The guy with 800 million friends.

A few weeks ago a group of entrepreneurs who were Sauder alumni did presentations at our Commerce 101 lecture. It very inspirational and their entrepreneurial spirit was felt by the whole auditorium. Their visit opted for me to write this post about a person I consider my idol entrepreneur. Time Magazine’s 2010 person of the year: Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software when he was just in middle school.  He was taught by his father Atari Basic programming and later was hired a tutor. Half way through his high school years he transferred into the prestigious Philips Exeter Academy. Philip Exeter Academy has an endowment of one billion dollars which is equal to that of UBC.

Even prior to finishing high school Microsoft and AOL tried to recruit Zuckerberg to work for them but Zuckerberg chose instead to enroll at Harvard University. There he studied computer science and psychology.

At Harvard he quickly gained a reputation of a “programming prodigy”. Before creating Facebook he wrote a software called CourseMatch which allowed student to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and FaceMash which let students select the best looking Harvard student from a choice of photos.

He cofounded Facebook with classmates Dustin Moskvitz, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes. Facebook now has over 800 million users from all over the world. Mark Zuckerberg’s net-worth is estimated to be US $17.5. Not too bad for a 27 year old.

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