Mark Zuckerberg
![Mark Zuckerberg](/assets/img/authors/mark-zuckerberg.jpg)
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot Zuckerbergis an American programmer, Internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is the chairman, chief executive officer, and co-founder of the social networking website Facebook. His net worth is estimated to be US$54.9 billion, as of July 2016, ranking him as the 5th richest person in the world...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth14 May 1984
CityWhite Plains, NY
CountryUnited States of America
So many businesses get worried about looking like they might make a mistake, they become afraid to take any risk. Companies are set up so that people judge each other on failure. I am not going to get fired if we have a bad year. Or a bad five years. I don’t have to worry about making things look good if they’re not. I can actually set up the company to create value.
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.
People at Facebook are fairly used to the press being nice to us or not nice to us.
Our work to improve privacy continues today.
I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I'm generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we're providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we're doing so well on so many of these things. I think it's important to have gratitude for that.
I think humans are just hard-wired to process people's faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.
The thing that's been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is - I think then, and I think now - that if we didn't do this, someone else would have done it.
There's a level of service that we could provide when we're just at Harvard that we can't provide for all of the colleges, and there's a level of service that we can provide when we're a college network that we wouldn't be able to provide if we went to other types of things.
When Facebook was getting started, nothing used real identity - everything was anonymous or pseudonymous - and I thought that real identity should play a bigger part than it did.
You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you're not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.
I feel like the thing we can do is celebrate people doing great work and create more cultural momentum and awareness that this is an important thing in the world. So when the next economic crisis hits and people are talking about where to cut from the budget, science isn't the thing.
You get a reputation for stability if you are stable for years.
It's, like, even in journeys like Facebook, we've had some very serious ups and downs.
I think Facebook is an online directory for colleges... If I want to get information about you, I just go to TheFacebook, type in your name, and it hopefully pulls up all the information I'd care to know about you.