1984– 
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER UNITED STATES
My goal is to not have a job. Making cool things is just something I love doing, and not having someone tell me what to do or a time frame in which to do it is the luxury I am looking for in my life.
—MARK ZUCKERBERG, AGE TWENTY
This is ridiculous,” Mark heard his father, Edward, complain. Edward ran a dental office out of the Zuckerberg family home, and everything was going quite well, except for the fact that his receptionist had to yell—really HOLLER—down the hall, past the 160-gallon fish tank, to let him know every time a patient arrived. It seemed the only alternative would be to make her walk back to the dental exam rooms every time, which would leave the reception area—and all the patient records and business files stored there—vulnerable. No, that wouldn’t work either. “There’s got to be a better way.”
Twelve-year-old Mark didn’t speak up right away, but his father’s need had sparked an idea. He headed upstairs to sort out the details.
Once settled into his room, Mark powered up his computer and began punching away at the keys. “If I set it up this way, maybe it will—” He paused and hit the backspace key a few times. “No, this will work better.”
Mark says he works on a lot of small projects, coding one little idea here and there. Sometimes, they come together into one big product, like Facebook, but not always.
In no time, he had created a computer program he called Zucknet. It would allow the receptionist to send Dr. Zuckerberg an instant message on the computer to tell him when patients arrived. No more yelling needed!
Pleased with his invention, Mark set the whole family—his parents and three siblings—up on Zucknet so they could chat with one another. Of course, between the siblings, chatting was less common than pranks were. One time Mark sent a message to his sister Donna while she was working on homework: the computer was going to explode in thirty seconds. “Maaaark!” she shrieked.
This was only one of Mark’s many early computer programming adventures, though. His family was fairly well off and lived a comfortable life in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Like most kids, one of Mark’s favorite things to do was invite his friends over. They would goof around and draw pictures, and then Mark would make a computer game out of the pictures.
Mark’s parents recognized his talent, and when he was eleven, they hired a tutor to work with him once a week. That lasted a short while, until Mark enrolled in a night class on programming at Mercy College nearby. Mark was so young that the instructor didn’t think he was a student, but the child of a student, and asked him to leave!
For high school, Mark attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where he studied classics, practiced fencing, and—of course—worked on computers. For his senior project, he and a friend developed a program called Synapse, which paid attention to a person’s musical tastes and predicted songs the listener would want to play next. They put it up on the internet for free, where Slashdot.org found it and linked to it. Suddenly, companies like AOL, WinAmp, and Microsoft were contacting Mark and offering to buy the program. One offer was for $2 million! The friends decided to turn down all offers, though.
When Mark went to college at Harvard University, his program ideas kept coming. He developed one called CourseMatch to help students choose which classes to take based on the course popularity among other students. Then he launched Facemash, which put photos of two Harvard students next to each other and allowed people to choose which one was more attractive. The students thought it was hilarious, but the administration did not; the site was shut down within four hours.
That’s when Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twins, and Divya Narendra approached Mark to help them with their project: HarvardConnection, later called ConnectU. It was late 2003, and Mark was a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Harvard. Cameron, Tyler, and Divya had been working on this project for two years, and they’d had the help of a few other people, but the programmers weren’t able to finish the code. They needed Mark to help so they could launch the social network that would allow students at Harvard to create online groups of friends, post updates about what they were doing and how they were feeling, and upload pictures. They knew it was going to be a huge success.
Mark accepted the invitation and began work right away. There are different stories about what happened next, though. Some people think Mark stole Cameron, Tyler, and Divya’s idea, while it’s possible that the four just didn’t work together very well and Mark was inspired to create his own social network. Either way, Mark never finished ConnectU. Instead, he launched thefacebook.com in early 2004.
Originally thefacebook.com was only for Harvard students. Within the first day of its launch, the site had over 1,200 members. A few months later, Mark opened the site up to other colleges in Boston, then to other Ivy League schools, then to colleges and universities across the country. In August 2005, Mark dropped the from the name, and the site was known as simply Facebook. The next month, high schoolers could sign up for a Facebook account too, and then in September 2006, the site was opened up to anyone with an email address. That’s when the user numbers really soared. As of mid-2011, Facebook had 750 million users, more than half of whom checked the site on any given day. All together, people were spending more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook per month—if you were to line all those minutes up consecutively, they would equal 1.3 million years, or eighteen thousand lifetimes!
Facebook employs 1,700 people, and Mark expects only the best from his engineers. They embrace the term HACKER, which to them means “someone who builds something very quickly” (it can also mean “someone who cracks passcodes to obtain private information,” but that’s not the definition Mark focuses on). Sometimes they’ll have Hackathons, when all the engineers, including Mark, stay up all night, working together to develop a new part of Facebook.
Not surprisingly, Mark has a Facebook page too. On it, he writes, “I’m trying to make the world a more open place by helping people connect and share.” Through Facebook, he seems to be achieving that goal. Stories abound about people finding long-lost friends, adopted children finding birth parents, and medical patients finding organ donors, all through Facebook. It’s even useful in politics—revolutionaries have used Facebook to organize civil rights revolts in countries like Yemen and Libya. Through applications, users can play games or tell their friends where they are at any given time. Companies can buy ads and target them to Facebook users who like things similar to their products or services. It seems there’s hardly any social activity that one can’t do on Facebook. In 2011 President Obama praised Mark for his innovation.
But the website is more than popular—it’s also profitable. Until May 2012, the company was not publicly owned, meaning not just anyone could buy stock in it; it had investors. People basically gave money to Facebook so that the company could use it to do new things. Then, as the company grew and became worth more money, the investors could get their money—and then some—back. When the company went public, the value of Facebook was estimated at $104 billion,16 and Mark Zuckerberg was a rich twenty-eight-year-old, worth about $17.5 billion.17
In 2010 the biographical drama The Social Network was released. It’s about Mark and his experience in building the Facebook empire. Even though it’s a fictionalized account—Mark’s never even seen it—the public went crazy over it. The movie won three Oscars and made over $96 million in theaters.
Have you ever wondered why Facebook’s colors are all blue? Mark is colorblind in green and red.
Many people are now asking, what’s next? Mark’s still only in his twenties, so he’s got lots of time to write more code, develop more programs, and change the world in new ways.