Who Is Zuckerberg: the Story of Mark Zuckerberg and 20 Years of Facebook

Few names tell the last twenty years of technology as well as that of Mark Zuckerberg. The “blue” social network he founded in a Harvard dorm room changed the way billions of people communicate, and the company that grew up around it — today Meta — produced technologies that even those of us who develop software use every day.

In this piece we answer the most direct question — who is Zuckerberg — and retrace the story of Facebook: the birth, the 20 years of the social network's transformations, the move to Meta and, above all, the technologies born inside that company that left a mark on the work of those who, like Codebaker, build custom applications.

Who is Zuckerberg: the short answer

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American entrepreneur and programmer, born in White Plains (New York) on May 14, 1984. He's known all over the world for founding Facebook in 2004, when he was still a Harvard student, and for turning it into the largest platform for online relationships ever to exist.

Today Zuckerberg is chairman, chief executive officer and controlling shareholder of Meta Platforms, the group that brings together Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and the projects on virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. His is the classic story, as much told as misunderstood, of the programmer who, from a university idea, builds one of the most influential technology companies on the planet.

From a Harvard bedroom to Facebook

Facebook is born on February 4, 2004, initially as a network reserved for Harvard students. Zuckerberg founds it together with his university classmates Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Andrew McCollum. The idea is as simple as it is powerful: bring online the network of relationships that already existed on campus.

The service soon opens up to other universities, then to high schools and finally, in 2006, to anyone over thirteen with an email address. That's the spark that turns a student project into a global phenomenon: in just a few years Facebook goes from a few thousand members to hundreds of millions of users.

20 years of Facebook: how the blue social network changed

Over two decades the “blue social network” transformed many times, and each change marked an era of the web. The main milestones can be summed up like this:

• The News Feed (2006): the stream of real-time updates that defined the social network experience for the years to come.
• The platform and apps (2007): Facebook opens up to external developers, becoming an ecosystem and no longer just a site.
• The “Like” button (2009): a single interaction that changed online advertising, measurement and even everyday language.
• The IPO (2012): Facebook becomes a public company, with everything that entails in terms of scale and responsibility.
• The shift to mobile: from the centrality of the desktop to a “mobile first” company, where most of the traffic comes from smartphones.

Behind each of these milestones is an enormous technical challenge: making a service used simultaneously by billions of people work means solving problems of scalability, performance and reliability that very few companies in the world have ever faced.

From Facebook to Meta: the pivot and the great acquisitions

Zuckerberg's growth doesn't come only from internal development, but also from some acquisitions that became legendary: Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, to which is added Oculus, the bet on virtual reality. Deals that turned a single social network into a group of platforms used by billions of people.

On October 28, 2021 comes the most symbolic change: the parent company changes its name to Meta, to signal a strategic shift toward the metaverse, virtual and augmented reality and, more recently, artificial intelligence. Facebook stays a product; Meta is the company that owns it along with everything else. It's a textbook example of how a technology company redefines its identity when the market changes.

The technologies born inside Facebook (that we still use today)

There's an aspect of Zuckerberg's story that is particularly interesting to anyone who develops software: to run a service at that scale, Facebook had to invent tools that it then released as open source, making them available to everyone. Many are now part of the stack used to build modern applications:

• React: the library for building web interfaces, born at Facebook and become a de facto standard of the frontend.
• React Native: the same approach as React brought to mobile apps, to develop for Android and iOS with a single codebase.
• GraphQL: the language for querying APIs efficiently, by now a widely adopted alternative to the classic REST.
• Cassandra: the distributed database designed to handle enormous volumes of data across many servers, used today well beyond the borders of Meta.
• PyTorch: the artificial intelligence framework born in the company's research labs, among the most used in the world for machine learning.

It's a small virtuous paradox: the gigantic problems of a single company produced tools that today make the work of anyone who develops software better, including the SMEs we work with every day.

What a company can learn from Zuckerberg's story

Beyond the off-the-charts scale, the trajectory of Facebook holds principles that apply to any digital project, even a much smaller one:

• Start from a minimum product: Facebook was born as a network for a single campus. A good business software, too, often starts from an MVP and grows through successive releases.
• Build proprietary technology: having your own tools, and not depending only on third-party solutions, is what allowed Facebook to scale. It's the same value as custom software compared to an off-the-shelf product.
• Know how to reinvent yourself: the move from Facebook to Meta shows how a company has to adapt its model and technologies when the context changes, without staying anchored to “we've always done it this way”.

These are the same principles we apply when we help companies develop a web application or digitize a process: think big, but build one step at a time.

Frequently asked questions about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook