Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ekaterina Walter is a social media innovator at Intel. A recognized business and marketing thought leader, she is a regular contributor to Mashable, Fast Company, Huffington Post, and other leading-edge print and online publications. Walter has been featured in Forbes and BusinessReviewUSA and was named among 25 Women Who Rock Social Media in 2012. She sits on the board of directors of Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and is an active member of the Thunderbird Global Council at Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Think Like Zuck

McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

Find that thing you are super passionate about. A lot of founding principles of Facebook are that if people have access to more information and are more connected, it will make the world better; people will have more understanding, more empathy. That's the guiding principle for me. On hard days, I really just step back, and that's the thing that keeps me going.

—Mark Zuckerberg's advice to young entrepreneurs in his March 25, 2011, appearance at Brigham Young University in Utah

People call him "The new Internet prince."

Zuckerberg does have some imperial tendencies. When he was a boy, he favored Civilization, a video game in which the object is to build an empire that will stand the test of time. Some of his friends are convinced that it served as a valuable exercise to prepare him to run his company. A fencer in high school (a captain of the team, no less), Mark sometimes perceived the world as a fencing match, trying to build the right strategy and figure out the next move. Sometimes, he would pick up his foil and walk around with it, thinking out loud, delivering sudden thrusts here and there. Mark can read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek (or so it said on his college application). In college, he was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad. And in the early days of Facebook, you could hear the word dominate thrown around often in conversations among the boys. Zuck's dominance was indisputable. In the early days, a tagline accompanied every page of Facebook that read "A Mark Zuckerberg production," and on the About page, he was listed as "Founder, Master and Commander, Enemy of the State." Given his knowledge of Latin, one can just imagine him proclaiming when reaching one billion users, "Veni, vidi, vici!" ("I came, I saw, I conquered") just as Julius Caesar reportedly said when celebrating a victory in 47 BC.

Zuck's confidence is oftentimes interpreted as arrogance. His direct stare can be unnerving. His tendency to tune out if he isn't interested in a conversation is well publicized. But isn't that what a man on a mission would do?

From an early age, Zuck was smitten with the intersection of software and social connections. At Harvard, he studied psychology and computer science. He created multiple little programs that explored the ways people connect with each other online, and he learned something new with each one of them. He wanted to bring the ways we communicate offline to the exploding world of online interactions. It became his passion. His passion powered his confidence. Says Ellen McGirt, a writer for Fast Company, in one of her stories about Zuck: "But he's not arrogant—he's profoundly certain."

Mark got the technology bug from his father, Edward Zuckerberg. A dentist by profession, Ed had an admiration for technology. He bought every early computer he could. His very first purchase was in 1978, a personal computer called the Atari 800 that was designed for the casual computing enthusiast. That was the computer Mark learned to code on. Shortly thereafter, the Zuckerbergs purchased IBM's XT, which was installed in Ed's home office. Ed wasn't afraid to dabble in technology and learned how to code himself. Mark loved playing with machines as much as, if not more than, his father did. Ed cheered him on as well as his other kids: "You have to encourage them to pursue their passions."

One of Zuck's first social coding experiments took place in the midnineties when his father got tired of hearing shouting from one room of his home dental practice to another announcing the arrival of a new patient. He wanted a more efficient approach. That's when Mark built a messaging system he called "Zucknet," which allowed one computer in the house to message another. The system was popular beyond Ed's office: Zuck and his three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, all used Zucknet to communicate with each other while working on their own computers in their rooms. The program he built was a simpler version of AOL's Instant Messenger, which came out the next year.

Mark enjoyed developing computer programs, especially ones that gave people the ability to interact with each other. He would code into the wee hours of the night. His Harvard friends recall a T-shirt he wore often: it pictured a little ape with the words "Code Monkey." In high school and during his first year of college, Mark built several smaller programs, including Synapse, CourseMatch, and Facemash. You could say Facemash was the reason he built Facebook. But more on that later.

Synapse Media Player, the program Zuck co-built in his senior year at Phillips Exeter Academy, used artificial intelligence to learn a listener's habits so that it could suggest other songs that matched what the user liked. The program caught the attention of both Microsoft and AOL. They tried to recruit Mark, but he chose to attend Harvard instead.

Zuck created CourseMatch during his first week in college. The idea was to help students identify who took which classes on campus. Whether you wanted to hook up with a hot girl or hang out with the "cool" crowd, the program appealed to the status-conscious students at Harvard. It was also extremely useful in helping students form study groups for particular classes. As David Kirkpatrick notes in his book, The Facebook Effect, Zuck had created a program students wanted to use.

Encouraged by the success of CourseMatch, Mark couldn't wait to try out new ideas. The next month, he created Facemash, a program aimed at finding out who was the hottest person on campus. In a bold move, he invited users to compare two different faces of the same sex and vote for the hotter one. The project, completed in an eight-hour stretch, became an instant hit. People couldn't stop using it.

That is when the trouble started. Harvard turned off Mark's Internet access, and he was called before Harvard's disciplinary administrative board (along with the other two students who helped create Facemash). The problem was that he had hacked into the university system to obtain names and photos of the "participants" without permission from the university or students. He was able to get information on students from nine of Harvard's twelve houses (either through hacking in or getting a log-in from his friends). Harvard decided his actions constituted an inappropriate and unauthorized use of personal information. He was put on probation and asked to see a counselor. Before the site was shut down, students voted on 22,000 pairs of photos.

The success of these experiments clearly showed Zuck that he had a knack for creating simple and addictive software. He also had passion. To connect people. To create an open world. It didn't matter in what format or for what purpose; Mark Zuckerberg had a strong desire to help people connect and, through that, to enrich their lives. He wanted to build a "social utility." At one time on his personal Facebook page, Zuck listed his personal interests as "openness, making things that help people connect and share what's important to them, revolutions, information flow, minimalism." Today, the "About Mark" space on Zuck's page simply states: "I'm trying to make the world a more...