Facebook

Here’s how much of a Web 2.0 guy Mark Zuckerberg is: during the weeks he spent working on Facebook as a Harvard sophomore, he didn’t have time to study for a course he was taking, “Art in the Time of Augustus,” so he built a website containing all of the artwork in class and pinged his classmates to contribute to a communal study guide. Within hours, the wisdom of crowds produced a sort of custom Cliff Notes for the course, and after reviewing the web based crib sheet, he aced the test. Turns out he didn’t need to take that exam, anyway. Zuck (that’s what the cool kids call him1) dropped out of Harvard later that year.
Zuckerberg is known as both a shy, geeky, introvert who eschews parties, as well as for his brash Silicon Valley bad-boy image. After Facebook’s incorporation, Zuckerberg’s job description was listed as “Founder, Master and Commander [and] Enemy of the State.” 2 An early business card read “I’m CEO . . . Bitch.” 3 And let’s not forget that Facebook came out of drunken experiments in his dorm room, one of which was initially to have compared classmates to farm animals (Zuckerberg, threatened with expulsion, later apologized). For one meeting with Sequoia Capital, the venerable Menlo Park, California, venture capital firm that backed Google and YouTube, Zuckerberg showed up in his pajamas. 4
By the age of 23, Mark Zuckerberg had graced the cover of Newsweek, been profiled on 60 Minutes, and was discussed in the tech world with a reverence previously reserved only for Steve Jobs and the Google guys, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. But Mark Zuckerberg’s star rose much faster than any of these predecessors. Just two weeks after Facebook launched, the firm had 4,000 users. Ten months later it was up to 1 million. The growth continued, and the business world took notice. In 2006 Viacom (parent of MTV) saw that its core demographic was spending a ton of time on Facebook and offered to buy the firm for three quarters of a billion dollars. Zuckerberg passed. 5