Zuckerberg was born in 1984 in
White Plains, New York to Karen, a psychiatrist, and Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist. He and his three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, were brought up in
Dobbs Ferry, New York Zuckerberg was raised Jewish and had his
bar mitzvah when he turned 13,although he has since described himself as an
atheist.
On Zuckerberg's Facebook page(
Facebook.com/MarkZuckerberg), he listed his personal interests as "openness, making things that help people connect and share what's important to them, revolutions, information flow, minimalism".Zuckerberg sees blue best because of
red–green colorblindness; blue is also Facebook's dominant color.
In May 2011, it was reported that Zuckerberg had bought a five bedroom house in Palo Alto for $7 million
Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room on February 4, 2004. An earlier inspiration for Facebook may have come from
Phillips Exeter Academy, the prep school from which Zuckerberg graduated in 2002. It published its own student directory, “The Photo Address Book,” which students referred to as “The Facebook.” Such photo directories were an important part of the student social experience at many private schools. With them, students were able to list attributes such as their class years, their proximities to friends, and their telephone numbers.
Once at college, Zuckerberg's Facebook started off as just a "Harvard thing" until Zuckerberg decided to spread it to other schools, enlisting the help of roommate
Dustin Moskovitz. They first started it at
Stanford,
Dartmouth,
Columbia,
New York University,
Cornell,
Penn,
Brown, and
Yale, and then at other schools that had social contacts with Harvard.
Zuckerberg moved to
Palo Alto, California, with Moskovitz and some friends. They leased a small house that served as an office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met
Peter Thiel who invested in the company. They got their first office in mid-2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group planned to return to Harvard but eventually decided to remain in CaliforniaThey had already turned down offers by major corporations to buy out Facebook. In an interview in 2007, Zuckerberg explained his reasoning:
It's not because of the amount of money. For me and my colleagues, the most important thing is that we create an open information flow for people. Having media corporations owned by
conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me.
He restated these same goals to
Wired magazine in 2010: "The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open."Earlier, in April 2009, Zuckerberg sought the advice of former
Netscape CFO
Peter Currie about financing strategies for Facebook
On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that the company reached the 500 million-user mark. When asked whether Facebook could earn more income from advertising as a result of its phenomenal growth, he explained:
"I guess we could ... If you look at how much of our page is taken up with ads compared to the average search query. The average for us is a little less than 10 percent of the pages and the average for search is about 20 percent taken up with ads ... That’s the simplest thing we could do. But we aren’t like that. We make enough money. Right, I mean, we are keeping things running; we are growing at the rate we want to".
In 2010,
Steven Levy, who authored the 1984 book
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, wrote that Zuckerberg "clearly thinks of himself as a
hacker." Zuckerberg said that "it's OK to break things" "to make them better.
Facebook instituted "
hackathons" held every six to eight weeks where participants would have one night to conceive of and complete a project. The company provided music, food, and beer at the hackathons, and many Facebook staff members, including Zuckerberg, regularly attended. "The idea is that you can build something really good in a night", Zuckerberg told Levy. "And that's part of the personality of Facebook now ... It's definitely very core to my personality."
Vanity Fair magazine named Zuckerberg number 1 on its 2010 list of the Top 100 "most influential people of the Information Age". Zuckerberg ranked number 23 on the
Vanity Fair 100 list in 2009. In 2010, Zuckerberg was chosen as number 16 in
New Statesman's annual survey of the world's 50 most influential figures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
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