A 20-year-old student starts a business. In less than one year it has one million customers; in 15 months it has raised $12.7m from venture capital; in 36 months it has over 30 million users.
Beginning in a well-to-do New York suburb and moving on to Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg’s is hardly a rags-to-riches tale. Nevertheless, it’s an incredible story of breakneck growth, as much about the medium as the man who became the youngest self-made billionaire at 23. Before the internet, this kind of story was inconceivable and such global penetration would have necessitated global bricks-and-mortar expansion. As it is, Zuckerberg’s company is all run from Palo Alto, California.
Zuckerberg founded The Facebook (as Facebook was initially known) at Harvard in February 2004. Within two weeks half of the undergraduates had signed up. The popularity of the site, which was soon taken up by numerous other colleges in the US, persuaded Zuckerberg to drop out of university and pursue the dream in Silicon Valley.
For those who don’t yet know, Facebook is a social networking website where people create networks between their existing friends, long-lost friends and — more often it seems — long-lost acquaintances. Then they email each other, write on each other’s public ‘walls’, declare their 'status', post photo albums, create mutual interest groups, advertise upcoming events, and more.
Enabling the free flow of information is an article of faith to Zuckerberg. When he set up the image-rating site Facemash.com at Harvard, for example, the university accused him of hacking into its computers and taking images of students without permission. The introduction of ‘News Feed’ — an action-by-action report on the Facebook activities of everyone in the user’s network — caused a furore when Zuckerberg initially failed to install privacy controls, which left users aghast that their online comings and goings were documented for all to see.
Facebook now has a programming platform enabling anyone with the requisite programming ability to build applications on the site. In this way, Zuckerberg hopes, the community itself will perpetually reinvigorate the Facebook site. If he’s wrong, and its popularity wanes, he’ll live to regret rebuffing $750m and $1bn bids from Viacom and Yahoo to buy the site.
