Success Story of a Start-Up Business or Entrepreneur

Success Story of a Start-Up Business or Entrepreneur

In current computer age with the emerging computer technologies many web services have come forth, of which Facebook has emerged as a big name. Facebook is a social networking service. Facebook users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. Through it users can communicate and share with friends and other users through private or public messages and chat features.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college fellows Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes. The idea started when Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard as a sophomore. According to The Harvard Crimson, the site used photos, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person". For this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied the private ID images. Facemash was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security but soon the charges were dropped. Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project by creating a study tool near an art history final, by uploading 500 Augustan images and a comment section to a website. He opened the site up to his classmates, and people started sharing their notes.

Zuckerberg launched “The Facebook” on February 4, 2004. In the intervening years, he had raised $37.7 million from venture capitalists and transformed his web site into a certified social website. In mid-2004 the entrepreneur Sean Parker became the company's president as then the company was incorporated. In summer 2004, it received its first investment from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The company dropped “The” from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005. Facebook launched a high-school version in September 2005

With the upcoming new features the site often failed to satisfy users on privacy issues. For this purpose it now includes appropriate customizable privacy features. Ups and downs were faced by the founders, the most marked one in 2006 when the site was about to be sold but then they revitalized the ideas and carried on with fresh strong efforts. Since then, more than 3,200 new applications have sprung up on the site, a number that is growing by about 180 a week. Those offerings have made Facebook a fully functioning social hub.

Contributed By: Mohammad Ali Zia

Roll#: 11K – 3008

MS – SPM (SPRING – 2012),

Academic Writing (ACAD)