The Real Inside Story of Mark Zuckerberg and the World's Fastest Growing Company

The Facebook Effect

'David Kirkpatrick was handed the keys to the Facebook kingdom - the result is the definitive account of its phenomenal rise' Observer

David Kirkpatrick was handed the keys to the Facebook kingdom - the result is the definitive account of its phenomenal rise

Leaves you with a deep understanding of Facebook, its philosophies and, most startlingly, its power. You come away with a creepy new awareness of how a directory of college students is fast becoming a directory of all humanity

A well-reported account of the first six years of one of the most important companies on earth

Mr. Kirkpatrick provides some intriguing insights into the psyche of Mr. Zuckerberg

A compelling account of the origins and prospects of the social networking giant

Along the way, Zuckerberg has turned down acquisition offers of as much as $15 billion; worked with and against technology giants Google, Microsoft and Viacom; and knocked heads with privacy advocates. Those are some of the gems in the illuminating new book

Understanding Facebook's success is crucial to understanding the modern internet, and this is the definitive account of its rise and rise. Kirkpatrick's story is an important contribution to the biography of the digital age, and one of the most startling stories of human ingenuity and appetite you'll find on any shelf

Tom Chatfield, Arts and Books Editor of Prospect Magazine

Fascinating ... exciting ... The book is packed with interviews from all the key players, including Zuckerberg and Moskovitz. Kirkpatrick's subjects open up about everything

This fast paced narrative captures the excitement of the startup world and reminds me of the early days of Wikipedia when I realized we were onto something big. A big revelation is how Mark Zuckerberg's idealism led him to focus on product improvements rather than short-term revenue gains, and how critical this was to the company's success

Facebook is becoming the dominant social networking tool, facilitating our online and offline worlds. The Facebook Effect effectively shows its rapid evolution, where it is going, and how it will increasingly affect our lives

Mr. Kirkpatrick doesn't coddle his subject, yet he presents Mr. Zuckerberg's point of view much more comprehensibly than we have seen it before ... The author lets you get inside Mr. Zuckerberg's head

Mr. Kirkpatrick ... was encouraged by Mr. Zuckerberg to write this book and was granted extensive access to him and his associates ... [Kirkpatrick] gives the reader a detailed understanding ... [and] still does an animated job of evoking the collegiate atmosphere that reigned at the company

A carefully reported book that should change the way you think about a very unusual enterprise ... does the best job yet of making sense of Facebook's founder, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg

Kirkpatrick's amazing reporting details what happens when a hacker culture turns into a multi-billion-dollar firm. Mark Zuckerberg sought to maintain that hacker energy, and it's fascinating to hear what resulted

Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail

Engrossing. . . . A detailed and scrupulously fair history of [Facebook]

David Kirkpatrick was for many years the senior editor for internet and technology at Fortune magazine. While at Fortune he wrote cover stories about Apple, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sun, and numerous other technology subjects. More recently he organized the Techonomy conference on the centrality of technology innovation for all human activity. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and appears frequently on television, radio, and the Internet as an expert on technology. He lives in New York.

Today - six years after it was created in a Harvard dorm room - over 500 million people use Facebook regularly, in just about every country on earth. That a company this powerful and influential was started as a lark by a couple of 19-year-olds makes it a fascinating and surprising tale. That one of them, the visionary Mark Zuckerberg, had the maturity, strategic smarts and luck to keep his company ahead of its rivals anchors the tale. 
 
With exclusive inside access to all the company's leaders David Kirkpatrick tells of the vision, the tenacity, the refusal to compromise, and the vision Zuckerberg has to remake the internet. A brilliant and fascinating cast of characters created Facebook and Kirkpatrick has interviewed all of them. Never before have Zuckerberg and his closest colleagues told what really happened as they built their dynamo while eating fast food, staying up all night, and thumbing their noses at how things are usually done.

David Kirkpatrick

Lives Less Ordinary

The Lives Less Ordinary series brings you the most exciting, adventurous and entertaining true-life writing that is out there, for men who are time-poor but want the best. Lives Less Ordinary drops you into extreme first-hand accounts of human experience, whether that's the adrenaline-pumping heights of professional sport, the brutality of the modern battlefield, the casual violence of the criminal world, the mind-blowing frontiers of science, or the excesses of rock 'n' roll, high finance and Hollywood. Lives Less Ordinary also brings you some of the finest comic voices around, on every subject from toilet etiquette to Paul Gascoigne. 
 
Six years after it was created, over 500 million people use Facebook. But it was started as a lark in a Harvard dorm room by a couple of 19-year-olds. David Kirkpatrick brings you the definitive, first-hand inside story of how the visionary Mark Zuckerberg had the maturity, strategic smarts and luck to keep his company ahead of its rivals, as well as the self-assurance at just 20-years-old to turn down an offer of $10 million dollars for his fledgling, four-month-old website. 
 
This digital bite has been extracted from David Kirkpatrick's fascinating book The Facebook Effect.

How to Become an Internet Billionaire

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