In this post we retrace the footsteps of this fantastic entrepreneur, who at a very young age created a real economic empire based on new digital technologies, becoming one of the richest entrepreneurs in the world and changing our habits forever.
Who founded Facebook?
Now this question is hardly asked by anyone anymore, as everyone knows the name of the creator of Facebook , Mark Zuckerberg !
In the next few lines, you will discover everything there is to know about him, the biography of the Facebook founder, accurate in every detail, from the beginning of his career, to the lucky intuition of Facebook, to his heritage, to his wife. We will go to sift through every detail of his life, so as to also guess what the lessons may be to learn to emulate him, at least in part.
Mark Zuckerberg: the beginnings
Mark Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York State in 1984, the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist. Mark’s childhood was carefree, like any American middle-class boy and educated according to Jewish precepts (the family is Jewish).
Since he was a child, Mark has had a predilection for humanities and classics, so much so that he is able to recite epic poems such as the Iliad by heart. But the classical and humanistic subjects, as well as the passion for languages (he writes and reads correctly in French, Latin, Hebrew, Chinese and ancient Greek) are not the only interests of Zuckerberg , who since he was a child matures an unbridled passion for information technology and new technologies. In fact, he learns the programming language since middle school, specifically BASIC, taught by his father, who is also passionate about computer science. He later takes private lessons from a developer, David Newman , who calls him a genius.
During his high school years, Mark Zuckerberg begins writing software: the first was Synapse Media Player which uses machine learning to learn the user’s musical preferences and store them in a database. This program manages to appear on the famous PC Magazine .
The Harvard years and the founding of Facebook
After high school, Mark Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard, at the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. This is where the idea of Facebook was born. In fact, during the Harvard years, the student first wrote a program called CourseMatch , which allowed users to choose courses to attend based on the choices of other students and to create study groups online. Shortly thereafter, he created another program, initially called Facemash , which allowed students to establish, by choosing from several photos, the most beautiful girl and boy on campus.
According to Zuckerberg’s roommate at the time, Arie Hasit:
We had books called Face Books, which had the names and photos of everyone who lived in the dorms. At first he created a website and placed two photos on it, or photos of two males and two females. Visitors to the site had to choose who was the coolest and based on the votes obtained, a ranking would be drawn up.
But this program turns into such a high success that it overloads the campus Internet network and causes it to go down, thus preventing students from connecting to the network.
From here Mark Zuckerberg understands the extent of the social phenomenon and founded thefacebook.com site, leaving Harvard and working exclusively on the project.
The Facebook story seems almost taken from a movie.
In fact, when he was still a Harvard student, Mark thinks of this platform in the University cafeteria. The idea of the famous social network comes from high school yearbooks, where in the United States it is customary to publish the student yearbook, with their photos, personal data, courses attended and interests that they already called in jargon ” The Facebook “. Mark thus decides to found the company in 2004 and make it an online yearbook for Harvard together with his companions and colleagues Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, Andrew McCollum and then to expand it to other American universities: the first to be involved were the Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Columbia University, New York University, Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Yale University and others who have social relationships with Harvard.
At that point the idea becomes too greedy not to develop it globally. This is how Mark and Moskovitz decide to move together with other collaborators to Palo Alto, California, working from home which at the time also served as an office.
The first to believe in the idea of opening a global social network is Peter Thiel , who invests in the company. At this point they had already turned down several offers made by companies intending to buy Facebook.
The accusations brought by the Winklevoss brothers and the millionaire lawsuit
Mark Zuckerberg’s biography is often tinged with yellow and above all with legal actions. One of these is carried out by the Winklevoss brothers who accuse the Facebook founder of stealing the idea of the social network from him. In fact, according to the accusations made against Zuckerberg, the latter would have copied the idea of his social network from the idea of the two brothers and Divya Narendra who had founded HarvardConnection.com , a social network on the university campus that Zuckerberg had promised to develop together. to Winklevoss, but which he actually copies for his TheFacebook.
Following the indictment, Zuckerberg acknowledges his responsibilities and closes a $ 300 million Facebook stock deal in favor of the three accusers.
Facebook listing and subsequent acquisitions
From here on, the management of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg is known to all: milestones upon milestones reached until the listing on the stock exchange in 2012, where the company Facebook Inc. held its IPO at a price of 38 dollars per share, bringing the total value of the company at $ 104 billion, marking the highest debut ever for a company on the US stock market.
In succession, to increase its strength on the market, it acquires startups and companies from which it takes the technology useful to improve Facebook and increase its functions. On April 9, 2012, the company bought Instagram for $ 1 billion, while in 2014 it bought WhatsApp for $ 19 billion. In 2014 it also acquired Oculus VR.
Among the various Facebook lenders we also find Microsoft which decides to acquire 1.6% of the shares.
Fun fact: Facebook sets up hackatons
Facebook has established the famous “hackathons”, competitions held every six or eight weeks in which participants have one night to conceive and complete a project. The company supplies music, food, and beer to the hackathons, and many Facebook staff members, including Mark, have often attended. “The idea is that you can create something extraordinary in one night , ” Zuckerberg told Levy. “And that’s part of the Facebook personality … and it’s really the heart of my personality.”
Facebook becomes Meta
The Facebook group has recently become Meta , with a paradigm shift in the way of developing one’s business. In fact, the mission of the new group is to develop the concept of metaverse, making it concrete and within the reach of its users. A new concept that over the years we will see how it will be managed and implemented by the mind of Mark Zuckerberg and his staff.
To date , Mark Zuckerberg’s assets are around $ 61.1 billion, making him one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet. Although the Cambridge Analytica scandal has affected its growth in the past , today Zuckerberg’s assets are experiencing an important recovery, thanks to the new strategies of Facebook and the coronavirus pandemic, which has skyrocketed the use of the applications of the famous American businessman.
In Zuckerberg’s life there have been a number of real estate investments , which over time have been made by the founder of Facebook. For example, in 2011 he bought a house worth 7 million euros, of 450 square meters; in 2012 the castle of Lavezzole, in the province of Asti for a total of 8 million euros; later, in 2014 he even bought 283 hectares of the island of Kauai, Hawaii for 100 million dollars and a house in downtown Manhattan for 22.3 million dollars. The latest purchases in order of time were two fantastic penthouses in Milan, inside the beautiful fashion district for a total of 800 square meters, including a 50-meter indoor pool and private cinema, as well as two houses on Lake Tahoe , California, for a total of 59 million dollars.
Zuckerberg wife
In 2012 Zuckerberg married his current wife Priscilla Chan, with whom he had two girls, in 2015 and 2017. Zuckerberg’s wife proves to be a precious ally in Mark’s personal but also professional life and still today deals with the affairs of family.
Aphorisms by Mark Zuckerberg
We want to conclude our appointment with Mark Zuckerberg, with his most famous maxims, which we can see below:
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Nobody can do it alone. When you see great things accomplished, remember that they were not accomplished by one person alone. There is a need to build as a team and surround yourself with the best people to learn from, with skills complementary to yours.
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During the day you have to do what in the evening makes you proud in front of the people you love.
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Advertising will change completely according to social networks, it will become more and more interactive and personalized.
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We will be remembered for what we did, not for our mistakes.
- For my parents, privacy was a value, for my peers, sharing is a value.
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Education is everything. The recipe for success lies right there. Find out about the latest news, learn new things, possibly from the best. In my company, people have to keep up-to-date, with specific lessons and more. Only in this way can new ideas come.
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TV is one-way, while the web allows you a completely new form of participation, it allows you to get in touch with everyone, you participate in discussions even with the government, and this has never happened before. And it is only the beginning of further changes as the Internet becomes an increasingly personal experience.
- “Facebook hasn’t replaced real relationships, but added opportunities to stay in touch that otherwise wouldn’t exist.”
