The Rising of Facebook

About ten months before the Zuckerbergs FaceMash epic, one of the students of Harvard - Divya Narendra - had already spoken with the idea of creating a social network exclusively for Harvard students, many of whom were suffering from emotional stiffness. And not have aliens engaged into the network, Narendra suggested using Harvard email address as the main username. Divya Narendra’s partners were twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The father of the Winklevoss twins, Howard Winklevoss, is a successful financial consultant and put in his sons a lot of efforts and money - so the problem with the initial capital for the future network could be solved easily.

After a private meeting with Narendra and the Winklevoss twins, Zuckerberg agreed to join in the work, but the potential of his new partners he estimated it skeptically. While working on Harvard Connection he got a fantastic idea about his own social network. On February 04, 2004 he registered the domain name TheFacebook.com, now known throughout the world as Facebook.com. However, it functioned only within Harvard. After Zuckerberg and his partner Eduardo Saverin realized that there were already registered 4000 users, they have come to the conclusion that they needed the services of new programmers. One of them was a Marks neighbor, Darren Moskowitz, who further opened the Facebook service to students at Columbia University, Stanford, and Yale. Around the same time after the IPO, Zuckerberg owned 503.6 million shares. And now Zuckerberg controls nearly 60% of the company’s votes, 35% - Eduardo Saverin, and 5% went to newcomer Moskowitz. Another friend of Mark, Chris Hughes, was assigned as the Press attache of Facebook.

Facebook: Not only a social site

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. Such photo directories were an important part of the student social experience at many private schools. With them, students were able to list attributes such as their class years, their friends, and their telephone numbers.

Bill Gates and Facebook

In 2007, a major event happened to Facebook. Microsoft acquired 1.6% equity stake in Facebook for an impressive amount of $240 million dollars. On this basis, a number of analysts suggested that the total value of Facebook reaches $15 billion. Quite good results for the company, whose income did not exceed $200 million a year. After the deal Bill Gates created an account in Facebook. He used to spend for several hours a day to communicate through Facebook with everyone, but after a time decided to close his account for some time, because there were too many people willing to chat with him. Physically, he was not able to chat with all of them. However, Gates provided a major PR campaign for Facebook worldwide. This is particularly important for Microsoft, given that it had an exclusive advertising agreement with the social network until 2011.

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 Columbia, New York University, Stanford, Dartmouth, 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. "Mark was clearly on to great things," said Laine, who was Facebook's fourteenth user.

After 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. According to Zuckerberg, the group planned to return to Harvard but eventually decided to remain in California. They had already turned down offers by major corporations to buy the company. 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."

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