We’re fully in the Facebook age and Mark Zuckerberg is the one who got us here. Regarded as one of the most innovative minds of his generation, Mark Zuckerberg developed technology that successfully connects everyone online in the world. Strangely enough, as one of the youngest billionaires in the world, he never intended on building a company. “Ten years ago, you know, I was just trying to help connect people at colleges and a few schools” Mark Zuckerberg told Freakonomics Radio as part of its six-week series called “The Secret Life of CEOs”.

Early Life

Born in 1984, he is part of the last generation of human beings who remember life before the internet. Zuckerberg quickly learned computer programming skills in middle school and his dad hired a professional developer to tutor him.

In high school, he used his creativity to build a smart music player that utilized machine learning to remember and then guess the user’s listening preferences. He also built computer games often out of ideas other students would draw for him. During his college years at Harvard, he was known as the programming prodigy due to the awards he had won in high school. He wrote a program in his first year called “CourseMatch” that helped students make decisions about the courses they wanted to take based upon the choices of others.

Creating Facebook

In Harvard, the students used books called “Facebooks” which had pictures and names to identify the people who lived in the dorms. Mark built a Harvard-specific photo rating site named “Facemash” where site visitors had to choose which person was better-looking. The site used photographs taken from Harvard’s online Facebooks, without student permission. The popularity of the Facemash caused servers to crash at Harvard and the college shut the site down shortly after citing copyright and security concerns.

In 2004, he partnered with friends in his dorm room to create “The Facebook”, where Harvard students could opt-in by creating an account on the social networking site. The site rapidly grew with users and Zuckerberg offered it to all Ivy League schools. By the end of 2004, The Facebook had over 1 million registered users. By 2005, “The Facebook” was known as Facebook. The site opened up to anyone over the age of 13 in 2006. Zuckerberg dropped out of school to manage Facebook full-time. As Facebook grew, their services expanded to include tagging, marketplace, gifts, video chat and more. They also acquired Instagram, Whatsapp, and Oculus VR.

Vision

Zuckerberg had one vision – he wanted his passion project to make an impact on people, without money being his priority. Although he did not set out to build a business, Facebook rose from a Harvard dorm room project to world domination with over 2 billion monthly users. When it comes to influence, Zuckerberg has signed the giving pledge, which is a commitment to contribute a majority of his wealth to philanthropic causes.

Zuckerberg has created a strong company culture that encourages risk-taking to constantly try new methods. Mark’s story as an internet entrepreneur encourages people to discover what they are most passionate about and take risks in pursuit of your goals.

Our favourite quote from Mark Zuckerberg is:

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”