Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook (Essay Sample)

Name:
University:
Course:
Tutor:
Date:
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook
Background
Mark Zuckerberg, one of the most celebrated young tycoon today. He is the man who discovered and developed a site that would later be Facebook. He is a personality who everyone believes have greatly boosted the success of social media. Zuckerberg was born on 14th May, 1984 in White Plains, New York. He left Havard University before completion of his study to pursue his career of developing the site. This is the site that has grown to more than 250 million users today. After its invention, project immediately made Zuckerberg a world-proclaimed celebrity and a multi-billionaire tycoon.
Interest in Career
According to Lüsted (37), Zuckerberg showed high interest in computer technology as early as 12 years of age. He used the software Atari Basic to come up with messaging programs that he named "Zucknet." His father used these programs in his dental care center where his receptionist could inform him any time a new client checked in without having to yell across the room. His family also used this messaging program for communication at home. With the assistance from his friends and classmates, Zuckerberg also created several computer games that he used for fun (Lüsted, 58). His friends could draw stuffs then he would develop games out of them.
To support him in his interest, in computing, his parents hired a private computer teacher, David Newman to tutor him. Newman came to their house once per week to help Mark improve his product. Newman once said on media that it was a bit difficult to stay ahead of this prodigy, who had already started taking different graduate programs at Mercy College a few yards from their home. Mark was quite creative and innovative.
Zuckerberg attended his pre-secondary education at Phillips Exeter Academy. This was an exclusive preparatory school that was based in New Hampshire. In this school, he showed talents such as fencing and craftsmanship. The school administration made him the school team's captain due to his exemplary performance in fencing. He also performed well in Linguistics and literature, earning a diploma in classics (Hasday, 63). Despite all his research, Zuckerberg remained fascinated with computers and continued to develop his project. During his years in high school, Zuckerberg had developed an early version of the music software Pandora, which is currently known as Synapse. Several giant companies such as Microsoft and AOL expressed interest in purchasing the software. The companies had also offered to hire the teenager before he graduated, but he declined the offer.
Study at Harvard
After completion of his preparatory studies, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University for an undergraduate degree. By the first year at Ivy League Institution, Mark had already founded a good reputation as a software developer in the campus. It was during this campus life that he developed a program called CourseMatch (Hasday, 13). This program was designed to help students choose their respective classes based on difference courses. He also invented and developed FaceMash that was a program that compared pictures of two or more students and gave room for other students to vote which student was more attractive. The popularity of the program spread fast but it was later banned by school administration as they deemed it inappropriate.
The Rise of Facebook
By the year 2005, Zuckerberg's enterprise had already received major boosts from reputable partners from all corners of the world. For instance, Facebook received a significant venture capital from Accel Partners. Accel is estimated to have invested more than $12.7 million into the network. By then, Facebook was only open for Ivy League Students. Zuckerberg then granted access to different colleges, international schools and high schools all over the globe. This pushed for more than 5.5 million users by the end of December 2005. The site has now interested more and more companies such as MTV Networks, Google and Yahoo among others. At first, Zuckerberg did not concentrate on investing in these companies but rather on expanding his site through adding more users and features.
Zuckerberg only seemed to be going up. However, in 2004 the investment faced its first significant challenge. The developers of Harvard Connection claimed that Mark Zuckerberg had stolen their idea and that he needed to pay them for the losses they had faced. On his side, Zuckerberg continually maintained that the two ideas were different as they were based on different types of social networks. After lawyers' intervention, it was claimed that Zuckerberg had intellectually stolen this idea from Harvard Connection and later offered Facebook users personal info to his friends (Hasday, 38).
Despite all these hurdles and criticism, Facebook continued to rise from one glory to another.He was later declared "the Person of the Year" by the Time magazine in 2010. Later, Vanity Fair listed him no. 35, beating out the then Apple CEO, Steve Jobs in a list containing 400 contestants. The magazine estimated that his wealth was worth to be $6.9 billion. In May 2013, Facebook came up with the Fortune 500 list. This was the first time to creating such an idea. Zuckerberg (then 28 years old) was named the youngest CEO on the list.
Advertisement of Facebook
Zuckerberg made his first major life changes in his venture in May, 2012. This is when Facebook came up with its first public offering that raised $16 billion. This made it the biggest internet IPO ever known. The company had to develop mechanisms that would help in handling the big influx in cash. He was looking for even more acquisition moving from one business venture to the other. He was personally involved in negotiating for Facebook's deal to buy Instagram only a month earlier (Zuckerberg, Mark, and George, 21). He holds more than quarter of the company's stock and also retains 57% of the total control of all voting shares.
Marketing Lessons one can learn from Zuckerberg
There are various, bus...