitz worked on software, and Chris Hughes was promoting the site. This project was financed by Eduardo Saverin.
Just a few days after the opening of the site, the Winklevoss brothers, for whom Zuckerberg once worked, said that Mark stole the idea of creating a social network at Harvard from them. This became the subject of a lawsuit that dragged on for several years and resulted in the brothers receiving $65 million.
Over the next few months, all Ivy League universities were connected to the resource. Amazingly, when each educational institution connected to Facebook, most of the students of that university quickly joined.
In the summer of 2004, Mark meets Sean Parker, who agrees to join his team. The guys decide to rent a house in Palo Alto, the historical center of Silicon Valley.
The rapid growth of the social network
In Palo Alto, the guys started optimizing Facebook and connecting new servers. The social network caused the effect of a bomb exploding. More than 80 percent of Ivy League students registered, two-thirds of whom logged on daily and were extremely active. The load on the resource was colossal, so Mark chose the only correct strategy - to connect new universities and colleges to the network only when technical capabilities allow it.
The new school year was supposed to start in September, and with it a new surge in Facebook user activity. The guys planned to connect new universities and colleges, whose students were already looking forward to this. Zuckerberg and his team worked most actively at night. The best decisions, according to Mark, were made at 3-4 o'clock in the morning. While working, the guys communicated with each other using the AIM program. The mansion was in chaos. Empty energy drink cans and other trash lay everywhere. From time to time the company threw noisy parties. In general, the guys did not get bored in Palo Alto.
Meanwhile, Sean Parker was registering the company and searching for investors. By mid-2004, Facebook was already officially registered. Soon investors were found. The first of them was Peter Thiel, one of the founders of the PayPal payment system. He invested $500,000 in the network, receiving in return about 10% of the shares and a seat on the board of directors.
Autumn arrived and the network continued to expand. People have already started talking seriously about Facebook. At the end of 2004, the number of users exceeded one million, and the company's estimated value reached $90 million. But Mark Zuckerberg wasn't after money. He realized that if he maintained complete control of the company, he could change the world.
The next investor was Accel Partners, which invested $12.7 million in Facebook. The company now owns a 10 percent stake in the social network.
In the new year 2005, Mark continues to develop the network and connect universities and colleges to it. That same year, Zuckerberg launched a photo service inside Facebook. In addition, the site design has been updated.
After connecting universities, the company took on schools. There were fears that schoolchildren would not appreciate the resource, but they were not confirmed. But the attempt to create working networks ended in failure.
In the summer of 2005, Mark purchased the facebook.com domain for a huge sum of $200,000. That same summer, Sean Parker resigned as president of the company due to a drug scandal.
Further development of Facebook and its unprecedented prospects
At the beginning of 2006, 25 million people were already communicating online. The company's specialists were developing two innovations at once - a news feed and public registration. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg was in talks with Yahoo! about the sale of the company. But if the Internet giant wanted to purchase Facebook for $1 billion, then Mark was simply trying to find out the price of his brainchild.
At the beginning of September, the news feed was launched. Within a matter of hours, a major scandal broke out: while working to ensure that users could see the most interesting news from the lives of their friends, Zuckerberg and his team forgot about privacy settings. Numerous protest groups emerged, and articles condemning Mark's actions were published one after another in newspapers and blogs. But instead of immediately correcting the mistake and apologizing, Zuckerberg simply monitored the situation. Ultimately, Mark did what he had to do, but this incident still left a stain on the company’s reputation.
At the end of the month, anyone could register on the network. Now not only students and schoolchildren, but also middle-aged and older people could join Facebook.
The number of network participants grew rapidly, and already in October 2007 the barrier of 50 million people was overcome. There was a need for new investments in the company, so Mark began to negotiate with two Internet giants at once - Google and Microsoft. As a result of these negotiations, Microsoft and Facebook entered into an advertising agreement. In addition, the Internet giant acquired several percent of the shares, based on the value of Facebook at $15 billion.
In August 2008, the 100 millionth user was registered, in 2010 the number of network users reached 500 million, and in 2012 it exceeded a billion.
In 2012, Facebook shares went public. At the same time, the estimated value of the company was more than $100 billion.
But Mark Zuckerberg is not going to stop there and sets himself quite ambitious goals - to increase the network to 3-5 billion people. The network continues to actively develop, developers are working on new functions and improving old ones.
Now Zuckerberg is at the height of his fame, owning a controlling stake in the most popular Internet resource and several billion dollars. But this man is not even thirty years old! This is real success!
Section: Motivation
Mark Zuckerberg born on May 14, 1984 in one of the wealthy areas of New York.
He was brought up together with his three sisters in the family of a dentist and a psychiatrist. Even in elementary school, I began to show increased interest in programming. And with the advent of the first computer, he plunged headlong into his hobby. Mark was in sixth grade then. Mark created his first serious achievement in the field of programming - a computer version of the board game "Risk" - by the beginning of the ninth grade.
While still a student, together with a friend he wrote a program for MP3 - player Winamp. Using this program, the computer not only analyzed the user’s musical interests, but also independently created playlists that suited him. After the newly created program was made available for free access to the Internet, Microsoft Corporation offered Mark Zuckerberg about two million dollars for his brainchild. However, Mark refused the deal - as it turns out later, the future billionaire and founder of Facebook has a complex and unpredictable character.
Despite his incredible passion for computer programming, young Zuckerberg finds time to both study and practice his favorite sport - fencing. Mark Zuckerberg excelled in science and mathematics, and also, while immersing himself in antiquity, studied ancient languages. His interest in ancient languages was so strong that one day he completely devoted his summer holidays to attending ancient Greek language courses at a summer school. The result is the ability to read and write fluently in both classical languages. Despite this, when entering university, the young man chooses a discipline completely unrelated to languages - psychology.
Mark Zuckerberg studied at Harvard, where he was almost expelled for hacking the university database. He posted photos of students in pairs on his website, encouraging users to vote for the more attractive one. In just four hours, the number of site visitors increased to half a thousand. The management of the educational institution cut off the resource, obliging Zuckerberg to apologize to the allegedly injured students. However, this idea was so approved by the students that they demanded that the university administration immediately restore the resource. After reopening the resource, half of all Harvard students registered there within just two weeks. And by mid-spring, the list of users of one of the first social portals, Facebook, also included students from such famous universities as Yale and Stanford.
Thanks to the convenience of a hierarchical system that organizes users by groups, courses and many other parameters, as well as the ability to post photos and any other personal information, Facebook is becoming incredibly popular among students. The main advantages of Facebook include the fact that it is a social network for real people to find real people. Also here you can independently define the user group that will have access to your profile.
A chance meeting with Sean Parker, an Internet cult figure and one of the creators of Napster, a file-sharing program, turned the life of the Facebook founder in a different direction. Thanks to Parker, Mark Zuckerberg meets an experienced businessman and co-founder of the PayPal payment system, Peter Thiel, who, after a fifteen-minute conversation with Mark, decided to invest him for 500 thousand dollars. Mark Zuckerberg leaves his studies at the university, writing an application for an indefinite academic leave, and devotes himself entirely to work.
At first glance, $500,000 is a fairly large amount, but it was still not enough to fully satisfy all the financial needs of the new startup. Mark and his company had to rent space in Palo Alto. The working conditions were completely uncomfortable - there was not enough furniture for everyone, the rooms with servers were not ventilated, and the Californian heat above 45 degrees Celsius made it impossible to work.
In the fall of 2004, the social network Facebook had more than a million users. And six months later, thanks to the help of Peter Thiel, the company received a serious investment of $12.7 million from Accel Partners, thanks to which the number of active users reached the five million mark in the fall of 2005.
After some time, the rules of the popular social network were slightly changed. If you have a valid email address Facebook user Anyone could become. According to Forbes magazine, the 23-year-old Facebook founder is 785th on the list of the world's billionaires and worth $1.5 billion. Mark Zuckerberg is rightfully considered the youngest billionaire in history.