Mark Zuckerberg : Programmer, Philanthropist and 2013 CEO of the year

Early Life

A rebellious yet relatively quiet student, he created a website called Facemash during his sophomore year – an instantly controversial website that encouraged students to rate each other based on appearance.

The site was an immediate source of controversy at the university for several reasons. The first was its illegal use of photographs, which the university and students took issue with. The second was its controversial nature – not every student like being ranked based on their appearance. The third was its massive resource use – while it was hosted on Harvard servers, it was the most popular page in the university's entire network.

Career

Zuckerberg was soon forced to shut the site down, but its immense popularity and controversy had made him consider its future potential. He soon turned the simple site into a personal directory for Harvard students, encouraging them to create their own profiles and network with their peers at the college. It was then, together with his friends, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris hughes that they launched 'The Facebook'.

It grew phenomenally, and within the next year it was immediately scaled out to other colleges in the United States. First, it was the Ivy League only, then state schools, then every college, and then secondary schools too.

Facebook Success

Eventually, Facebook grew into a public service that anyone could access, whether to network with friends and family, to play games, or to meet past colleagues.Of course, given the immense size of the website and its incredible popularity – Facebook now has over seven-hundred million users and makes up a huge portion of overall web traffic – its attracted a reasonable amount of controversy. From privacy disputes to concerns about the companys earliest years and equity share, the company has been sued numerous times and criticized frequently.

Zukerberg Success - Growth of Facebook

Obama with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook Head Quarters

Nevertheless, Zuckerberg has remained true to his initial vision – to create a website that the entire world can use to communicate openly and easily with one another. Hes turned down opportunities to sell the site, often for multi-billion dollar sums. Hes even turned down chances to increase the sites income from ad revenue, instead preferring to keep the user experience clean and pure.The end result is one of the worlds biggest online businesses, and an icon of the tech renaissance thats occurred recently.

Although its true value is debatable, its safe to say that Facebook, and its creator Mark Zuckerberg, are two of the twenty-first centurys most influential, controversial, and potentially powerful figures.

Personal Life

Mark Zuckerberg married Melissa Chen in 2012. They had met when Mark was a sophomore in Harvard at a frat party. They started dating in 2003 and they started living together when she was a medical student in the University of California, San Fransisco. 

On 31 July 2015, Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world that they'd had a baby girl, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg.

 

Mark Zuckerberg's Motivational Speech in India