Mark Zuckerberg is an American entrepreneur and computer programmer. He is well known as the founder, chairman and CEO of Facebook.
Born into a well-educated family on May 14th, 1984 in White Plains, New York, Mark Zuckerberg was raised in Dobbs Ferry. At a very early age, Zuckerberg developed an interest in computer programming.
When he was 12 years old, he created a messaging program called Zucknet. He implemented if as an inter-office communication system for the family’s dental practice. Since he was quite a child prodigy, his parents got him a computer programming tuitions. At that time he was still in high school. He was later enrolled in prep school in New Hampshire.
After his graduation from prep school, Mark got admission in Harvard University.
At Harvard, Mark quickly became known as a computer programmer par excellence. When he was in his sophomore year, he created two programs; Course Match and Face Mash. Both of his programs became extremely popular on campus, but the university had to shut Face Mash as it was thought to be inappropriate.
Since he had become so well known on campus, Zuckerberg formed partnerships with some friends to create a social networking site that would allow Harvard students to stay connected. In June, 2004 the site went live by the name of ‘The Facebook”. The site was run from Mark’s dorm room.
Soon after his sophomore year, Mark decided to drop out of college and pursue Facebook full-time. By the end of 2004 the website had reached 1 million users.
With such extensive growth, the project attracted many venture capital firms, and in 2005 Mark eventually had to move to Silicon Valley. The first round of Facebook’s venture capital was received by Accel Partners. They invested $12.7 million in the site. At this point the site only catered to Ivy League students.
At the end of 2005, the website was opened for other colleges and schools as well which resulted in the website reaching 5.5 million users. Since 2005, Facebook received many acquisition offers from companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo. Despite being through a number of legal battles, the company has continuously increased the number of its users.
In 2015, Facebook had over 2 billion users, and was valued at $272 billion in July 2015. Zuckerberg has become one of the youngest multibillionaires in history, owning nearly 423 million shares of Facebook.
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