Mark Zuckerberg, founder, CEO and
president of Facebook, launched what became the world’s most popular social
networking website in 2004. Just four years later, he was the planet’s youngest
billionaire.
Born in 1984, Zuckerberg was
interested in computers from an early age and could write software code before
he was 12 years old. At high school he wrote a program he called ‘ZuckNet’,
which allowed all the computers between the family home and his father’s dental
office to communicate by ‘pinging’ each other. His next venture, which caught
the attention of both Microsoft and AOL,
was a music player that used artificial intelligence to learn the user’s listening habits.
was a music player that used artificial intelligence to learn the user’s listening habits.
While studying computer science and
psychology at Harvard University, Zuckerberg, aged 19, began working on a
program which would allow students to contact one another via an online
website. At first called ‘The Facebook’, the site launched from his dorm room
on February 15 2004. Within two weeks, more than half of Harvard’s students had
signed up for the service, and Zuckerberg, with the help of his roommate,
opened it up to universities across the United States and Canada. In June of
that year, after an influx of investment, he dropped out of Harvard and moved
to Palo Alto in California to devote all his time and energy to the
skyrocketing social network site. In September 2005, the high school version of
Facebook was launched and by the following year anyone with a valid email
address was allowed to access it.
“I don’t pretend that I had any real
idea what I was doing at first,” Zuckerberg tells cbsnews.com. “You’re going to
make a ton of mistakes, but you don’t get judged by that. In a world that’s
changing really quickly, the biggest risk is not taking any risks.”
Creating and sustaining a startup is
beyond difficult, he says, and the one essential quality for success is
passion. “The demands and the amount of work it takes, if you weren’t
completely into what you were doing and didn’t think it was an important thing,
it would be completely irrational. You really have to believe and love what you’re
doing.”
Zuckerberg has had many number of
opportunities to sell the site for vast amounts of money, but has resisted them
all. “As a company we’re focused on what we’re building rather than on the
exit,” he says. “We believe we’re adding a certain amount of value to people’s
lives if we build a very good product.”
In May 2012 investors were giddy
with expectation when Facebook went public, but the outcome was disappointing
and share prices plummeted. Stocks have begun a gradual recovery since then,
and Zuckerberg remains confident about his mission - to make the world more
open and connected. “When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the
system usually ends up in a really good place,” he says. “What we view our role
as, is giving people that power”