Mark Zuckerberg Biography
Born in: United States
Birth Name : Mark Elliot Zuckerberg
Residence : Palo Alto, California, U.S.
Education : Ardsley High School,Phillips Exeter Academy
Spouse : (s) Priscilla Chan (m. 2012–present)
Height : 5' 9" (1.75 m)
Home town : Dobbs Ferry, New York, U.S.
Parents : Edward Zuckerberg,Karen Kempner
Relatives : Randi Jayne Zuckerberg (sister)
Awards :Time Person of the Year 2010
Occupation : Chairman & CEO of Facebook, Inc.
Mark Zuckerberg, the man of the hour and Time person of the year, 2010, is the founder and CEO of Facebook. His creation is on road to become one of the most valuable tech companies of the world as Facebook debuts at the Nasdaq stock exchange on 18th May, 2012. At $38 per share, the Facebook has a market capitalization of $104 billion, making it not only one of the biggest in Silicon Valley, but one of the biggest in the world. Mark's 443 million shares are worth $16.9 billion at $38 a share.
In the filed listing it was revealed that Facebook's revenue was an astounding $3.7 billion while it generated $1 billion in profit. Mark himself earned a handsome base salary of $500, 000 amounting to an annual $1.7 million pay package. Owning 28 % share of Facebook, he will be worth 28 billion USD once the company becomes public and will be standing at front in the queue of richest persons on the planet.
Born on May 14, 1984 to Edward Zuckerberg and Karen Zuckerberg, Mark was a child prodigy, programming and creating games at the age, when one is usually playing them. He repeatedly asserted his extraordinary potential as a computer programmer through different inventions. In his early teens he created a music player named Synapse as a school project using some help from a friend, which used artificial intelligence to understand one’s taste in music and created a playlist accordingly. Software bigwigs like Microsoft and AOL tried to buy it and even recruit Mark. But he refused both. Instead he went to Harvard in 2002. On Feb 4, 2004, with the help of his roommates, Dutsin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes and using the finance provided by another friend Eduardo Saverin, he launched what was called then, The Facebook. It was an instant hit, and soon made Mark the next big thing.
In 2007, he was named as the world’s youngest billionaire and continues to dominate the internet space like no one else. His site, which has ubiquitous presence all across the globe, has now over 850 million members, which in terms of population can be termed as the third largest entity after China and India. A man of radical notions and tremendous genius, Mark wants the world to be a more open place, where every person is connected to other, sharing their personnel lives and dreams that his invention, Facebook would be successful in doing that.
Risk-taker
Taking risks is one of the secrets to Zuckerberg's success, he says; risks that include dropping out of Harvard and forging forward with the Facebook strategy. "The biggest risk is not taking any risk," he said. "In a world that's changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
With Zuckerberg's leadership, Facebook began to acquire smaller companies in the mobile technology space, including Friend.ly, Snaptu, and Instagram. Facebook continued to evolve, with its News Feed, photo posting capabilities, and information sharing features. The company found itself as part of odd news more than once, including numerous people who found long-lost relatives, a fugitive arrested after taunting police with photos and posts, and woman who found the people who saved her as a baby.
While Zuckerberg may not have foreseen consequences like this, he saw the potential for Facebook to help people develop their own identities. "Think about what people are doing on Facebook today," he said. "They're keeping up with their friends and family, but they're also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They're connecting with the audience that they want to connect to."
In May 2012, Facebook had its initial public offering, raising $16 billion and becoming the biggest Internet IPO in history. Though plagued by several problems and heavily criticized for being overvalued, the IPO was the icing on the cake that was Zuckerberg's success at such a young age — he was only 28 at the time. But while young, he was not impulsive when it came to business decisions.
Though part of Zuckerberg's entrepreneurial strategy is to take risks, he also emphasizes not blindly committing to something. "I have this fear of getting locked into doing things that are not the most impactful things you can do," he said. Zuckerberg's attitude and strategy is built on remaining flexible and nimble in approaching business matters. The CEO of a company acquired by Facebook noted that he met with Zuckerberg on a Friday afternoon, the papers were signed on Sunday, and the deal was announced on Monday.
Though extremely wealthy at a young age, Zuckerberg has managed to stay humble. He married his college sweetheart, Priscilla Chan, in an unassuming and small surprise ceremony in his back yard the day after the Facebook IPO. Friends believed they were arriving at the house to celebrate Chan's graduation from medical school, and were thrilled to instead celebrate an exchange of vows. Sushi and Mexican food were served, while Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong performed to the 100 party guests.
Casual yet productive
Wearing in his signature casual T-shirt and jeans on a daily basis, even in major business meetings, Zuckerberg inspires his employees to keep the office environment casual yet productive. He also was inspired by his wife, a pediatrician, to use Facebook to promote organ donations. Despite what others might do in her situation (being married to one of the richest people in America), she has remained self-sufficient and dedicated to her career, while avoiding the limelight as much as possible.
Using his fortune, he became a widely regarded philanthropist. Zuckerberg donated 18 million Facebook shares to education initiatives, worth nearly $500 million, and donated $100 million to save the failing Newark Public Schools system. Joining Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and George Lucas, Zuckerberg signed "The Giving Pledge" and promised to donate at least 50 percent of his wealth to charity over the course of his lifetime. He encouraged other young entrepreneurs to do the same with their wealth.
"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," he said.
Mark Zuckerberg Estates and Homes
World’s youngest billionaire Mark Zuckerberg owns a house in Palo Alto which is his first property investment. Prior to this he has always stayed in rented apartment. The house is just a 10-minute drive from what will soon be Facebook's new headquarters in Menlo Park. He lives in this house with his college sweetheart Priscilla Chan. The young billionaire has long been a fan of renting and of relatively modest digs.
Location: The house is located in one of the posh locality of California, Palo Alto which is situated in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County.
Accommodation: The house sits in the area of 5,1617-square-foot, was originally built in 1903. Since the house is of historic times it boasts gorgeous historical elements, like sash windows, coffered ceilings, French doors, and deep porches. The house has total of 5-bedroom, 5.5-bath and purchased for $ 7 million. Although the house is grand but still is modest compared to his other Silicon Valley contemporaries. In addition, this two storied house also has a saltwater pool, a music alcove, spacious porch and a large kitchen with adjoining breakfast area. The master bedroom suite has a spa-inspired Carrara marble bath with heated floors, which add some elegance to otherwise this simple, if not frugal piece of property.
Facebook History
Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room on February 4, 2004. An earlier inspiration for Facebook may have come from Phillips Exeter Academy, the prep school from which Zuckerberg graduated in 2002. It published its own student directory, “The Photo Address Book,” which students referred to as “The Facebook.” Such photo directories were an important part of the student social experience at many private schools. With them, students were able to list attributes such as their class years, their friends, and their telephone numbers.
Once at college, Zuckerberg's Facebook started off as just a "Harvard thing" until Zuckerberg decided to spread it to other schools, enlisting the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They began with Columbia, New York University, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, Penn, Brown, and Yale. Samyr Laine, a triple jumper representing Haiti at the 2012 Summer Olympics, shared a room with Zuckerberg during Facebook's founding. "Mark was clearly on to great things," said Laine, who was Facebook's fourteenth user.
After Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California with Moskovitz and some friends, they leased a small house that served as an office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel who invested in the company. They got their first office in mid-2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group planned to return to Harvard but eventually decided to remain in California. They had already turned down offers by major corporations to buy the company. In an interview in 2007, Zuckerberg explained his reasoning: "It's not because of the amount of money. For me and my colleagues, 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.
He restated these goals to Wired magazine in 2010: "The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open. Earlier, in April 2009, Zuckerberg sought the advice of former Netscape CFO Peter Currie about financing strategies for Facebook.On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that the company reached the 500 million-user mark. When asked whether Facebook could earn more income from advertising as a result of its phenomenal growth, he explained:
I guess we could..... If you look at how much of our page is taken up with ads compared to the average search query. The average for us is a little less than 10 percent of the pages and the average for search is about 20 percent taken up with ads..... That's the simplest thing we could do. But we aren't like that. We make enough money. Right, I mean, we are keeping things running; we are growing at the rate we want to.
In 2010, Steven Levy, who wrote the 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, wrote that Zuckerberg "clearly thinks of himself as a hacker". Zuckerberg said that "it's OK to break things" "to make them better".Facebook instituted "hackathons" held every six to eight weeks where participants would have one night to conceive of and complete a project. The company provided music, food, and beer at the hackathons, and many Facebook staff members, including Zuckerberg, regularly attended.[45] "The idea is that you can build something really good in a night", Zuckerberg told Levy. "And that's part of the personality of Facebook now..... It's definitely very core to my personality.
Vanity Fair magazine named Zuckerberg number 1 on its 2010 list of the Top 100 "most influential people of the Information Age". Zuckerberg ranked number 23 on the Vanity Fair 100 list in 2009.In 2010, Zuckerberg was chosen as number 16 in New Statesman's annual survey of the world's 50 most influential figures.
In a 2011 interview with PBS after the death of Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg said that Jobs had advised him on how to create a management team at Facebook that was "focused on building as high quality and good things as you are".
On October 1, 2012, Zuckerberg visited Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow to stimulate social media innovation in Russia and to boost Facebook's position in the Russian market. Russia's communications minister tweeted that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev urged the social media giant's founder to abandon plans to lure away Russian programmers and instead consider opening a research center in Moscow. In 2012, Facebook had roughly 9 million users in Russia, while domestic clone VK had around 34 million. Rebecca Van Dyck, Facebook's head of consumer marketing, claimed that 85 million American Facebook users were exposed to the first day of the Home promotional campaign on April 6, 2013.
On August 19, 2013, the Washington Post reported that Zuckerberg's Facebook profile was hacked by an unemployed web developer.
At the 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt conference, held in September, Zuckerberg stated that he is working towards registering the 5 billion humans who were not connected to the Internet as of the conference on Facebook. Zuckerberg then explained that this is intertwined with the aim of the Internet.org project, whereby Facebook, with the support of other technology companies, seeks to increase the number of people connected to the internet.
Zuckerberg is the keynote speaker at the 2014 Mobile World Congress (MWC), held in Barcelona, Spain in March, which will be attended by 75,000 delegates. Various media sources highlighted the connection between Facebook's focus on mobile technology and Zuckerberg's speech, claiming that mobile represents the future of the company.[56] Zuckerberg's speech expands upon the goal that he raised at the TechCrunch conference in September 2013, whereby he is working towards expanding Internet coverage into developing countries.
Marriage
At a party put on by his fraternity during his sophomore year, Zuckerberg met Dr. Priscilla Chan,a fellow student whom he began dating in 2003. Chan is the child of a Chinese-Vietnamese refugee, who arrived in the U.S. after the Fall of Saigon. She was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, and is a 2003 graduate of Quincy High School. In September 2010, Zuckerberg invited Chan, by then a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco, to move into his rented Palo Alto house. Zuckerberg studied Mandarin Chinese in preparation for the couple's visit to the People's Republic of China in December 2010.
On May 19, 2012, Zuckerberg and Chan married in Zuckerberg's backyard in a celebration also marking her graduation from medical school.
Personal Quotes
The only meat I eat is from animals I've killed myself.
Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They're keeping up with their friends and family, but they're also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They're connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It's almost a disadvantage if you're not on it now.
I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more transparent.
The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that's changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.
All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school - my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.
Facebook is really about communicating and telling stories... We think that people can really help spread awareness of organ donation and that they want to participate in this to their friends. And that can be a big part of helping solve the crisis that's out there.
I mean, we've built a lot of products that we think are good, and will help people share photos and share videos and write messages to each other. But it's really all about how people are spreading Facebook around the world in all these different countries. And that's what's so amazing about the scale that it's at today.
I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that's always existed.
I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.
The thing that we are trying to do at Facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.
At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people's capacity to build and maintain relationships.
For the first time we're allowing developers who don't work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That's a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.
The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'
I don't have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.
I do everything on my phone as a lot of people do.
What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they're proud of.
The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.
Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
Mobile is a lot closer to TV than it is to desktop.
This is our commitment to users and the people who use our service, is that Facebook's a free service. It's free now. It will always be free. We make money through having advertisements and things like that.
Our goal is not to build a platform; it's to be cross all of them.
Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they're thinking and have their voice be heard.
I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.
We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that's something we're proud of.
Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected.
The real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.
The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it's actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions... If people feel like they don't have control over how they're sharing things, then we're failing them.
There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don't usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.
I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the side, and we've funded ever since by putting ads on the side.
Advertising works most effectively when it's in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook - they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing - so there's really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.
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.
There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.
My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don't care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that - building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.
We're running the company to serve more people.
The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.
People at Facebook are fairly used to the press being nice to us or not nice to us.
I started the site when I was 19. I didn't know much about business back then.
I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.
I actually do think you're seeing this trend towards organizations just caring more about their brand and engaging. And so I think Home Depot will want to humanize itself. I think that's a lot of why companies are starting blogs, are just giving more insight into what's going on with them.
Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.
Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer questions that people have, like, what sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York lately and liked? These are queries you could potentially do with Facebook that you couldn't do with anything else, we just have to do it.
Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn't really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn't until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.
Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn't have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they're thinking and have their voice be heard.
People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people - and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
On engagement, we're already seeing that mobile users are more likely to be daily active users than desktop users. They're more likely to use Facebook six or seven days of the week.
My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley.
Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn't have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he's getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.
It used to be the case, like you'd switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn't keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.
In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people's perspectives... I really try and live the mission of the company and... keep everything else in my life extremely simple.
In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.
I think that more flow of information, the ability to stay connected to more people makes people more effective as people. And I mean, that's true socially. It makes you have more fun, right. It feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life.
I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don't pretend that if Facebook didn't exist, that this wouldn't even be possible. Of course, it would have.
When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don't want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren't. There are pranks, IMs.
This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.
There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.
People don't care about what someone says about you in a movie - or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people's life better, then that's something that's really good.
No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn't create that - society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that's good.
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