Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg When I think of a person that I find inspiring and a representation of my generation, I think of Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook, which he founded in 2004. Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, families, and coworkers. Mark is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. He leads the design of Facebook’s service and development of its core technology and infrastructure (Executive Bios). Seven years ago, in 2004, when Zuckerberg was a 19 year old sophomore at Harvard, he started a web service from his dorm. It was called Thefacebook.com, and it was billed as “an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges.” Last year, Facebook, now minus the the – added its 550 millionth member. One out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account. They speak 75 languages and collectively lavish more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month (Grossman, 2010).
Destination
On earlier social networks like Friendstar and MySpace, identity was malleable and playful, but Facebook was and is different. “Were trying to map out what exists in the world,” he says. “In the world, there’s trust. I think as humans we fundamentally parse the world through the people and relationships we have around us. So at its core, what where trying to do is map out all those trust relationships we have around us, which you can call, colloquially, most of the time, friendships.” He calls this map the social graph, and it’s a network of an entirely new kind (Grossman, 2010). Facebook didn’t stay on campus. Zuckerberg and his partners – including his roommate Dustin Moskovitz and Sean Parker, who had co-founded Napster – led Facebook on a campaign to conquer the world. By the end of 2004, Facebook was on several hundred U.S. college campuses. In 2005, it expanded to high schools and foreign schools, in 2006 to workplaces, and eventually to anybody over the age of 13. By December 2009, it had over 350 million users (Grossman, 2010). There are people who can write code as well as Zuckerberg, not many, but some, but none of them can get the human psyche the way he does. Zuckerberg’s awareness of how other people’s brains work characterizes all of Zuckerberg’s projects, even the projects he did before Facebook (Grossman, 2010).
Inspiration
Living across the country from my family, I use Facebook regularly to keep in contact through pictures and every day conversation including instant messaging. Getting ready to complete my MBA, I find his success inspiring and admirable. Mark Zuckerberg’s lifestyle is modest by most standards monastic for someone’s whose personal fortune was estimated by Forbes at $6.9 billion. By signing on to Bill Gates and Warren Buffet’s initiative called the “Giving Pledge”, Mark agreed to give most of his wealth to charity, either during his lifetime or after his death. “People wait until late in their career to give back. But why wait when there is so much to be done. With a generation of younger folks, who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of philanthropic efforts”, said Zuckerberg in a statement (Schroeder, 2009).
Conclusion
For any flaw it has, there was no other way for Facebook to begin. Only someone like Zuckerberg, someone as brilliant, self confident, single-minded, and social as he is, could have built it. However, the Zuckerberg that built Facebook won’t be the same person as the Zukerberg who runs it. He’ll be getting older, traveling, maybe getting married, having kids, and as his life outside Facebook gets more complicated, maybe Facebook, the world that he built in his own image, will get more complicated too: more sensitive to the richness that exists outside it, in the real world, and to the richness that passes through it in such enormous volumes every second of the day (Grossman, 2010).

References
Executive Bios. (n.d.). Retrieved September 2011, from Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?execbios

Grossman, L. (2010, December 15). Mark Zuckerberg. Retrieved September 2011, from Person

of the Year 2010:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037183_203718

5-2,00.html

Schroeder, S. (2009, December). Mark Zuckerberg to Donate Most of His Wealth to Charity.

Retrieved September 2011, from Mashable Social Media:

http://mashable.com/2010/12/09/mark-zuckerberg/