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Case study of the profile of a young

entrepreneur - Mark Zuckerberg
AN ENTREPRENEURSHIP PROJECT REPORT

Submitted by

Sindhu Bharathi
Class: 11 Arts
Subject: ENTREPRENEURSHIP

THE INDIAN HIGH SCHOOL

DUBAI
1

7th June 2010

THE INDIAN HIGH SCHOOL, DUBAI

BONAFIDE CERTIFICATE

Certified that this project report PROJECT REPORT AND MARKET SURVEY
ON Mark Zuckerberg
is the bonafide work of Sindhu Bharathi who carried out the project work under
my supervision.

Teacher In-charge

Mrs. Priya Godwani

Acknowledg
ement:
Id like to thank my teacher, Mrs.Priya
for her guidance as well as
encouragement on this project. Id also
like to thank my parents as well as
friends for being there throughout with
me,
Sindhu.

Table of Contents
Chapter Name:

Page No.

1 Early life
2 Facebook
2.1 Founding
2.2 Moving to California
2.3 Facebook Platform
2.4 Facebook Beacon
2.5 ConnectU Controversy
2.6 Microsoft investment in Facebook
2.7 Facebook in 2010
2.8 Movie
3 Appendix
4 Glossary
5 Bibliography

Mark
Elliot

Zuckerberg:
The mastermind Of
Facebook
6

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg ,born on May 14, 1984, is an American

entrepreneur best known for co-founding the popular social networking
site Facebook. Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook with fellow
classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes while
attending Harvard. He is currently one of the youngest billionaires in the
world with personal wealth of US$4 billion in 2010.

Early life
Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York to a Jewish family and raised
in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He started programming when he was in middle
school. Early on, Zuckerberg enjoyed developing computer programs,
especially communication tools and games. Before attending Phillips Exeter
Academy, Mark went to school at Ardsley High School. At high school, he
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excelled in the classics. He transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy where he

immersed himself in Latin. He also built a program to help the workers in his
father's office communicate; he built a version of the game Risk and a music
player named Synapse that used artificial

intelligence to learn the user's listening habits. Microsoft and AOL tried to
purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he decided to attend Harvard
University instead, where he joined Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity. In
college, he was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad.

Zuckerberg (right) with Robert Scoble in 2008.

Founding
Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room on February 4,
2004. The idea for Facebook came from his days at Phillips Exeter Academy
which, like most colleges and prep schools, had a long-standing tradition of
publishing an annual student directory with headshot photos of all students,
faculty and staff known as the "Facebook". Once at college, Zuckerberg's
Facebook started off as just a "Harvard-thing",with some financial help from a
friend Eduard Servin, until Zuckerberg then decided to spread Facebook to
other schools and enlisted the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They first
spread it to Stanford,Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell and Yale, and then to
other schools with social contacts with Harvard. Only months later when it
was officially a national student network phenomenon, Zuckerberg and
Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to pursue their dreams and run Facebook
full time. In August 2005, theFacebook was officially called Facebook and the
domain Facebook.com was purchased for a reported $200,000.

Moving to
California
Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California, with Moskovitz and some friends.
They leased a small house which served as their first office. Over the summer,
Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel who invested in the company. They got their first
office during the summer of 2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group
planned to return to Harvard in the fall but eventually decided to remain in
California. To date, he has not returned as a student to college.

Facebook
Platform
On May 24, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a Facebook Platform, a
development platform for programmers to create social applications within
Facebook. This announcement sparked a great deal of interest in the developer
community. Within weeks, many applications had been built and some already
had millions of users. Today, there are more than 800,000 developers around
the world building applications for Facebook Platform.
On July 23, 2008, Zuckerberg announced Facebook Connect, a version of
Facebook Platform for users.

Facebook
Beacon
On November 6, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a new social advertising
system at an event in Los Angeles. A part of the new program, called Beacon,
enabled people to share information with their Facebook friends based on
their browsing activities on other sites. An eBay seller, for instance, could let
friends know

automatically what they have for sale via the Facebook news feed as they list
items.
The program came under heavy privacy concerns from both privacy groups
and individual users. Zuckerberg and Facebook failed to respond to the
concerns quickly, and on December 5, 2007, Zuckerberg ultimately wrote a
blog post on Facebook taking responsibility for issues with Beacon and
offering an easier way for users to opt out of the service.

10

ConnectU
Controvers
y
Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya
Narendra accused Zuckerberg of fraudulently letting them believe he would
help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com (later called
ConnectU). They filed a lawsuit in 2004 but were dismissed without
prejudice on March 28, 2007. It was refilled soon thereafter in U.S. District
Court in Boston, and a preliminary hearing was scheduled for July 25, 2007.
At the hearing the judge told ConnectU parts of their complaint were not
sufficiently pled and gave them the ability to refile an amended complaint. On
June 25, 2008, the case was settled and Facebook agreed to pay a $65 million
settlement.
As part of the lawsuit, in November 2007, confidential court documents were
posted on the website of Harvard alumni magazine 02138. They included
Zuckerberg's social security number, his parents' home address and his
girlfriend's address. Facebook filed to get the documents taken down, but the
judge ruled in favor of 02138.

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Microsoft
investmen
t in
Facebook
On October 24, 2007, Facebook Inc. sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft Corp. for
$240 million, rejecting a competing offer from online search leader
Google Inc. This would indicate that Facebook had a market value of $15
billion at the time of the sale. A software update for Microsoft's Xbox 360
games console has been released which added support for Facebook, Twitter
and Last.fm

12

Facebook in
2009
As of May 2010,Facebook has claimed that it has attained over 400 million
users.

Movie
There is a movie based on Mark Zuckerberg and the surrounding creators
of Facebook, called The Social Network. It is currently set to release in 2010,
and stars Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake. Another Hollywood venture
based on the life of Zuckerberg ,The Accidental Billionaires film will be
directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
and reportedly has a $US47 million ($56.5 million) budget.

13

Forbes
profile of
mark:
World's youngest billionaire leading his addictive social networking site
Facebook to an inevitable public pay-day. Firm became "cash-flow positive"
last year, instituted dual-class voting structure akin to what Google put into
place before it held its 2004 offering. Fresh-faced entrepreneur launched
Facebook from Harvard dorm room in 2004. Left school for Silicon Valley
later that year; bagged initial $500,000 investment from PayPal cofounder
Peter Thiel. Last May Russian investment firm Digital Sky agreed to buy
stock from Facebook employees; deal priced company at $10 billion. Shares
continue to change hands on private equity exchange SecondMarket; recent
transactions put the value at upwards of $15 billion. Growing rapidly: in past
12 months user base has surged 130% to 400 million.

14

Facemash

Zuckerberg created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room.

Mark Zuckerberg invented Facemash on October 28, 2003, while
attending Harvard as a sophomore. The site represented a Harvard University
version of Hot or Not, according to the Harvard Crimson. That night,
Zuckerberg was blogging about a girl who had dumped him and trying to
think of something to do to get her off his mind:
I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 p.m. and it's a
Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] Facebook is open on my desktop
and some of these people have pretty horrendous Facebook pics. I almost
want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have
people vote on which is more attractive.
9:48 pm
Yea, it's on. I'm not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this
whole thing (you can't really ever be sure with farm animals...), but I like the
idea of comparing two people together.
11:09 pm
Let the hacking begin.
12:58 am
According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash "used photos compiled from
the online Facebooks of nine Houses, placing two

15

next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person". To
accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's
computer network and copied the houses' private dormitory ID images.
Harvard at that time did not have a student directory with photos and basic
information and the initial site generated 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views
in its first four hours online. That the initial site mirrored peoples physical
communitywith their real identitiesrepresented the key aspects of what
later became Facebook.
"Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value
as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools (maybe even
ones with good-looking people...)," Zuckerberg wrote in his personal blog.
"But one thing is certain, and its that Im a jerk for making this site. Oh well.
Someone had to do it eventually..." The site was quickly forwarded to several
campus group list-servers but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard
administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of
security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and faced
expulsion, but ultimately the charges were dropped.
Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social
study tool ahead of an art history final by uploading 500 Augustan images to a
website, with one image per page along with a comment section. He opened
the site up to his classmates and people started sharing their notes. "The
professor said it had the best grades of any final hed ever given. This was my
first social hack. With Facebook, I wanted to make something that would
make Harvard more open," Zuckerberg said in a TechCrunch interview.

16

The
Facebook
TheFaceboo
k

TheFacebook on February 12, 2004.

17

The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in
January 2004. He was inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard
Crimson about the Facemash incident. "It is clear that the technology needed
to create a centralized Website is readily available," the paper observed. "The
benefits are many." On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched
"TheFacebook", originally located at theFacebook.com. "Everyones been
talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard," Zuckerberg told The
Harvard Crimson. "I think its kind of silly that it would take the University a
couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can
do it in a week." "When Mark finished the site, he told a couple of friends.
And then one of them suggested putting it on the Kirkland House online
mailing list, which was...three hundred people," according to
roommate Dustin Moskovitz. "And, once they did that, several dozen people
joined, and then they were telling people at the other houses. By the end of the
night, we were...actively watching the registration process. Within twenty-

four hours, we had somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred
registrants."
Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which
Zuckerberg called the next logical step. At that time, high school networks
required an invitation to join. Facebook later expanded membership
eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple
Inc. and Microsoft. Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to
everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address. In October 2008,
Facebook announced that it was to set up its international headquarters
in Dublin, Ireland.[45]
Facebook has been highly used in the years 2009-2010. It has crossed the
visits of Google in some continents. And recently, Facebook.com was the top
social network across eight of individual markets in the region, Philippines,
Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong and
Vietnam, while other brands commanded the top positions in certain markets,
including Google-owned Orkut in India, Mixi.jp in Japan, CyWorld in South
Korea and Yahoo!s Wretch.cc in Taiwan

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Facebook :
The
Complete
Biography

Availability
Unlike its competitors MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, hi5, Bebo and others,
Facebook isnt available to everyone which explains its relatively low user
count. Currently, users must be members of one of the 30,000+ recognized
schools, colleges, universities, organizations, and companies within the U.S,

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Canada, and other English-speaking nations. This generally involves having a

valid e-mail ID with the associated institution.

Surveys &
Studies
A large number of surveys and studies have been conducted around Facebook
some with interesting results. For instance, according to an internal
September 2005 survey, approximately 85% of the students in the supported
colleges had a Facebook account, with 60% of them logging in daily. A survey
conducted by Student Monitor revealed Facebook was the most in thing
after the iPod and tying with beer, and comScore Media Metrix discovered
users spend approximately 20 minutes everyday on Facebook. Another 2005
survey said 90% of all undergraduates in the U.S. use either Facebook or
MySpace regularly, and a detailed questionnaire analysis by Chris Roberts
revealed that 76.2% never click on its ads. Perhaps the most amazing statistic
of all may be that Facebook is the 7th most trafficked site in the U.S.

Business &
Funding
Given the situation other social networks on the web are facing, Facebook is
in a good position financially. For its initial funding, it

received $500,000 from Peter Theil, co-founder of PayPal. A few months

later, it was also able to get $13 million from Accel Partners, who are also

20

investors in 15 other Web 2.0 startups, and $25 million from Greylock
Partners, making their overall venture equal to approximately $40 million.
For users, Facebooks core service is completely free and ad-supported. In
fact, in August 2006 Facebook signed a three year deal with Microsoft to
provide and sell ads on their site in return for a revenue split. The deal
followed an announcement from Facebooks direct competitor MySpace who
signed a similar deal with Google. The youthful demographic that both the
services attract is highly prized amongst advertisers and should return a good
amount of revenue for both the services to stay alive and profit. Another
deal which made news in July was Facebooks agreement with Apple to give
away 10 million free iTunes samplers to Facebook users. A deal has also been
signed to provide Facebook credit cards.

The Service
Now, lets look into Facebook the service itself, and some of its features,
highlights, and the things that got Facebook where it is today.

Facebook
Profiles

As Facebook has evolved, so have its profile pages

new fields have been added and users can share more information than before.

A typical Facebook profile consists of a number of different sections,

including Information, Status, Friends, Friends in Other Networks, Photos,
Notes, Groups, and The Wall. Most of the sections are self-explanatory but
some are specific to Facebook.
21

Facebook
Photos

With over 1.5 million photos uploaded daily, one of Facebooks most popular
features has been the ability to upload photos. Users can upload unlimited
photos from their cell phone or through its Java-based web interface.
Facebook is one of the few services to offer an unlimited quota with their only
restriction being a 60-photos-per-album limit this is much appreciated by
Facebooks college demographic.
The process of uploading photos is very simple. Users create albums which
they can assign limitations to (e.g. visible to my friends only) and upload
photos within them. The album is then put into their profile, and other users
with right credentials have the ability to see and comment on them. Facebook
also gives the feature to share the photos with a simple web link or send them
via AIM or by e-mail. Whats more, users can also order prints online through
a simple integrated interface.

Facebook
Groups
Just like every other social network, Facebook has something called groups.
Users can create new ones or join and participate in existing ones. This is also
displayed in their profile and is a good indication of hobbies and interests a
person might have.

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There are two kind of groups, a normal group and a secret group, which isnt
shown on the profile. A normal group is just like any other, but users can also
create and invite others into secret groups. These can be used for collaborating
on university projects, and provide a way to have closed discussions. About
80% of the groups are fun-related and companies can even sponsor groups
as is the case with, for example, the Apple users group.

Facebook
Events

Another Facebook success is their events feature,

which provides the ability to organize, be part of, and plan for events. This
feature has been extremely successful when it comes to organizing parties.
Along with organizing and joining events, users can also invite and
recommend others to an event. This feature, however, has raised some
controversy as it is generally the start of underage drinking and dry campus
violations. Colleges and universities use the feature to catch planning of such
events before hand and investigate those that are over. In any case, its one of
the most popular features of the service and even beats some of the competing
products made specifically for this purpose.

Facebook
Developers
On August 2006, Facebook offered a free Developers API called Facebook
Developers. This essentially gives anyone access to

23

Facebooks internals and lets programmers create widgets, mashups, tools and
projects based around Facebook.
This is an important feature for Facebook since it makes it the first major
social network to give access to its API. Although it is limited to 100,000
requests a day, its more than
enough for a decent web app to
come through. Whats more, a
selection of applications have
already been created. FaceBank
is a promising tool which lets
you keep track of depts and
shared expenses with friends.
Another interesting application is lickuacious which lets you rank your
friends by wall popularity. The Wall, of course, is Facebooks comments
feature.

Facebook
Notes
Facebooks Notes addition launched in late august 2007. The service is called
Facebook Notes, and allows users to write a Facebook blog. All notes are
displayed in the users profile, and other members can add comments.
Notes possesses an important feature, which is the ability to import and
syndicate an external blog, although unlike Technorati, doesnt allow you to
claim one only to yourself (e.g. its possible to claim the New York Times
syndication feed easily in ones Notes). The service allows HTML to be
included in the posts, although JavaScript and Flash are disabled. You can
attach photos and also post via cell phone by sending your notes to
notes@Facebook.com. Another interesting feature is tagging tagging a post
with a username will automatically send it to that specific user. The Notes
feature has been well received.

The Future
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Facebook is a massively successful social networking service that grew to

prominence in virtually no time. Its not hard to see why: its features and tools
are highly appealing, and Facebook users are extremely well networked in real
life. Rumors of an acquisition continue to circulate, with some estimates
putting the price in the billions of dollars. In the short term, however,
Facebook plans to go it alone, continuing to build out one of the worlds most
successful social networks.

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Appendi
x

Appendi
x:
26

Fact or
Fiction??:
A report from
an Australian
journalist,
Asher Moses.
Mark Zuckerberg wanted more than money from his Facebook
discovery.
The story behind the world's most popular social networking site has a
bizarrely Australian twist. In 2004, aboard the yacht of a Sun Microsystems
executive, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and friends apparently
dined on a koala.
Or so says Ben Mezrich, the multimillionaire American novelist who has built
a career and scored several lucrative film deals from charting the success
of young geeks who strike it rich.
"Whenever I see a young person with a Ferrari I try to follow them to find out
how they made their money," Mezrich told the Herald.

27

His latest, The Accidental Billionaires: Sex, Money Betrayal and the
Founding of Facebook, which charts the rise of Facebook from Harvard dorm
room project in 2004 to today's multibillion-dollar force, will be released in
Australia on Tuesday. Before the book was finished, the actor Kevin Spacey
and the writer Aaron Sorkin creator of The West Wing had signed on to
transform it into film.
Some of the more saucy tales were destined for the big screen, such as
Zuckerberg and the early Facebook investor Eduardo Saverin getting busy
with groupies in adjacent bathroom stalls. Or the time Zuckerberg was picked
up by a Victoria's Secret model at a San Francisco party.
But it's difficult to separate fact from fiction.
Zuckerberg refused to be interviewed for the book and many of the salacious
tales appear to have been provided by Saverin, who was pushed early from the
company and became embroiled in a legal battle with Zuckerberg.
Mezrich frames the story around Zuckerberg and his co-founders creating
Facebook as a way to pick up women, to party and to get into a private
Harvard club. Zuckerberg is portrayed as a back-stabbing genius with a fetish
for Asian women.

The book is marketed as non-fiction, and Mezrich insists it is a true story

based on interviews with hundreds of sources and extensive court documents.
But he admits some scenes and dialogue were based on a "best guess" from
what sources told him.
In his 2002 book Bringing down the House the story of six MIT maths
geniuses who scammed Las Vegas casinos with Blackjack card-counting
techniques Mezrich admitted to fabricating some characters and situations.
But despite reviewers calling his latest work "non-fictionish" and "fluffy lad
lit", Mezrich's narrative non-fiction style he likens it to Hunter S. Thompson
is well received by Hollywood.
"I always think of a film as I write the book. I write very cinematically. I'm
not interested in people sitting in front of computers," Mezrich says. "I'm into
the salacious details and I love the sex and the money that's sort of been my
genre from the beginning."
Once Facesmash transformed to Facebook, Zuckerberg's former Harvard
classmates, the twin Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, sued
him claiming he stole their idea and source code for Facebook when they
asked him for programming help in 2003. The case settled last year for $US65
million, chump change for Zuckerberg considering the 25-year-old is now the

28

world's youngest billionaire, based on Facebook's most recent valuation of

$US6.5 billion.
Last year, another Zuckerberg Harvard buddy, Aaron Greenspan, who was
working to develop a social networking site around the same time as
Zuckerberg, petitioned to have the Facebook trademark cancelled. He claimed
he came up with the Facebook name and that Zuckerberg stole some of his
ideas.
Greenspan and Zuckerberg settled for an unknown amount but not before
Greenspan was able to release Authoritas, his account of Facebook's
inception.
Facebook has refused to publicly buy into the argy-bargy, disputing the
accuracy of Mezrich's book but not commenting on specifics.

Mezrich cannot understand why Zuckerberg would take issue with being
portrayed as an intelligent if socially awkward chick magnet. He does not
regret his year-long failure to speak with Zuckerberg because the latter would
have tried to airbrush some of the more saucy details.
And Mezrich stands by the koala yarn. "It was a time in their lives when they
were running around being wooed by every venture capitalist in Silicon Valley
. . . these were just kids who were given something and they thought it was
part of their adventure.

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Glossary
Developers API An application-programming interface (API) is a set of programming instructions and
standards for accessing a Web-based software application or Web tool. A
software company releases its API to the public so that other software
developers can design products that are powered by its service.
For example, Amazon.com released its API so that Web site developers could more easily
access Amazon's product information. Using the Amazon API, a third
party Web site can post direct links to Amazon products with updated
prices and an option to "buy now."
MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, hi5, Bebo, twitter
Other social networking sites
HTML
Hypertext markup language the programming used to create websites and webpages .
Usually used to indicate the web address of a site .

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Bibliograph
y:
WWW.WIKIPEDIA.COM The early life of Zuckerberg.
WWW.MASHABLE.COM
WWW.GOOGLE.COM Photos
WWW.NYDAILYNEWS.COM Controversies
WWW.FORBES.COM
Wall Street Journal - article
Gulf News - article

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