Some Unknown Facts About Mark Zuckerberg (Founder oF Facebook)

Was Facebook Mark Zuckerberg's original idea?

Facebook is a social networking service launched in February 4, 2004, owned and operated by Facebook. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University student Eduardo Saverin. It started with Facemash, the Facebook’s predecessor, opened on October 28, 2003.Initially, the website was invented by a Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg, and three of his classmates – Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz. Zuckerberg wrote the software for the Facemash website when he was in his second year of college. The website was set up as a type of “hot or not” game for Harvard students. The website allowed visitors to compare two student pictures side-by-side and let them choose who was “hot” and who was “not”.....

In January 2004, Mark Zuckerberg began writing the code for a new website, known as 'theFacebook'. Initially he said he was inspired to make Facebook from the incident of Facemash.
six days after the launch of the site, three Harvard University seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called harvardconnection.comHarvardConnection.com, but instead using their idea to build a competing produce

How did Mark Zuckerberg manage to own 25% of Facebook?

Generally speaking, these are the levers you can pull to minimize dilution during fundraising:
Don't raise a ton of money.
Negotiate a high valuation.
Wait until you can negotiate a high valuation to raise a ton of money (this is just restating the first two points).

Let's see how this played out for Facebook using data that was helpfully organized by Dealbook:
Angel round (2004): $500k raised at a ~$5M cap, so +/- 10% dilution in exchange for sufficient funds to really begin developing & growing the platform. The team saves money by living/working together in a house in Palo Alto, taking pretty low or nonexistent salaries, et cetera. Good move.
Series A (2005): $12.7M raised at a ~$80M valuation, which is ~15% dilution. At this point the userbase was growing so briskly that valuation jumped 16x within a calendar year. The founding team skillfully waited to raise a 8-figure round until they could negotiate such a soaring valuation... again, another great move. If FB had raised this round at a $30M valuation, Zuck would own a fraction of the stock he currently possesses.
Series B (2006): $27.5M raised at a ~$500M valuation (5-5.5% dilution). Once again.... they only raised large dollar figures once the valuation had grown significantly.
And so on.

Unfortunately there aren't many broadly applicable lessons for entrepreneurs to take away from Facebook's fundraising experience. FB is a once-in-a-generation technology company, and consequently Mark Zuckerberg is one of the 20 richest people on the planet. Travis Kalanick is the only other person I can think of who has been able to fundraise this effortlessly and at such an enormous valuation.

But Facebook's story (and the story of Zuck's 25% stake) really isn't about dilution, anyways. It's about how much awesomeness can happen when a company builds a product that people adore. If you build something truly great, everything else (including & especially fundraising) pretty much takes care of itself.

How did Mark Zuckerberg become a programming prodigy?

Just because Mark started Facebook doesn't mean he is a programming prodigy. Mark's major was Psychology so he wasn't at Harvard as a CompSci prodigy. Back in 2004 building a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) application in PHP/MySQL was fairly easy. I would bet if you had more insight into what people that seem to be amazing are really capable of, you would see that they are normal people with normal skills.

Facebook's success (like many startups) is largely due to timing, solid product/market fit and a bit of luck. Those same rules apply to successful startups today, any of which could potentially be as big as Facebook. Where Mark made the right decision was surrounding himself with smart and talented people.

Long story short, if you want to get better at anything, hang around with the right people and work hard.

Who is the best programmer: Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison or Linus Torvalds?


 Linus Torvald: hands down to him.

Jeff Bezos is not a programmer. Larry Ellison is not really a programmer, he did write some mainframe code when he was in his twenties. He and Bezos are though awesome kickass business people.

Mark is quite a capable programmer, but probably not a superhero coder like Torvalds.

Bill Gates was at the time probably among 10 best programmers when he was in his teens. He and Paul Allen wrote basic compiler for Altair with 4 KB of total memory. This is hard stuff. I don't know for sure, but I think they also wrote the Intel 8080 emulator on the mini computer they had access to at school, that on its own is pretty awesome. But he got other interests now and is totally awesome doing it.

But as a programmer, only Linus Torvalds is active programmer, and he wrote the Linux kernel and Git source controller.