About Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York. The son of Karen, a psychiatrist, and Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist, Zuckerberg co-founded the social networking website, Facebook, out of his college dorm room following his successes with two earlier projects, one of which was called CourseMatch that helped students choose their classes based on the course selections of other users, and the other, Facemash, which compared the pictures of two students on campus and allowed users to vote on which one was more attractive (Biography.com, n.d.).
As an entrepreneur and CEO of Facebook, Zuckerberg has brought with him the passion and personality he cultivated at an early age when he first developed an interest in computers. According to those who knew him at the time, he used to write programs simply out of fun (Haaretz, 2009).
How Facebook Started
Facebook was born out of the desire to create an open global information flow that was not under the control of any business conglomerate (Lion’s Eye, 2007). Typically, it involved a social network platform that would give the promise of maintaining social interactions among users based on the culture of real identity on the service (StartupSchool12, 2012). To achieve this objective from the outset, the Zuckerberg led team leveraged on school email addresses provided by users as the basis for identifying the source of identity. This early real identity culture was informed by the fact that Facebook was originally a college specific social interaction engine even though it would later grow to include communities outside the college environment.
Ideally, Facebook began as a college project whose main objective was to connect Harvard students with each other, inspired by Zuckerberg’s previous feats such as the music software Pandora which he developed and named Synapse while at Exeter preparatory and both CourseMatch and FaceMash, mentioned earlier, that he created while in his sophomore year at Harvard (Biography.com, n.d.).
However, one thing that stood out from all of this was the fact that Facebook founders did not initially think of it as a business venture because they saw it simply as a pastime-something which Zuckerberg attributed to the overall mission of making information sharing accessible to all( StartupSchool12,2012). Facebook, like its predecessors in Zuckerberg’s programming product portfolio were all driven by “a desire to make it for fun” rather than as a business idea. Indeed, this philosophy has remained very much alive to date on Facebook (Carlson, 2010).
Facebook began its rollout in other schools that were deemed to have the greatest challenge in terms of offering high quality college oriented products such as Yale, Stanford, Columbia, etc. The idea was to test the waters to see if Facebook might stand from anything offered out there in order to provide theoretical insight into whether or not to push ahead with the plans of expansion so as to know if it would be worthwhile to invest in and produce something different or maybe end up being just another one among equals or more of the same (Nguyen,2004).
Personal Characteristics
Mark Zuckerberg is a man with many desirable characteristic traits that make up an entrepreneur and are worth emulating. Key among them includes:
Passion
From the early age of 12, it seemed that Mark had already begun developing a burgeoning interest in computers and specifically programming. From Zucknet, which he developed out of his Atari BASIC programming courtesy of his father’s guiding and which they utilized both at the dentist practice and at home to communicate with, to the music software he developed in private high school and named Synapse, to Harvard Sophomore projects namely the CourseMatch and Facemash, it is very clear that this was an individual with internal drive to develop things out of fun (Carlson, 2010).
Leadership
Being able to provide direction to his fellow college mates when they were at the crossroads of decision whether to launch Facebook faster by going the way of many big companies or simply stick to their mission of creating an open world by taking the longer route of trying to understand the needs of their users. For instance, Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz had to be involved in cleaning up the data for various schools that they were launching in with a view to setting a tone of high quality college level data on Facebook (StartupSchool12, 2012).
Pursuit of excellence
He took up the decision to launch in schools that had school specific social networks because he knew that if Facebook succeeded first in areas that would be the hardest to conquer then he would have passed the first crucial test of determining the level of quality his product was promising.
Minimalism
Zuckerberg took the investment decision slowly and carefully by investing in cheap servers for a start.
References
Biography.com n.d., Mark Zuckerberg biography. Web.
Carlson, N 2010, At Last – The Full Story of How Facebook Was Founded, Business Insider. Web.
Grimlang, G 2009, Facebook founder’s roommate recounts creation of Internet giant, Haaretz. Web.
Nguyen, L 2004, Online network created by Harvard students flourishes, The Tufts Daily. Web.
Philips Exeter Academy 2007, Face-To-Face with Mark Zuckerberg ’02. Web.
StartupSchool12 2012, Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2012. Web.