REPORT ON

MARK ZUCKERBERG: CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF FACEBOOK, INC.

Submitted to: Ms.Manisha Raina A.P. RBIM

Submitted By: Shweta (1175041) MBA (RBIM)- 4th Sem

MARK ZUCKERBERG: CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF FACEBOOK, INC.

In the course of building a business, we have seen and learned a lot of things, and we are still in the learning process. Everyday, we come across tough, die hard entrepreneurs whose drive and achievements inspire us. One of such inspiring entrepreneurs is Mark

Zuckerberg; the youngest billionaire in the world.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984. He is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known as one of five cofounders of the social networking site Facebook. Zuckerberg is the chairman and chief executive of Facebook, Inc. Zuckerberg's personal wealth is estimated to be $9.4 billion as of 2012.

EARLY LIFE Zuckerberg was born in 1984 in White Plains, New York. He is the son of Karen (ne Kempner), a psychiatrist, and Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist. He and his three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, were brought up in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Zuckerberg was raised Jewish and has since described himself as an atheist. At Ardsley High School, Zuckerberg excelled in classics. He transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy in his junior year, where he won prizes in science (math, astronomy and physics) and classical studies (on his college application, Zuckerberg claimed that he could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek). He was a fencing star and captain of the fencing team.

A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER
IN SCHOOL: Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately. Newman calls him a "prodigy", adding that it was "tough to stay ahead of him". Zuckerberg took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near his home while still in high school. He enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. In one such program, since his father's dental practice was operated from their home, he built a software program he called "ZuckNet" that allowed all the computers between the house and dental office to communicate with each other. It is considered a "primitive" version of AOL's Instant Messenger, which came out the following year. During Zuckerberg's high school years, under the company name Intelligent Media Group, he built a music player called the Synapse Media Player that used artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine. Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he chose instead to enroll at Harvard in September 2002. IN COLLEGE: By the time he began classes at Harvard, Zuckerberg had already achieved a "reputation as a programming prodigy". He studied psychology and computer science. A short time later, he created a different program he initially called Facemash that let students select the best looking person from a choice of photos. I In January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website. He was inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimson about the Facemash incident however subsequent events have revealed this to be untrue. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "The facebook", originally located at thefacebook.com

CAREER IN FACEBOOK
Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room on February 4, 2004. An earlier inspiration for Facebook may have come from Phillips Exeter Academy, the prep school from which Zuckerberg graduated in 2002. It published its own student directory, The Photo Address Book, which students referred to as The Facebook. Once at college, Zuckerberg's Facebook started off as just a "Harvard thing" until Zuckerberg decided to spread it to other schools, enlisting the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They began with Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, New York University, Cornell, Penn, Brown and Yale. Samyr Laine, a triple jumper representing Haiti at the 2012 Summer Olympics, shared a room with Zuckerberg during Facebook's founding. Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California, with Moskovitz and some friends. They leased a small house that served as an office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel who invested in the company. They got their first office in mid-2004. In an interview in 2007, Zuckerberg explained his reasoning: It's not because of the amount of money. For me and my colleagues, the most important thing is that we create an open information flow for people. Having media corporations owned by conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me. On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that the company reached the 500 million-user mark. When asked whether Facebook could earn more income from advertising as a result of its phenomenal growth, he explained: 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 percent of the pages and the average for search is about 20 percent taken up with ads ... Thats the simplest thing we could do. But we arent like that. We make enough money. Right, I mean, we are keeping things running; we are growing at the rate we want to.

ENTREPRENEURIAL LESSONS FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG

Listen to Zuckerberg discuss the early days of Facebook, and we will hear him say that he knew he wanted to get into tech startups, but he never thought it was going to be Facebook. He figured a social network would be built by a big, multi-billion dollar tech corporation, not him. Now, nine years after Facebooks launch, it has become its own multi-billion dollar empire. Facebook has done a lot of things right. It scaled well, has a great UI (user interface) and always has been iterating, a trademark of many top companies. There are a few things we can learn from Zuckerberg and his relatively short stint as CEO. Lets look at what drives Zuckerberg and how his team at Facebook is changing the world for the better. 1. BUSINESSES NEED TO HAVE HIGHER PURPOSE In a May 2012 interview with Forbes, Zuckerberg says: I often say inside the company that my goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people have been misinterpreting that as if I dont care about revenue or profit or any of those things, he continued. Thats not actually it at all. You need to do those things to succeed in any meaningful way.. Ultimately what not being just a company means to me, is just not being just that building something that actually makes a really big change in the world. Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission to make the world more open and connected. According to Zuckerberg, Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. As stated, the mission of Facebook is to make the world more open and connected. This mission, of consumers having closer relationships with businesses, musicians, etc., and forming connections with others is why Facebook exists. The business aspect of Facebook is to serve advertisements to people who are interested and expose them to brands that may appeal to them. Thus, people connect and meet new people and businesses on Facebook.

2. MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS Move fast and break things is a motto that Facebook has become known for. Like Zuckerberg states, it means that if you arent making mistakes, you arent moving fast enough. Zuckerberg says in his letter to shareholders: Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies gro w, they slow down too much because theyre more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: Move fast and break things. The idea is that if you never break anything, youre probably not moving fast enough. An instance where Facebook upset many users was the integration of Timeline into user profiles. The first impression of Timeline was overwhelmingly negative for many users. In fact, they didnt like being forced into using Timeline so much that a verb, Timelined, was born. Eventually, the user screams faded and everyone is adapting to Timeline. The key with mistakes is distinguishing between the false positive mistakes and the real mistakes. For instance, Timeline would appear to be a false positive mistake, meaning that it appeared to be a huge mistake at first, but ultimately turned out to be a success. Then there are the real mistakes, like Beacon. Ultimately, as Zuckerberg has pointed out, people wont remember the mistakes years from now. Theyll remember the value that you provided. 3. GROWTH SHOULD BE A CORE COMPETENCE Zuckerberg says that once you have a product youre happy with, you should centralize things like a growth team. At Facebook, they were called the Spread Facebook team, and their only job was to get people to sign up and use Facebook. One thing that the growth team at Facebook discovered was that a new signup needs 10 friends in order to stay engaged and keep coming back to Facebook. If they have any fewer than 10 friends, there isnt enough content for them to keep coming back to see their News Feed. Once Facebook

had this information, it removed a lot of the unnecessary red tape from the new user setup and helped the beginners discover people they might know. Zuckerberg says its different for every company: Its going to be different things for different companies, but I think for each of your companies once you get a core product that youre happy with, I think its worth going through and having the discipline to do this exercise. You can find a good write up about Facebooks user growth that Andy Johns, former Facebook user growth employee.

4. DONT BE AFRAID TO TAKE RISK The biggest risk is not taking any risk.- Mark Zuckerberg If you want to move fast and break things, you cannot shy away from risk. The biggest mistake you can make is not making any mistakes. As Zuckerberg says: In a world thats changing really quickly the only strategy where youre guaranteed to fail is not taking any risk and not changing anything. Amazon is a company known for its risks. It is constantly experimenting and inventing, unafraid to fail. One big risk for them was letting other merchants sell through Amazon. It would allow a merchant to undercut Amazons price, which would lead to fewer sales for Amazon. One of the biggest risks taken by a major US corporation was Coca-Colas introduction of New Coke. Amid a shrinking market share, Coca-Cola introduced New Coke. Consumers didnt like it and were vocal about their displeasure. That was a big risk for Coke changing the formula for their top selling product. Its a risk that didnt pay off, but Coke has rebounded since then. Theyve eliminated New Coke and brought back Classic Coke.

5. STAY FOCUSED ON YOUR PRODUCT AND DONT WORRY ABOUT MISTAKES Zuckerberg and his team at Facebook focus on moving fast and making mistakes. Its his philosophy that people wont remember the mistakes you make in the long run. In a talk at Startup School 2011, Zuckerberg says that entrepreneurs need to stay focused on providing value for users. He says: Theres like 1000 things going on at any point in given time [at Facebook], and theres like one or two that actually matter. You need to focus on those.probably the most inspiring surprising t hing is that you can be so bad at so many things, and learn along the way, and as long as you stay focused on how youre providing value to your users and customers and you have something that is unique and valuable and you understand and that youre providing, then you get through all that stuff.you have time to learn, youre not going to know everything going into it up front, and thats okay. Just stay focused on the stuff that youre providing to your users. Youre going to make a ton of mistakes, it doesnt matter. You dont get judged by the mistakes, people dont remember those years from now, they remember the things that you did that were good. Zuckerberg later says: We place a really big premium on moving quickly. One of the big theories that I had about that, was that all technology companies, and probably all companies, just slow down dramatically as they grow. But if we can focus at every step along the way on moving quickerthen well move as quickly as a company that only has 500 people, because weve invested so much in building up the infrastructure and tools and also the culture that tells people to take risks and try things out. I just think that that ability to build stuff quicker will be a big advantage for us and will help us build better products over the long term.

OTHER GOOD ZUCKERBERG TIDBITS ARE: Have a dream Think Big Believe in yourself Follow your passion Be prepared for criticism Be diligent Stick to the process

In conclusion; theres nothing extraordinary about Mark Zuckerbergs success. Theres nothing abnormal about his emergence as the youngest billionaire in the world. He deserves the position because he dreamed it, planned it and worked it out. He stuck to his passion and focused on fulfilling the Facebook mission; that was why he became the youngest billionaire in the world. His success has nothing to do with luck.