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. Zuckerberg has consistently focused on growth and not on
profit and has remained resolute that Facebook will transform how people
communicate. By all evidence it is now succeeding spectacularly on a global
level. 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 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.