"Im just lucky to be alive." Mark Zuckerberg, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of social-networking site Facebook, is talking about the time he came face-to face with the barrel of a gun. It was the spring of 2005, and he was driving from Palo Alto toBerkeley.
Just a few hours earlier, he had signed documents that secured a heady $12.7 million in venture capital to finance his fledgling business. It was a coming-of-age moment, and he was on his way to celebrate with friends in the East Bay. But things turned weird when he pulled off the road for gas. As Zuckerberg got out of the car to fill the tank, a man appeared from the shadows, waving a gun and ranting. "He didnt say what he wanted," Zuckerberg says. "I figured he was on drugs." Keeping his eyes down, Zuckerberg said nothing, got back into his car, and drove off, unscathed. Today, it is an episode that he talks about only reluctantly. (A former
employee spilled the beans.) But it fits the road he has taken--an adventure with unexpected, sometimes harrowing, moments that has turned out better than anyone might have predicted. Zuckerbergs life so far is like a movie script. A supersmart kid invents a tech phenomenon while attending an Ivy League school--lets say, Harvard—and launches it to rave reviews. Big shots circle his dorm to make his acquaintance; he
drops out of college to grow his baby and Change The World As We Know It. Just three years in, what started as a networking site for college students has become a go-to tool for 19 million registered users, including employees of government agencies and Fortune 500 companies. More than half of the users visit
every day. When a poorly explained new feature brought howls of protests from users--some 700,000--the media old and new jumped to cover the backlash. But Facebook emerged stronger than ever. According to comScore Media Metrix, which tracks Web activity, it is now the sixth most-trafficked site in the United States -- 1% of all Internet time is spent on Facebook. ComScore also rates it the number-one photo-sharing site on the Web, with 6 million pictures uploaded daily.
And it is starting to compete with Google and other tech titans as a destination for top young engineering talent in Silicon Valley. Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst at eMarketer, says it is on track to bring in $100 million in revenue this year--serious money indeed. Yet there is an undercurrent of controversy about whether Mark Zuckerberg is making the right decisions about the juggernaut he has created. Late last year, a blog called TechCrunch posted documents said to be a part of an internal valuation of Facebook by Yahoo. The documents projected that Facebook would generate $969 million in revenue, with 48 million users, by 2010.
The New York Times and others reported that Yahoo had made a $1 billion offer to buy Facebook -- and Zuckerberg and his partners had turned it down. This followed an earlier rumor of a $750 million offer from Viacom. Yahoo, Viacom, and Facebook would not comment on the deal talk (and they still wont). But Silicon Valley has been abuzz ever since. "Its all been very interesting," deadpans Zuckerberg, sitting in a conference
room in Facebooks Palo Alto headquarters. He looks every bit the geek in his zippered brown sweatshirt, baggy khakis, and Adidas sandals. He came into the room eating breakfast cereal from a paper bowl with a plastic spoon. He still lives in a rented apartment, with a mattress on the floor and only two chairs and a table for furniture. ("I cooked dinner for a girlfriend once," he admits at one point. "It didnt work well.") He walks or bikes to the office every day.
Zuckerbergs college-kid style reinforces the doubts of those who see the decision to keep Facebook independent as a lapse in judgment. In less than two years, the two reigning Web 2.0 titans have sold out to major corporations: MySpace accepted $580 million to join News Corp., and YouTube took $1.5 billion from Google. Surely any smart entrepreneur would jump at a chance to piggyback on those deals. Looming over the
Facebook talk is the specter of Friendster, the first significant social-networking site. It reportedly turned down a chance to sell out to Google in 2002 for $30 million, which if paid in stock, would be worth about $1 billion today.
Now Friendster is struggling in the Web-o-sphere, having been swiftly eclipsed by the next generation of sites. The same thing could happen to Facebook. New social-networking sites are popping up every day. Cisco bought Five Across, which sells a software platform for social networking to corporate clients. Microsoft is beta-testing a site named Wallop.
Even Reuters is planning to launch its own online face book, targeting fund managers and traders. So is Zuckerberg being greedy--holding out for a bigger money buyout? If so, will that come back to haunt him? If not, what exactly is his game lan? Zuckerbergs answer is that hes playing a different kind of game. "Im here to build something for the long term," he says. "Anything else is a distraction." He and his compatriots at the helm of the company--cofounder and VP of engineering Dustin Moskovitz, 22, his roommate at Harvard, and chief technology officer Adam DAngel
Narayana Murthy and Team
How Infosys was born
The idea of Infosys was born on a morning in January 1981. That fateful day, N R Narayana Murthy and six software engineers sat in his apartment debating how they could create a company to write software codes.
Six months later, Infosys was registered as a private limited company on July 2, 1981. Infosys co-founder N S Raghavan's house in Matunga, northcentral Mumbai, was its registered office. It was then known as Infosys Consultants Pvt Ltd.
What was the company's starting capital?
US $250. Murthy borrowed $250 from his wife Sudha to start the company. The front room of Murthy's home was Infosys' first office, although the registered office was Raghavan's home.
Who were Murthy's six friends who joined hands to launch Infosys?
Nandan Nilekani, N S Raghavan, S Gopalakrishnan, S D Shibulal, K Dinesh and Ashok Arora.
Are all of them still the founding directors?
Murthy is currently chief mentor and chairman while Nilekani is the chief executive officer and managing director. Gopalakrishnan, Shibulal and Dinesh are directors. Raghavan retired as joint managing director in 2000. He is currently the chairman of the advisory council of the N S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.
Ashok Arora worked for the company till 1988 and left after selling his shares in the then unlisted company back to the other promoters. He moved to the United States where he now works as a consultant.
'Murthy was always broke'
'Murthy was always broke. He always owed me money. We used to go for dinner and he would say, 'I don't have money with me, you pay my share, will return it to you later.' For three years, I maintained a book of Murthy's debts to me. No, he never returned the money and I finally tore it up after our wedding. The amount was a little over Rs 4,000.'
-- An excerpt from Sudha Murthy's reminiscences. She is the wife of Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy.
Those days, Murthy wanted to do something with his life, but he had no money. Murthy was married to Sudha on February 10, 1978, while he was working with Patni Computers.
In 1981, it was Murthy's idea to start Infosys. Murthy had a dream, and no money. So Sudha gave him Rs 10,000, which she had saved without his knowledge. Murthy and his six colleagues started Infosys in 1981.
No, it was not in Bangalore, but in Pune that Infosys set up its first office, in 1981. The house that Murthy and Sudha bought with a loan became the first Infosys office. As Murthy ran Infosys, Sudha took up a job as a systems analyst with the Walchand Group of Industries to support their household.
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