The Accidental Billionaire is a recreation of the founding of Facebook.com based on a reconstruction of eyewitness accounts. It is an easy read, which paints a picture of founder Mark Zuckerberg's humble beginings at Harvard. Humble because on the social scale at the campus he is portrayed as someone disadvantaged, yet driven to be connected. Mark hacked his way to popularity. Initially, with a social experiment at Harvard for tracking people in Harvard classes and later to viral notoriety, achieved by hacking into every dorms' database of student pictures and letting his friends rate students in a Hot or Not style site.
The book recounts how Zuckerberg attracted the attention of Microsoft, being offered $1M to work for them when he was in high school and, as we know, Microsoft was an investor in Facebook.
It's apparent from the start that many of the people surrounding Mark in the book recognised talent in him and wanted to ride his coat tails or get him to work for them. All this when what he really wanted to do was create a site where he could find a date amidst his busy class schedule. This story really presents Mark Zuckerberg as an underdog that becomes the world's youngest billionaire through luck, hardwork and partying. The story behind Facebook's enormous growth in 6 years to the worlds second largest web destination with 400 million users is worth reading. Especially if you use Facebook.
The author Ben Mezrich is known for his previous book Bringing Down the House which was turned into the Kevin Spacey directed movie 21 (IMDB).
An awesome new online bookshop www.treeet.com.au sent us a copy of the book to review. Check out their site, they're super speedy with their delivery and have excellent discounts.
0 comments:
Post a Comment