May 14, 1984
Born to Karen, a psychiatrist, and Edward, a dentist, in White Plains, New York. His three sisters are Randi, Donna and Arielle.
1996 Creates ZuckNet, a programme to connect his dentist father’s (Edward) home and office computers. It alerts his father about patients in his waiting room. By 18 Mark knows half-a-dozen programming languages.
2000 At Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive private school in New Hampshire, he becomes the captain of his high school fencing team. This is where he also learns to read Latin and Greek.
2002 Comes up (with Adam D’Angelo) with a programme called Synapse, which predicts a user’s music listening habits. Microsoft tries to buy it but he refuses and chooses to enrol at Harvard. During a conference at Stanford University 10 years later, Z says had Facebook failed he would have probably “taken an engineering job”... “[I’ve] always had a lot of respect for Microsoft. A lot of people from Harvard went to work there.”
2002 Enrols at Harvard’s undergraduate computer science programme but leaves it in 2005 to devote all his time to his social network that is about to take off.
2003 Starts dating Priscilla Chan, who in 2012 will become his wife.
2003 Develops a tool called CourseMatch where people can list what classes they are taking. “And then I kept on building more and more things just like that. I did build the face match thing that was in the movie (The Social Network, 2010) but that was just a prank.”
2003 Launches Facemash, a web programme that allows Harvard students to compare images of same-gender students and rate the more attractive. It becomes so popular that he is almost kicked out of the university.
2004 The year when Facebook’s twisty tale unfolds. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, or the Winklevoss brothers, were juniors in Harvard when in 2002 they conceived the Harvard Connection (also known as ConnectU), a social network. In November 2003, they ask Mark to develop the site’s software and database. Mark abandons the project in February 2004, a month after registering the domain name thefacebook.com. By April of that year, his site is very popular, going beyond universities and overshadowing ConnectU. Lawsuits follow. Meanwhile, Mark appears on CNBC to discuss his expanding social networking site: “When we first launched we were hoping for maybe 400 or 500 people… so who knows where we’re going next? Maybe we can make something cool.”
2004 Facebook receives its first big investment — $500,000 from Peter Thiel, who over the years has sold his stocks in the company. But credit goes to Napster (the song-sharing service that upended the music industry) man Sean Parker for the meeting. Sean becomes the first president of the company but is pushed out the next year after a cocaine-related incident in North Carolina.
2007 When the network is taking off, Zuck — according to David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect — has two sets of business cards. One is the traditional kind with his name and CEO title. The other reads: “I’m CEO… Bitch!”.
2008 When Narendra Modi meets Zuck at an FB townhall conference in 2015, the FB man recounts his 2008 visit to India. And that meeting wouldn’t have been possible without Steve Jobs entering the picture. “Early on in our history…we had hit a tough patch…I went to meet Steve Jobs, one of my mentors, who told me in order to reconnect with the mission of the company, I should visit this temple he had gone to,” Mark had said. It was during that visit his vision for FB was reinforced. Though Zuck didn’t name the temple, but the Steve Jobs connection takes us to Neem Karoli Baba (who passed away in 1973), the spiritual guru whose ashram Jobs had visited in 1974. Mark had flown down to Pantnagar, about 65km from Nainital, and then taken a car to the temple which is housed within the premises of Kainchi Ashram. “So I travelled for almost a month (India and other places), seeing how people connected. Having the opportunity to feel how much better the world could be if everyone had a stronger ability to connect reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing. That’s something I’ve always remembered while we built Facebook.”
2009 China blocks domestic access to Facebook.
2010 Is named Time magazine’s ‘person of the year’. It is also the year of the film The Social Network, which documents Zuckerberg’s time at Harvard and the early days of Facebook. Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Mark in the film, and Z come face to face the next year on Saturday Night Live. Mark to Jesse on the film: “It was interrrresting!”
2010 Mr Z is usually not seen dancing. But he does just that with his wife when he attends the wedding of his friend and former colleague Aditya Agarwal to Ruchi Sanghvi. The couple of Indian origin went on to be associated with one of the most popular file-sharing services, Dropbox.
2012 One billion users for Facebook! The same year, FB buys out the photo-sharing site Instagram for $1 billion and in a few years, takes it to a new level.
2014 Visits Chandauli, in Rajasthan. Suddenly, a village is face to face with the online superhero. He thinks it would mark the digital transformation of a village and fit into the greater scheme of things… bringing the Internet to millions of people. When he returns to Delhi, he writes on FB: “Seeing first-hand how people here are using the Internet was an incredible experience. One day, if we can connect every village, we can transform many more lives and improve the world for all of us. Chandauli is just the start.”
2014 People wonder why Facebook drops $19 billion on WhatsApp, the instant messaging service. Nobody asks that question anymore! The other big acquisition of the year: Oculus VR, the company dealing in virtual reality.
2014 Internet.org launches in India, a service that the social media giant says will help affordable Internet access. Soon the platform is renamed Free Basics. While Internet.org remains the bigger entity, Free Basics is launched with the addition of a small set of services developed on an open platform with new partners.
2015 Daughter Maxima Chan Zuckerberg is born on November 30. Mark’s wife is currently pregnant with their second.
2016 Not the best of years for Facebook. In February, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India bans the Free Basics programme, ruling that the system and others like it violate the principles of Net neutrality. Mark writes in a post: “While we’re disappointed with today’s decision, I want to personally communicate that we are committed to keep working to break down barriers to connectivity in India and around the world.”
May 25, 2017
The Harvard dropout will be the “commencement speaker” at Harvard’s 366th Commencement where he will also get a college degree. He walks in the footsteps of Bill Gates who did the same 10 years ago.
IN HIS WORDS
In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
October 2011 at Y Combinator’s Startup School in Palo Alto, California
People don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie — or even what you say, right? They care about what you build.
In an interview with ABC in July 2010
I don’t want Facebook to be an American company. I don’t want it to be this company that just spreads American values all across the world.... My view on this is that you want to be really culturally sensitive and understand the way that people actually think.
To The Wall Street Journal in 2011
You can’t connect the world without connecting India.
At his town hall at IIT Delhi in 2015
GOING, GOING... NOT GONE
2005: In the spring of 2005, Mark (still TheFacebook) is talking to The Washington Post Company about an investment. This is when Viacom offers $75 million to buy the company.
2006: Viacom once again tries its luck with $1.5 billion on the table. Mark almost agrees but he wants a bigger pay upfront.
2006: “One of the hardest parts for me was when Yahoo offered to buy the company for a lot of money. That was the turning point in the company. The part that was painful wasn’t turning down the offer. It was the fact that after that, huge amounts of (people) quit because they didn’t believe in what we were doing,” Mark tells Y Combinator, a start-up incubator, in 2016.
2007: Wanting to keep FB away from Google, then Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer offers $15 billion.
ZUCKERBERG FOR POTUS?!
After Donald T, will it be Mark Z? The question has been doing the rounds for sometime. It’s a legitimate possibility, say some, because Mark’s challenge to himself for 2017 (see page 18) is to visit and meet with people in all 50 states of the US by the end of the year. He is using his social networking skills well and pictures of him feeding a calf in Blanchardville near Madison have gone viral. Last month, a clause in his SEC filing from Facebook read: “Mr Zuckerberg’s leave of absence or resignation would not constitute a Voluntary Resignation if it were in connection with his serving in a government position or office.” Mr Z for White House in 2020?!
I admire Mark Zuckerberg . . . for not selling out, for wanting to make a company. I admire that a lot.
— Steve Jobs (to his biographer Walter Isaacson)
MARK’S CHALLENGES TO HIMSELF
2009 WEAR A TIE FOR A WHOLE YEAR
Mark Zuckerberg describes his challenge for 2009 in his own words thus: “My 2009 challenge was to wear a tie for a whole year. After the start of the recession in 2008, I wanted to signal to everyone at Facebook that this was a serious year for us. Great companies thrive by investing more heavily while everyone else is cutting back during a recession. But great companies also make sure they’re financially strong and sustainable. My tie was the symbol of how serious and important a year this was, and I wore it every day to show this.”
2010 LEARN MANDARIN
Although Facebook isn’t available in China, Zuckerberg has made an effort to learn Mandarin. While addressing a Q&A session in Beijing in 2012, he said: “There are three reasons I decided to learn Chinese. The first, my wife is Chinese. Her grandmother can only speak Chinese. When I told her in Chinese I was going to marry Priscilla, she was very shocked. Then I want to study Chinese culture. The third: Chinese is hard and I like a challenge!” It wasn’t long before he gave a 20-minute-long speech, entirely in Mandarin, at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His Sinophilia proves that he is still keen on China. Also, there are many Chinese consumer companies that develop brands for customers globally and want to use FB ads to reach customers.
2011 EAT THE MEAT ONLY OF ANIMALS KILLED BY HIM
In May, he posted on Facebook: “I just killed a pig and a goat.” Then in a letter to Fortune, he explained: “This year, my personal challenge is around being thankful for the food I have to eat. I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have. This year I’ve basically become a vegetarian since the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself. So far, this has been a good experience. I’m eating a lot healthier foods and I’ve learned a lot about sustainable farming and raising of animals.”
2012 CODE EVERY DAY
He wrote a lot of the initial code for Facebook, but very little of it, if any, is still in use. After the initial years, he gave up coding. He spent a few hours every day in 2012 to programme.
2013 MEET ONE NEW PERSON EACH DAY OUTSIDE FB
To facilitate the process, he joined community organisations and started teaching a class at a local middle school.
2014 GRATITUDE GOAL
This involves writing a thank you note each day. He told Businessweek: “It’s important for me, because I’m a really critical person. I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are, or the level of service that we’re providing for people, or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.”
2015 READ A NEW BOOK EVERY OTHER WEEK
Zuckerberbg posted on FB: “I’m excited for my reading challenge. I’ve found reading books very intellectually fulfilling. Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today. I’m looking forward to shifting more of my media diet towards reading books.”
2016 BUILD AN AI BUTLER LIKE IRON MAN AND RUN 365 MILES
First he challenged himself to code his own version of Jarvis from Iron Man after announcing: “I’ll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell. I’ll teach it to let me know if anything is going on in Max’s (his daughter Maxima) room that I need to check on when I’m not with her.” And when Jarvis was ready, he asked Morgan Freeman to be its voice!
The same year he decided to run like Forrest Gump. “This is a lot of running, but it’s not a crazy amount. It’s a mile a day, and at a moderate pace it’s less than 10 minutes of running per day.”
2017 MEET PEOPLE IN EVERY US STATE
Yes, Mark Z is taking quite a few road trips across the US. “I’ll need to travel to about 30 states this year to complete this challenge…. The challenge is to get out and talk to more people about how they’re living, working and thinking about the future,” he said.
What is your challenge to yourself for 2017? Tell t2@abp.in
