MARK ZUCKERBERG – MIGHTY VISIONARY AND FACEBOOK FOUNDER
Mark Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is a child of the computer age. His father, a dentist and an early user of digital radiography, taught his son BASIC, a simple programming language. The nine-yearold Mark created a primitive instant-messaging programme that allowed his family to send messages to computers round the house.
When he was 11 years old, his parents hired a software developer to give him weekly lessons. The tutor described Mark to New Yorker magazine as “a prodigy”, adding “sometimes it was tough to stay ahead of him”.
Subsequently he joined Harvard. At Harvard, Mark came up with the idea for the social networking site, Facebook. He saw Facebook as answering a basic human need to know about what other people were doing at that same moment, as opposed to search engines, which could only find historic information that had already been made available.
As he told The New Yorker, “Most of the things we care about are in our heads … and that’s not out there to be indexed, right?”
Before launching Facebook, Mark first built a programme that let students see photographs of other Harvard students and vote on their attractiveness. The system was popular enough to crash the campus online network. Mark was then approached by three senior students to help with a more traditional collection of student profiles, called Harvard Connection.
Mark started work on the project but left to create his own version, which he and four Harvard friends launched in February 2004 as thefacebook.com. The Harvard Connection team later accused Facebook of stealing their idea. Mark maintained that the two sites were very different. The case was settled out of court.
Facebook, which allowed users to create their own profile page, upload photographs and communicate with other users, was a big hit. Mark and his friends dropped out of Harvard to work on Facebook full time. Peter Thiel, co-founder of the online payment system, Paypal, invested US $ 500,000 in the new company. The site was offered to other universities and colleges; by the end of the site’s first year, it had one million users.
In 2005, the company received a further £13.7 million of venture capital support. The following year, the search engine Yahoo offered to buy Facebook for US $ 1 billion. Mark refused the offer. As the CEO of Yahoo, Terry Semel told the New Yorker magazine, “I’d never met anyone who would walk away from a billion dollars.” But Mark said, “It’s not about the price. This is my baby and I want to keep running it, I want to keep growing it.”
Facebook’s popularity continued to grow, as it was offered to more universities and eventually to high schools and then to anyone over the age of 13. Companies began to show increasing interest in advertising to the site’s young users. In 2007, Facebook announced that it would become a ‘platform’ and that other designers were welcome to build applications that would run on the site.
The company maintained a slightly anarchic culture, its motto being ‘move fast and break things’. Changes to the site are tested live on real users; pages are tested constantly to see which aspects are most popular. Every engineer is given equal access to the code and all changes are uploaded to the site daily. Sometimes the site crashes. Sometimes new products are released by accident.
“We make more mistakes than other companies do,” Mark told the Businessweek magazine. “You can’t have everything, so you just have to choose what your values are and where you want to be … for us, this is the right way to go.”
In 2012, Facebook reached one billion users. It sees its goal as accumulating data on everything that its users consume and do, making it possible to build a robust model of other things that they are likely to enjoy. As a leading Facebook engineer told Businessweek, “We are trying to map out the graph of everything in the world, and how it relates to each other.”
In June 2016, Business Insider named Mark one of the “Top 10 Business Visionaries Creating Value for the World” due to the fact that he and his wife “pledged to give away 99 percent of their wealth — which is estimated at over US $ 65.3 billion as at beginning of this year.
So, what can we learn from Mark?
1. Be passionate about what you do
This is a common trait in all of most successful entrepreneurs. They are passionate about what they do. The same passion has enabled Facebook to innovate continuously and overcome every obstacle that came its way. It is that same passion which helped our Facebook prodigy reject multitudes of buyout offers, even in the face of adversity.
2. Set high long-term goals
Mark has followed the mantra “Think big, start small” all his life and it worked wonders for him. From humble beginnings to a huge empire, Mark has always set his sights on long-term goals. His vision was clear from the outset. In addition to his unflinching determination, he sets high standards for himself and his company and his work ethics reflect that too. He is always aspiring to deliver a better experience to users with innovations and cutting-edge features.
3. Move fast and break things
Facebook has long stuck to the motto of “Move fast and break things” and it helped them grow into the world’s largest social network. Mark has always been an advocate of moving fast, even if it breaks a few things. Facebook was in a predicament when they introduced a new Newsfeed. They acted on the spur of the moment and gave users options to see both the new and old Newsfeed, which resolved the issue. They also faced a backlash from users when they introduced their Timeline feature but their move fast approach helped them iron out issues in an expedient manner without cultivating any mistrust.
4. Explore before you commit
Mark always suggests that young entrepreneurs should always pick their battles carefully. Explore and do your research before signing a business deal, otherwise you could land into trouble. According to Mark, “The biggest risk is not taking any risk.” Although, you should be ready to break the glass ceiling and take risks, they should be calculated ones. Making business commitments without proper research is a recipe for disaster.
5. Recruit the right people
Mark elaborated on his recruiting criteria by saying, “I would only recruit someone to work for me and not for me to work for him.” His advice for young entrepreneurs is that they should never compromise on recruiting the best employees. “Recruit the best talent to complement your skills.”
6. Focus on your product and make it better
According to Mark, you should not expect good results and success without making your product great. Look for loopholes and fix them as soon as possible. Despite being the CEO of the company, Mark works in coordination with his team to improve Facebook. Mark advises you to focus on what your customers want and tailor your product accordingly.
7. Stay in learning mode all the time
It is the desire to learn new things that led to the creation of Facebook. From an early age, Mark had a predilection for computers and programming. He even developed a programme called Zucknet to connect his father’s home and office computers at the tender age of 11. The list goes on and on. Despite having touched the upper Echelon in his niche, he still signs up for courses to stay abreast of the latest developments in the world of technology.