By Arushi Kapoor 

INTRODUCTION

The World’s youngest billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder of Facebook, which is a social networking website. And also, he is the CEO of Facebook. He was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York. He was always passionate about social networking sites and then started working on them. His journey started in his college dorm room. Just to focus and concentrate on his social networking sites, he left Harvard after his sophomore year. He became a billionaire after the user base of Facebook has grown to more than 2 billion people. Facebook was first introduced in the Film “The Social Network” in 2010. He is a great computer Programmer and a Philanthropist.

EARLY LIFE

He was born and brought up in a well-educated family and a very comfortable environment in a nearby village of White Plains, New York, in a village of Bobs Ferry. Edward Zuckerberg was his father who was a very famous dentist at that time. His mother was Karen who worked as a psychiatrist. But she left her work after giving birth to 4 children who were Mark, Randi, Donna, and Arielle.

When he was in school at the age of 12, he started developing his interest in computer programming at a very small age. Firstly, he created a messaging program, which he named as ‘Zucknet’ in which he used Atari BASIC. He introduced this function to his father who used this in his dental clinic where the receptionist in the hospital could inform him that a new patient has come without even yelling. They also used that program in the house to communicate.

While being successful in this Application, he also started building an interest in the create computer games just for fun. He had many artists’ friends. So, they could draw stuff and Mark built a game out of it.

After seeing his ongoing interest in computers, his parent hired a personal computer trainer David Newman who came to their house and worked with Zuckerberg.
Mark studied in Phillips Exeter Academy which was a preparatory school in New Hemisphere. He became the captain of the school’s team by showing his talent of fencing. He also did a diploma course in classics and was excellent in literature. But nothing could take his interests in computers. He remained focussed in computers and developing programs while studying in High School, he created a music softheaded Pandora, which was called Synapse. After that, he was in great demand. Great companies like ADL and Microsoft wanted to buy that software but he refused to accept the offers by them because he wanted to do something huge in life.

His further Education was from Harvard University after graduating from Exeter in 2002. He had a reputation as a software developer in his campus at the Ivy League institution. He developed a very interesting course for students in which they could select their own classes on the basics of the courses election of another user. He named this program as course match. It became very popular among students, it had to shut down and they were very disappointed.

Mark Zuckerberg with three of his fellow students – Divya, Narendra, Twins Cameron, and Tyler Winklevoss started to work on a social media networking site which they called it (Harvard Connection). This was a dating site which could be used by Harvard’s students for the elites. He also worked on more networking sites with friends – Dustin Hoskovitz, Chris Hughes and Edwardo Saverin.

Out of the Dorm room at Harvard, Zuckerberg and his friends created a social networking platform which was very interesting for others to use it. People could create their own profile, upload photos, and status of what they are doing at that moment and also communicate with each other. This was started in 2004.

THE RISE OF FACEBOOK

Zuckerberg started his own enterprise and in 2005, they received a huge amount from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. They invested $ 12.7 million into Facebook which was open only to Ivy League students at that time. There was a great push in the membership to more than 5.5 million users by December 2005. There was an increase in the number of access to colleges, high school, international schools etc. The other companies were also getting interested in advertising the social hub of Facebook. There were a lot of offers for selling of Facebook but ark Zuckerberg denied all of them. He also got offers from Yahoo and MTV networks which were not entertained by him at all. Instead, he wanted to focus more on his own social networking of Facebook and wanted to expand as much as possible at that time by introducing more and more features and opening up projects to outside developers.

In 2006, his business was expanding to such but there is nothing without any hurdles in the business. He faced his biggest hurdle. It was believed by Harvard connection that their idea was stolen by Mark Zuckerberg and they insisted software developer to pay for the losses they faced in their business. Zuckerberg was shocked after this claim. His ideas were based on 2 different concepts used in the social network but after lawyers searched about his personal records, they found that Zuckerberg intentionally stole the property of Harvard Connection and offered Facebook’s private information to his friends.

So, he got stuck. But later he apologized for his influential attitude. After that, a settlement of $65 million was done between them. There were many personal challenges also which he faced when a book in 2009 ‘The Accidental Billionaires’ by writer Be Mezrick hit stores. He was criticized very much because of the re-telling of Zuckerberg’s stories. But Mark could manage to report that many of the details were inaccurate in the film.

In spite of all the criticism in the market, Facebook continued to succeed and Mark Zuckerberg was successful. He was named as the Person of the year in 2010 by Time Magazine. He had beaten the CEO of Apple Steve Jobs at that time and Forbes ranked Zuckerberg at No. 35.

SOCIAL WORK FOR WELFARE

On May 19, 2012, Zuckerberg married his girlfriend Priscilla Chan when at the age of 28; he was marked as the youngest CEO on the list. In 2015, they welcomed a daughter Max and Mark announced that they would give 99% of their Facebook shares to charity because he wanted to create the world full of children. They also invested $3 billion in scientific research to manage diseases in children. He brought engineers, computer scientists, biologists, chemists and others to help.

He never wanted to build a company, he had a purpose to connect people and bring them closer. After facing a lot of problems when companies wanted to tear them apart and buy them but he ignored all the hurdles and succeeded. He focussed on the change he wanted to see.