Mark
Elliot 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. Mark’s 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 a user wanted to listen
to. Microsoft and AOL got an unusual interest in Synapse media player and
wanted to acquire it. However, the young talent rejected the offer of the 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 at 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.
About FaceMash
In
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 at
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.
About Facebook
About
ten months before the Zuckerberg’s 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
Narendra’s 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 would post on 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
skeptically. While working on Harvard Connection, he got a fantastic idea for
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
4,000 users registered on Facebook, they came to the conclusion that they
needed services of new programmers. One of them was a Mark’s 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 company’s votes, 35% – Eduardo Saverin,
and 5% went to the newcomer Moskowitz. Another friend of Mark, Chris Hughes,
was assigned as the Press Attache of Facebook.
Facebook 2003 |
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
person’s belonging to the 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 of PayPal, Peter Thiel, who is well known throughout
Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel allocated $500,000, 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 and then Greylock Partners
added to this amount $27.5 million.
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, a Facebook ‘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.
The
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 to grow its audience. When they got over 50
million users, large companies began to offer Zuckerberg to sell 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, isn’t it?
Lawsuits
against Facebook
The
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 of stealing 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 and his Wife |
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. Zuckerberg’s 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
counsel’s view, the decision was illegal, as Mark Zuckerberg in a proceeding in
2008 provided false information about the company’s 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 by the brothers to make the court reconsider the case.
Mark Zuckerberg and his Family |
In
2007, a significant event happened to Facebook. Microsoft acquired 1.6% equity
stake in Facebook for an impressive amount of $240 million dollars. On this
basis, a number of analysts suggested that the total value of Facebook reached
$15 billion. Quite good results for the company, whose income did not exceed
$200 million a year. After the deal, Bill Gates created an account in Facebook.
He used to spend several hours a day to communicate through Facebook with
everyone, but after a time decided to close his account for some time, because
there were too many people willing to chat with him. Physically, he was not
able to chat with all of them. However, Gates provided a major PR campaign for
Facebook worldwide. This is particularly important for Microsoft, given that it
had an exclusive advertising agreement with the social network until 2011.
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