Mark Zuckerberg is the man who revolutionised social media.
He is the founder of Facebook which he started out of a dorm room in Harvard and went on to expand his venture in size. Today, Facebook is definitely the most popular and widely used social networking site in the world.
What contributed to the growth of Facebook are Mark Zuckerberg’s extraordinary leadership skills and entrepreneurial capabilities.
Here are six lessons every entrepreneur could learn from Mark Zuckerberg:
1. Believe in your idea
If you don’t have faith in your idea, no one else will. In the early stages of Facebook, Zuckerberg was running it from his own dorm room with his friends. Initially, Estavez, a partner, wanted facebook to garner more money from ads but Zuckerberg outright denied because he wanted it to first gain popularity and then allow publicity stunts on the website.
This contributed greatly to Facebook’s initial success.
2. Own your venture
A lot of companies like Yahoo wanted to buy Facebook and offered great sums of money to Zuckerberg. But he believed that he could make his big idea work by himself and refused to sell it. Soon, as the site gained popularity and Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal invested $500,000, and the amount was sufficient for immediate Facebook purposes. For further development of Facebook, Zuckerberg needed more investments. Accel Partners invested in Facebook $12.7 million and then Greylock Partners added to this amount $27.5 million.
So, with major investments he managed to own and run his business.
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3. Be ready to give in your everything
He might be one of the most successful entrepreneurs everybody wants to emulate but he has definitely put in a lot of hard work no outsider could fathom. He had his vision set from the beginning and after Facebook started gaining popularity, he decided to drop out of Harvard to devote all his time to the venture as he was aware that he couldn’t make it bigger with limited time in his hands.
4. Aim big
Facebook started as a connection site for only Harvard students. Soon, it expanded to other colleges as well.
The next idea that he developed on would be the one that changed how people networked socially through the internet. In less than a year after it was founded more than 1 million people joined the social network.
Later, Zuckerberg also bought giants like WhatsApp and Instagram to expand his share the social networking world.
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5. Be ruthless
In Harvard, Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss asked him to help them to work on an idea for a social networking site they called Harvard Connection. This site was designed to use information from Harvard’s student networks in order to create a dating site for the Harvard elite.
Zuckerberg soon dropped out and started his own venture. He created a site that allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos, and communicate with other users. Zuckerberg was soon accused of cheating the Winklevoss twins and Narendra’s idea and ConnectU’s secure code. This law suit was settled as the three received a hefty sum of $65 million and Zuckerberg continued with Facebook.
The lesson learnt from this is no matter how hard you might have to fight, never give up on your dreams or venture.
6. Stay focused at the end goal
Even after a million accusations and lawsuits, Zuckerberg was always focused at his end goal- to make a social networking site so huge that the whole world would use it. To accomplish this, he believed he along with his team would be the best persons. So, instead of walking away with the billion dollars offered by Yahoo, Zuckerberg worked relentlessly to make his idea work even though there was always a risk factor involved. Hence, all entrepreneurs could learn to be focused on their targets like Zuckerberg.
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