Mark Zuckerberg has always been passionate about connecting people.
It started at age 10, when he entered his father’s dental office (it was connected to the family home) and saw his father’s computer. He was immediately intrigued. Unlike most children his age, however, Zuckerberg didn’t use the machine to play games or mess around; he wanted to find out how it worked. Realising this, his father bought him an Atari 2600 and BASIC Programming, a cartridge designed for the gaming console to teach users the fundamentals of computer coding.
What resulted was Zuckerberg’s first social network: ZuckNet. An instant messaging tool, ZuckNet allowed his father’s receptionist to advise him of a patient’s arrival without having to shout across the room, and provided a means for the family to communicate from different areas of the house.
It was developed one year before the release of AOL Instant Messenger, the defining chat service of the late-90s and 00s. Zuckerberg was only 12 at the time.
To foster his love for coding, Zuckerberg’s parents hired software producer David Newman to privately tutor him. Newman immediately labelled him a prodigy, reflecting that it was “tough to stay ahead of him” as Zuckerberg spent his free time reading books like C++ for Dummies, a gift from his mother and father.
Upon entering high school, Zuckerberg formed a friendship with classmate Adam D’Angelo, another coding whiz. Together, the pair created MP3-playing software that tracked a user’s listening habits in order to form playlists. Called Synapse, the software could correctly determine the frequency at which a user would play a song “to the hundredth of a percent”.
Immediately, Zuckerberg and D’Angelo received expressions of interest and job offers from companies including AOL and Microsoft, but decided to pursue a college education instead.
What happened next was the stuff of epic tale, akin to those that Zuckerberg became known for quoting to colleagues and friends.
He was accepted at Harvard University, and though he was a psychology major, he attended any computer science classes that piqued his interest.
Though he arrived at the college with a reputation as a brilliant programmer, Zuckerberg soon found his skills the subject of controversy. He created two highly popular, yet uncomfortably invasive programs. The first, CourseMatch, allowed students to enrol in courses based on which of their peers had already joined. It was followed soon after by Facemash, which asked students to rank the attractiveness of their classmates via images sourced from Harvard’s ‘Face Books’, which listed all the residents of the dormitories. Facemash generated so much interest that it crashed one of the school’s network switches four hours after launch. Though the former was designed to help facilitate study groups, and the latter made just for fun, Zuckerberg was forced to publicly apologise after students complained that their photos had been used without consent, and expressed concerns for their general security.
The following year, Zuckerberg started work on ‘TheFacebook’, a social network for the Harvard community.
“I remember really vividly, you know, having pizza with my friends a day or two after—I opened up the first version of Facebook at the time I thought, ‘You know, someone needs to build a service like this for the world.'”
In 2004, Zuckerberg left college, and he and his partners rented an office in Silicon Valley. They were inundated by requests to buy the service – from the $75 million offered by MTV, to the tremendous $1.5 billion from Viacom – but refused, citing a desire to keep what would soon be known as Facebook as an open platform free from the grasp of major media entities.
As Facebook’s user-base rose from 500 million in 2010 to 1.6 billion active users per month in 2016, open connectivity remained at the heart of Zuckerberg’s vision. From the hackathon social events he would run month in order to challenge developers to create new ideas, to the Internet.org campaign he launched in 2013 to provide web access to the 5 billion people worldwide unable to access the internet, he proved eager to shirk tradition and criticism in the name of major, global advancement.
This was never more clear than on December 1st 2015, when Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in celebration of the birth of their daughter. As part of their announcement, the couple pledged to donate 99% of their worth – approximately $45 billion – to a range of causes throughout their lifetime.
In recent years, Zuckerberg has turned his attention to other means of creating connection. Facebook has acquired over 50 companies, from media-sharing app Instagram (which was purchased for $1 billion) to messenger service WhatsApp, a $19.3 billion acquisition in 2014.
Of most interest is Zuckerberg’s interest in Virtual Reality technology. Facebook purchased VR-hardware company Oculus VR for $2 billion in 2014, and considers the tech the next evolutionary stage of social connectivity. Taking the stage at Samsung’s Mobile World Congress press conference in late-February 2016, he told industry representatives “Pretty soon we’re going to live in a world where everyone has the power to share and experience whole scenes as if you’re just there, right there in person”. While critics call the devices isolating, Zuckerberg highlights the “presence” that they can bring to social experiences shared by people who may be sitting at home, alone, on opposite sides of the world.
And if there’s anyone whose word is worth taking on that topic, it is certainly his.