Mark Zuckerberg

Mr Facebook shares and shares and shares

The Observer, November 2008

I was told not to expect a human whirlwind, but when Mark Zuckerberg walks into the room there is barely a breeze. He is 24, on the short side, shy in the way that short, ginger-haired people often are, and he walks with his head down, as if he is carrying a heavy burden, such as being the richest young person in the world.

Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, has one thing that most geeky-looking guys don’t have – $3bn. Unfortunately, he doesn’t actually have it with him, it is paper money, an estimate of his net worth. But the money is mentioned every time he is written about in the newspapers, as if it is an extension of his name. The sum was calculated when Microsoft paid $240m for a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook in October 2007, valuing the company at $15bn, of which Zuckerberg owned 20 per cent. In these recessionary times Facebook is probably worth considerably less, but who knows? A company like his has never faced recession before, and hundreds of new customers are still flocking to it every hour. It is a genuine internet sensation, and it shows no sign of becoming less of one because it is based on an idea so simple, and so fundamental to our emotional and personal growth, that when people discover it, even four years after its formation, they feel that it is exactly what they’ve been looking for all their lives. They feel it is designed exclusively for them, and that is its trick: it makes more than 100m people feel like treasured individuals.

Facebook is based on the idea of sharing. Not long after he walks into the room (an almost empty conference room apart from a table with tea and biscuits and a photographer readying his gear), Zuckerberg tells me ‘sharing’ was the only word on his mind when he dreamt up Facebook in his college dormitory at Harvard in 2004. He was not thinking about money, nor personal aggrandisement; he just wanted to know more about the other students in his year. Harvard produced the traditional yearbook with grinning pictures and brief biographical sketches, but it would take a long time to appear each year and would be impossible to update until a year later. It also wouldn’t contain one vital piece of information: was that person you found attractive in your class single or ‘in a relationship’? Zuckerberg thought he could do something better online. You could put up as much personal information as you liked – your favourite bands, your favourite hobby, even your real name – and you could change it as situations changed. Four years on, his vision is in every street in almost every country in the world.

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