In the previous blog, we had learned about the journey of the CEO of Google, "Sundar Pichai". In this blog, we learn about the journey of Facebook's CEO, "Mark Zuckerberg".
Before the popularity of WhatsApp and Instagram, Facebook was used as a top social media platform and Mark Zuckerberg is one of the founders and CEO of this company. Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest CEO on the planet with an estimated worth of $49.9 billion as of April 2016. He is only 35 and reaching this level is incredible. He began his coding experience by learning Atari's basic programing language with the help of his father. But he was a quick learner, so his dad thought of hiring a professional developer to train him. While he was still in school he took a graduation program in computer programing at a college.
He built a program to communicate with his father's computer at his dental practice. He also built many computer games with the help of his creativity. In college, he always is known as a programming prodigy. At Harvard, the students had books called Facebook that had their names and pictures on paper. Mark build the website that randomly showed two pictures of males and two females on it. People who visited the site had to choose which person is the hottest. This site was named Facemask and it just went up within one weekend. Built for fun, but went so popular that the college had to shut it down. Also, some students didn't like the idea of their pictures being used without their permission. He was forced to apologize for these things.
In 2004, he began writing a new website which is called Facebook along with Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz. Initially, it was just a Harvard site, but then soon expanded to other colleges and universities also. As this project started to get momentum, he decided to take a drop out of the college and dedicate his time only to the website. He and his friends moved to a small house in Palo Alto which became the office of the enterprise. In 2005, Facebook was renamed just Facebook only. The site opened up anyone over a study in 2006. By 2007 the site had over 1 lakh businesses listening to their companies over Facebook and creating pages.
By the year 2011, it also became the largest Digital Photograph and had over 350 million people accessing it. After all this success, Facebook decided to borrow money from people in order to expand it. So, on May 18 2012, it bought its first IPO in the US markets by offering 21 million shares to private investors at a price of $38. This valued the company at $104 billion. Almost everyone wanted to buy a page on the booming social platform. So, it was very easy for Facebook to raise $16 billion from the market. But just after 2 weeks of IPO things didn't go well for investors as the market price even went down further reaching the level of $ 19. Some of them even lost 50% in the first few months. More than 40 lawsuits were filed against Facebook after just the first week of the IPO launch. However, it recovered in 2013 and by 2016 it was around $41.
Mark Zuckerberg remained true to his initial vision to create a website that the entire world can use to communicate openly and easily with one another. After all the hard work, he is now standing with the world's popular leaders. He is the most influential and potential powerful figure of the 21st century despite so many controversies.
If you like my blog and if you feel this is informative, do let me know, which other people's journeys you want me to write about.