The King of social media is unarguably one of the best CEOs in history. Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard University in 2004 to pursue his big idea. Nine years and 1 billion users later, the 28-year-old founder of Facebook, Zuckerberg is a much polished and confident man, who is keenly watched within and outside the industry for his next move.
Zuckerberg has claimed several titles of his own, including the world's youngest billionaire in 2008 and TIME's Person of the Year in 2010. Born to well-off Jewish parents, Karen and Edward Zuckerberg, in the suburb of White Plains, New York, Mark was raised in the trendy village of Dobbs Ferry, New York. Mark excelled in his studies at Phillips Exeter Academy and along with his three sister, Randi, Donna and Arielle, they won numerous prizes for science, math and other subject throughout middle school and high school years.
Most people think that Mark Zuckerberg was an overnight success story, but the truth is different. Although his journey to fame and fortune began as a dream – a desire he was willing to sacrifice all for – his success is attributed to following his passion, leading with purpose, building great teams, and strives for continued excellence in his product or services. It is a mentality that drives great leaders to building successful business and the approach they use to doing so.
As it turns out, Zuckerberg made a better choice when he turned his talents to churning out the code that became the heart and soul of Facebook. Here’s we take a look at some of the top quotes during his career.
When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power.In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people's perspectives... I really try and live the mission of the company and... keep everything else in my life extremely simple.By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more transparent.A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.We're running the company to serve more people.I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that's always existed.The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it's actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions... If people feel like they don't have control over how they're sharing things, then we're failing them.My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don't care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that - building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.Our goal is not to build a platform; it's to be cross all of them.The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people's capacity to build and maintain relationships.This is our commitment to users and the people who use our service, is that Facebook's a free service. It's free now. It will always be free. We make money through having advertisements and things like that.I don't have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they're proud of.Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn't really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn't until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the side, and we've funded ever since by putting ads on the side.Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn't have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he's getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.I just wish nobody made a film about me while I am still alive.I guess we could. If you look at how much of our page is taken up with ads compared to the average search query. The average for us is a little less than 10% of the pages and the average for search is about 20% taken up with ads. That’s the simplest thing we could do but we aren’t like that; we make enough money. Right, I mean we are keeping things running; we are growing at the rate we want to.The thing I really care about is the mission; making the world open.People don't care about what someone says about you in a movie - or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people's life better, then that's something that's really good.
