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| Mark Zuckerberg: From zero to $100bn in seven years |
Mark Zuckerberg tells a adventure about abrogation plan one day and getting hailed by a brace of tourists alfresco Facebook's non-descript Silicon Valley offices.
'Would you apperception demography a account of us next to the Facebook sign?' they asked. Zuckerberg obliged, was thanked, and went to his car.
It's simple to accept how tourists absent their chance. Zuckerberg doesn't attending abundant like Jesse Eisenberg, the amateur who played him in The Amusing Network movie. Added important, his demeanour takes atoning to a accomplished new level.
'Ninja' Zuckerberg
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| Joe Green talks about his Harvard roommate Mark Zuckerberg |
On the aboriginal day we visited Facebook for the BBC blur I was making, we didn't set eyes on Zuckerberg - or so we thought. But if we came in the next day, the agent told us he'd absolved appropriate accomplished us and a ancestors of tourists had aswell absent him. It wasn't uncommon, she told us, "he's like a Ninja".
Around Facebook, The Amusing Network is said to accept got the aboriginal data appropriate - things like the exact tee-shirts Zuckerberg wore - but collapsed down on added important kinds of accuracy.
For a start, says David Kirkpatrick - who has had admission to the aggregation for his book The Facebook Effect - Zuckerberg isn't a academic nerd: "He's consistently had a lot of friends. He's convivial, funny, and, for a nerd, acutely social."
ust as important, Zuckerberg's above Harvard room-mate Joe Green says, he has never lacked confidence. Green was alive at Facebook in 2006, if it was just two years old. Yahoo! offered to buy the aggregation for $1bn. Zuckerberg angry down the offer. It didn't accomplish him accepted a part of some of his accompany and colleagues:
"Everyone [was saying] 'We could advertise this affair for a billion dollars, let's just do it, what the hell's amiss with you?'," remembers Green, "it took [Zuckerberg] an about cool amount of aplomb to be able to acclimate through that storm."
The $15bn offer
Zuckerberg admits it was a harder action to refuse: "At the time I knew annihilation about business, so I knew annihilation about what a aggregation would be worth." If agents abstruse of his decision, there was an departure of those who, as he puts it, "weren't in it for the continued term."
So if Microsoft offered an alarming $15bn (£10bn) for the aggregation a year later, that was easier to about-face down, he says: "we'd already fabricated those decisions, and we already knew we weren't traveling to advertise the company, and that we were traveling to body it."
At Harvard, alongside computer science, Zuckerberg aswell advised psychology. He says Facebook springs from both disciplines: "Those two things calm absolutely represent the DNA of Facebook… There are a lot of abundant technology companies and there are humans who anticipate about amusing issues, but there aren't a lot humans accomplishing both."
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| Mark Zuckerberg: "We view Facebook as a platform" |
Geek Zuckerberg?
The best amid Zuckerberg the socially-inept beatnik and Zuckerberg the ample and assured alone is simple to resolve: the aboriginal is myth, the second, reality.
More complicated is an arising astriction amid Zuckerberg the affable 27-year old - still in his aboriginal job - and Zuckerberg the all-around agent whose ability and access are harder to enlarge (Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2010, to name but one badge of it).
Fortune anniversary technology biographer Jessi Hempel says that as "arguably one of the youngest humans to accept had one of the better influences on the world," Zuckerberg is administration the ache impressively. He's aggravating "to accumulate both anxiety on the ground, to focus and apply on his values, and not to get absent by all the noise."
If you wish to apperceive about Zuckerberg as "ordinary bloke", attending no added than his accessible Facebook Page.
Here you can apprentice (along with 9.3 actor subscribers) that his favourite movies are Hero, The Godfather and The Matrix, that his interests cover "Making things", "Information flow", "Minimalism" and that he's in a accord with Priscilla Chan (anniversary: 7 November 2003 - the year afore he invented Facebook).
What Zuckerberg doesn't say
Since, as he puts it, "the mission of the aggregation is to accomplish the apple added accessible and connected," Zuckerberg could hardly adumbrate himself abroad and acquaint us that his clandestine activity is private.
There are locations of it he doesn't accept to allocution about, like the anniversary challenges he sets himself. One year he learnt Mandarin.
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| Share your thoughts, on the Facebook Wall at the company's headquarters |
This year he's absitively to alone eat meat from animals he has slaughtered. "It's a blue-blooded goal, says Jessi Hempel, "and on the spectrum of hobbies that CEOs can have, this is a appealing acceptable one. But it's aswell abominable goofy, right?"
When Zuckerberg fabricated a presentation in September, it featured his own aliment diary, including "bison burgers". He assured his admirers they were "delicious". He didn't acquaint them he'd attempt the bison himself. Cool indeed.
Alongside this, there's Zuckerberg the CEO of a business acclimated by 800 actor people, who could be account $17bn (£11bn) personally. It's the affectionate of role usually abounding by an accomplished businessperson at atomic 20 years his senior.
He has been able in accouterment himself with a agile of earlier mentors, with some like Don Graham of the Washington Post and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel on Facebook's lath of directors.
But as Facebook increases in influence, it will accordingly be Zuckerberg himself who will accept to acknowledgment alone to politicians and regulators who wish to constrain its activities.
Ambassador Zuckerberg
It's a role alfresco his abundance zone, which David Kirkpatrick says he'll accept to apply on. "I anticipate he still has not abundantly focussed on the ambassadorial aspect… He does it, but I don't anticipate he does it enough."
"He's learning, but he isn't acquirements fast enough," says Mr Kirkpatrick, "because I anticipate if he doesn't get acceptable at that, aggregate abroad he's gotten acceptable at may be for nought."
When he finishes his affairs with active of state, we can brainstorm the added Mark Zuckerberg bustling a freshly-slaughtered craven into a pot, and crimper up on the daybed with Priscilla to watch the West Wing or Rome (his favourite TV programes).
Charles Miller is the ambassador of Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook, to be apparent on BBC Two at 21:00 GMT on Sunday, 4 December.
Source From BBC News
