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Mark Zuckerberg Childhood Biography


Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May
14, 1984 and grew up in the suburbs of
New York, Dobbs Ferry. He was the second
of four children and the only son in the
educated family. Marks father, Edward
Zuckerberg, is a dentist and mother, Karen
Zuckerberg, is a psychiatrist. His father
owned a dental practice next to the family
house. Mark and his three sisters, Arielle,
Randi and Donna were raised in Dobbs
Ferry, New York.
Mark got interested in programming yet in elementary school. The fact
that the world is divided between programmers and users, Mark found out
when he was 10 years old and got his first PC Quantex 486DX on the Intel
486.
From Mark Zuckerberg biography we found out he was taught Atari BASIC
Programming by his father and when Mark was about 12, he used Atari
BASIC to create a messenger, which he called ZuckNet. It made all the
computers connected to each other and allowed to transfer messages
between the house and dental office. His father installed the messenger
on his computer in his dentist office and the receptionist could inform him
when a new patient arrived. Mark also enjoyed developing games and
communication tools and as he said he was doing it just for fun. His
father, Edward Zuckerberg, even hired a computer tutor David Newman
who gave his son some private lessons.
Also being at high school, Mark wrote an artificially intelligent media
player Synapse for MP3-playlists that carefully studied the preferences of

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a user and was able to generate playlists guessing, which tracks user
wants to listen to right now. Microsoft and AOL got unusual interest in
Synapse media player and wanted to buy it out. However, the young
talent rejected the offer of IT-giants and then politely rejected their
invitation to cooperate. Just like that, Mark Zuckerberg refused from
dozens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and work in one of
the top IT-corporations.
Soon Mark Zuckerberg studied at the Academy of Phillips Exeter, an
exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. He showed good results
there in science and literature, receiving a degree in classics. He also
showed a great talent in fencing and even became the school captain of
the fencing team. Yet Mark Zuckerberg stayed fascinated by coding and
wanted to work on the development of new software.
In 2002, after graduating Phillips Exeter, Zuckerberg entered Harvard
University. By his second year at the Ivy League he had gained a
reputation as a software developer on campus. It was then when he wrote

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a program CourseMatch, which helped students choose their subjects on


the basis of lists of courses from other users.

FaceMash A Fun Site for Voting


In 2003, once summer evening when Mark Zuckerberg suffered from
insomnia in the Harvard dormitory room, he got an idea to create a site
called FaceMash. Mark decided to hack the database of Harvard, where
the students uploaded their profile pictures. He quickly wrote a program
that randomly selected two pictures of two random female students and
put them next to each other, asking Who is hotter?, giving the option for
voting.
The process was in full swing and site was visited by most of the students
in Harvard. When the number of visitors exceeded the limit, the server
crashed due to overload. Mark appeared before the committee on
computer hacking. Of course nobody told Mark Zuckerberg Well done!
and he received a disciplinary action, and had noticed that such kind of
things cause stormy interest in society. By the way, Harvard has refused
to comment on the incident up till now.

The Rising of Facebook


About ten months before the Zuckerbergs FaceMash epic, one of the
students of Harvard Divya Narendra had already spoken with the idea
of creating a social network exclusively for Harvard students, many of
whom were suffering from emotional stiffness. And not have aliens
engaged into the network, Narendra suggested using Harvard email
address as the main username.
Divya Narendras partners were twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The
father of the Winklevoss twins, Howard Winklevoss, is a successful
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financial consultant and put in his sons a lot of efforts and money so the
problem with the initial capital for the future network could be solved
easily.
In conversation with Mark Narendra said that the project would be called
Harvard Connection (later renamed to ConnectU), and its members will be
posted to the Internet their photos, personal information and useful links.
The tasks of Mark Zuckerberg included programming of the site and
creating a special source code, which would allow the system to work as
quickly as possible.

After a private meeting with Narendra and the Winklevoss twins,


Zuckerberg agreed to join in the work, but the potential of his new
partners he estimated it skeptically. While working on Harvard Connection
he got a fantastic idea about his own social network.
On February 04, 2004 he registered the domain name TheFacebook.com,
now known throughout the world as Facebook.com. However, it functioned
only within Harvard.
After Zuckerberg and his partner Eduardo Saverin realized that there were
already registered 4000 users, they have come to the conclusion that
they needed the services of new programmers. One of them was a Marks
neighbor, Darren Moskowitz, who further opened the Facebook service to
students at Columbia University, Stanford, and Yale.
Around the same time after the IPO, Zuckerberg owned 503.6 million
shares. And now Zuckerberg controls nearly 60% of the companys votes,
35% Eduardo Saverin, and 5% went to newcomer Moskowitz. Another
friend of Mark, Chris Hughes, was assigned as the Press attache of
Facebook.
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Some time later, the registration was opened to all students. The main
condition was the availability of an email address in .edu zone, which also
indicated a persons belonging to education sector.
It must be said that at first this tactic worked out nicely. The project
attracted audience attention of sufficient quality. When a user was trying
to sign up he had to fill out a detailed profile, and in addition to the email
address in .edu zone it was requested to add a real profile picture. If
people used avatars instead of real pictures their profiles were deleted.
Soon
beyond
sector,

Facebook
the

went

education

becoming

more

and more popular. Mark


Zuckerberg

started

looking for investors. The


first investments Mark received from one of the founders of PayPal, Peter
Thiel, who is well known throughout Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel allocated
$500,000 dollars and that amount was sufficient for immediate Facebook
purposes. The project began to evolve rapidly. In less than a year after it
was founded more than 1 million people joined the social network. For
further development of Facebook they needed more investments. Accel
Partners invested in Facebook $12.7 million dollars and then Greylock
Partners added to this amount $27.5 million dollars.
By 2005, Facebook became accessible for all educational institutions and
universities in the USA. Zuckerberg still believed that his project is a
social network for students, but the interest of users to Facebook grew
exponentially. Then it was decided to make a registration accessible to the
public. And after this a Facebook epidemic started.

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The main thing that immediately attracted users in Facebook, is that


friends who meet in real life now could communicate with each other
online. It was something new.
Facebook audience grew rapidly, but the monetization of the project still
remained unclear. Everyone expected that the main instrument should be
context advertising. The fact is that every Facebook user fills sufficiently
detailed profile, which can be used to show relevant advertisements.
Obviously that would open up enough options to advertisers, who may be
of interest to their audience. But Facebook continued

just to build

number of users. When they got over 50 million users, large companies
began to offer Zuckerberg to sale them the project. So, one time even
Yahoo! offered $900 million dollars for Facebook. Impressive sum, but it
absolutely did not satisfy Mark. Facebook biography and Mark Zuckerberg
success story is quite intriguing, isnt it?

Lawsuits against Facebook


The Facebook project launch was accompanied by series of scandals. Six
days later after launching the site senior students brothers Cameron and
Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra accused Mark Zuckerberg in stoling
their idea. They claimed that in 2003 hired Zuckerberg to make him
complete the establishment of the social network HarvardConnection.com.
According to their testimonies, Zuckerberg did not provide them the
results of his work, but used the original source code to create Facebook.
In the same year, Narendra and the Winklevoss twins launched their own
network renamed to ConnectU. And they continued to attack on Mark
Zuckerberg,

complaining

Harvard

administration

and

The

Harvard

Crimson newspaper. Initially Zuckerberg urged journalists not to publish


the

investigation:

he

showed

them

what

supposedly

he

did

for

HarvardConnection, and explained that those developments did not have

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any relation to Facebook. But very inappropriately, another Harvard


student John Thomson in personal conversations started saying that
Zuckerberg stole one of his ideas for Facebook. The newspaper decided to
publish the article and it offended Mark Zuckerberg very much.
Zuckerberg took revenge on The Harvard Crimson. According to Silicon
Alley Insider, in 2004, he breaks the mailboxes of two journalists from
The Harvard Crimson, using the newly launched Facebook. He found users
who were involved in the newspaper and browsed their logs (i.e. history)
of incorrectly entered passwords in Facebook. Zuckerbergs expectations
were met: two employees of the newspaper absentmindedly tried to login
Facebook with passwords from their mailboxes. Silicon Alley Insider wrote
that Zuckerberg got lucky: he had a chance to read the correspondence
about him between the editorial office and HarvardConnection.

The Winklevoss twins and Narendra filed a lawsuit against Mark


Zuckerberg, but the court rejected their claim. They were persistent and
filed another lawsuit. This time the court examined the code sources to
understand whether they were actually stolen. But the truth was still not
clear. The examination results were not announced. In 2009, Zuckerberg
agreed to pay $45 million ($20 million in cash, and the remaining amount
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in Facebook shares) ConnectU as part of the court settlement. The case


was closed. By that time ConnectU had less than 100,000 users, Facebook
boasted about 150 million users.
The Winklevoss twins yet did not calm down and filed a petition in the
U.S. Court of Appeals, but they were denied a retrial. According to their
lawyer Jerome Falk, the appellate court refused to take a review of the
case based only on the parties settlement agreement, which states that
members of the trial after the signing of the document does not have the
right to resume the trial. In counsels view, the decision was illegal, as
Mark Zuckerberg in a proceeding in 2008 provided false information about
the companys value.
On May 17, 2011 Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss filed another lawsuit
against the owner of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg to the U.S. Supreme
Court. That was the latest attempt of the brothers to make the court to
reconsider the case.

How Facebook Makes Money


In 2013, the turnover of Facebook, Inc. reached $7.87 billion and net
income $1.5 billion. The growth rates are also impressive: three years
turnover has increased six-fold.
Basis earnings of Facebook come from contextual ads on the pages of
social network. Growing number of users and the time they spend on the
site is converted into advertising revenues. 85% percent of cash-flow that
went through the company last year was earned through contextual
advertising.
Most of the rest 15% are deductions from purchases made through the
Facebook payment system. These are mostly not real, but virtual goods.

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For example seeds, fruits and vegetables, purchased by fans of the


popular game Farmville developed by Zynga.

Despite the apparent frivolity, virtual goods is a serious business, and the
Facebook report confirms that. The company estimates that in 2010 the
global market turnover for virtual goods reached $7 billion, and by 2014 it
rose to $15 billion.
At the beginning of January 2013, Facebook Inc. started testing the
service of paid private messaging. Facebook charges $1.00 for a private
message that you can send to the users who are not in your friend list.
And the message goes directly to their Inbox folder, instead of Other one.
But Facebook went further and realized that some users are worth more
than a $1. If you want to send a message to Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg and get into his inbox, you might have to pay $100 for this
exclusive option. This is another very simple way to generate additional
revenue.

Acquisition of Instagram, Oculus Rift and WhatsApp


Mark Zuckerberg is a great strategist and he keeps acquiring companies
that continue their operation as independent entities under Facebooks
umbrella.

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In April 2012, acquired mobile photo sharing


app Instagram for $1 billion in cash and
stock. Initially, it was an iOS application
developed

by

Systrom.

Now

Mike

Krieger

Instagram

and

Kevin

application

is

available on Android OS as well.


In March 2014, Facebook closed acquisition
of Oculus Rift for $2 billion. Oculus Rift is a
virtual reality hardware engineered by Oculus VR Company headed by
Palmer Freeman Luckey. Facebook paid $400 million in cash plus 23.1m
Facebook shares, with a further $300 million in incentives if it hits certain
milestones in the future.
In October 2014, Mark Zuckerberg completed purchase of WhatsApp for
$22 billion. Facebook paid $4.59 billion in cash and 177,760,669 shares in
the company. WhatsApp is an instant messaging application founded by
Jan Koum and Brian Acton in 2009.

WhatsApp Co-Founders Brian Acton (left) and Jan Koum (right)

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Mark Zuckerberg: TIMEs 2010 Person of the Year


In January 2010, TIME magazine named
Facebook founder, CEO and 26-year old
billionaire Mark Zuckerberg the Person of
the Year 2010.
Lady Gaga, James Cameron and founder of
WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, were struggling
for this title that year. However, TIME
magazine

chose

his

hero.

The

social

network created by Mark connected almost


every

tenth

person

on

the

planet,

Richard Stengel, TIME editor-in-chief explained their choice. According to


him, Today, Facebook is the third largest country in the world that knows
about its citizens as much as no government on planet does.
According to TIME, in the past year no one else had such great impact on
the world than the current winner. Marks popularity is so high that in
2010 David Fincher shot a movie The Social Network in which the main
role of Facebook founder was brilliantly played by Jesse Eisenberg.
Previously, TIMEs persons of the year became the United States
presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
In 2010, Forbes magazine admitted Mark Zuckerberg as the youngest
billionaire in its list to the state of $4 billion.
In the rating of the 400 richest people in the United States, published by
Forbes magazine in 2014, Zuckerberg took 11th place with a net worth of
$34 billion.

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Mark Zuckerbergs Lifestyle


Currently Zuckerberg lives in the Palo Alto in a $7 million estate that
features 5 bedrooms a saltwater pool, and over 5,000 square feet of
property.

Mark Zuckerbergs Wife Priscilla Chan

On May 19, 2012 Mark Zuckerberg married his longtime girlfriend Priscilla
Chan in Palo Alto, California and finally they happy live together.
We hope you have enjoyed reading Mark Zuckerberg biography and
breathtaking success story of Facebook and it has inspired you to new
discoveries.

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Bibliography
The Following Website used for collecting information about this
Entrepreneur:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
www.biography.com/people/mark-zuckerberg507402
mashable.com/category/mark-zuckerberg/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
http://businessideaslab.com/mark-zuckerberg/
https://www.google.co.in

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