Motivational Monday - Mark Zuckerberg

Starting out

Mark Zuckerberg was born on 14th May 1984 just outside of Manhattan in New York City. He was the only son of his parents Edward and Karen and growing up with three sisters he was deemed ‘the prince’ of the family. His home life was comfortable, they were all well-educated with his father a dentist and his mother a psychiatrist and later a stay-at-home mother.

Zuckerberg’s love of mathematics and science were clear from a young age to the point where he was transferred to the Phillips Exeter Academy. The school was extremely selective and was built around catering for the ‘gifted’. While in attendance at the school he won prizes in mathematics, astronomy, physics and classics, so clearly the tech world was calling.

His father was always highly supportive of his love of tech, teaching him how to use Atari BASIC. By the time Zuckerberg was 12 he had built and created a messaging program aptly called Zucknet that his father went on to use as a form of communication in his dental office and the family used at home to communicate around the house. Zuckerberg recalls having “a bunch of friends who were artists” and they would come round and draw characters and Zuckerberg would make a game out of them.

A Prodigy

Given Zuckerberg’s innate talents in computing his parents hired a computer tutor, David Newman, to come to their house once a week and work with Zuckerberg helping him to further his knowledge and skills. Although it worked for a while it got to the point where Newman felt he couldn’t keep up with the child prodigy as he was already taking graduate courses at Mercy College.

His progression seemed limitless. While still at high school Zuckerberg worked under the company name Intelligent Media Group and programmed a music player, he called Synapse. Having been on some of the tech companies’ radars for a while when Microsoft discovered he had programmed this software they offered him $9.5million. He turned them down.

Harvard

Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard in 2002 with the New Yorker since claiming before he began, he had a “reputation as a programming prodigy” but are we at all surprised? Studying psychology and computer science he continued building programs alongside excelling in his studies.

While in his sophomore year he wrote a program known as CourseMatch which was a software that allowed students to select the classes they wanted to enrol in based on the selection of classes from other students. An imaginative and simple way of selecting courses. Something that today is so normalised but in the early 2000s was still a novelty. The program was also used to help form study groups between students.

FaceMatch went up over a weekend and by Monday had been taken down by the school. The premise of the program was that Zuckerberg would choose four photos of Harvard students, two male, two female and fellow students were able to vote who they deemed hotter. Though the website was originally built for fun there were complaints from students that their photos were being used without permission and it caused tensions within the cohort. Later, Zuckerberg publicly apologised in the student paper and claimed it was “completely improper”.

Facebook is Born

Three of his college cohort, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra approached Zuckerberg in late 2003 to ask if he would like in on a social networking idea they had, named Harvard Connection. Originally the idea for the website was to act as somewhat of a dating website for the Harvard elite using information from the Harvard student database. Zuckerberg was involved with the project for a short while until dropping out to pursue his own social networking idea.

Along with Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg created The Facebook. The idea of the website was that someone could create themselves a profile and could communicate with others and post updates surrounding their life and hobbies etc. Launching on February 4th 2004, the website was only originally set up to be used by Harvard students. They soon saw how much it was taking off amongst their cohort and expanded it to other universities such as New York University, Columbia University, Stanford, Cornell and others.

Having been running the website from their dorm room, Zuckerberg and others including Moskovitz moved to Palo Alto in Silicon Valley, California, where all great tech resides. The group originally planned on going back to Harvard but soon realised there was too much opportunity available to them in California so ended up dropping out of Harvard. At this point Facebook had accumulated around 1 million users, in just a few months!

Success

In 2005 Accel Partners, the capital firm decided to invest $12.7million into the social network even though at the time it was only available to Ivy League Students. At this point Zuckerberg saw its potential and opened it up to other colleges and high schools both within the States and internationally and by late 2005 Facebook had around 5.5million members! Buyout offers were coming in from every direction including powerhouses such as Yahoo! and MTV networks, but Zuckerberg refused as he had a vision for where he was taking the website. He said in an interview, “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”.

Since 2004 and its original release Facebook has gone on to become the biggest and most powerful social networking website in the world with 2.8billion active users globally in 2021. From what started as a bit of fun for Zuckerberg in his college dorm has now gone on to become one of the most influential aspects of modern life. Facebook is used by people from all backgrounds, all over the world as a way to connect to people they had once lost contact with and those they are unable to see.

A Bump In The Road

With a net worth of $1.6billion at only 37 Zuckerberg is set for life and more but his success hasn’t come without challenges along the way. In 2006 just when Facebook had completely taken off there was a major controversy surrounding its originality. The group he had worked with on the Harvard Connection program, Divya Narendra and the Winklevoss twins claimed he had stolen their idea as the basis of Facebook.

Though at the time Zuckerberg claimed all ideas for Facebook were original, and the two networks were completely different. After further investigation including the incrimination of messages sent by Zuckerberg it transpired there were in fact links between the basis of the two websites. Zuckerberg publicly apologised to the founders claiming that “if you’re going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right?”. The initial settlement of $65million was reached between the two parties. To most this would be more than enough but in 2011 there was further controversy when the three claimed they were misled in regard to the value of their stock within Facebook.

Legacy

Zuckerberg has taught us that no matter where you are in life, if you have a dream and you believe in yourself anything is possible. He dropped out of Harvard University, one of the most prestigious Universities in America to pursue his dream because he believed he could make something of himself. Facebook's ongoing popularity and success is somewhat down to the fact it is constantly evolving and changing in an effort to keep up with the world around it. If you allow yourself to grow and change as you grow older while never giving up on your dreams you’ll be sure to reach success. Zuckerberg started out at 19 in his dorm room and now 17 years later he’s the youngest person on the world’s rich list. You never know, keep pushing, keep dreaming and you might be next!