Facebook的年轻创始人 The self-assured geek

Dressed in his usual attire of jeans, a fleece vest and Adidas sandals, Mark Zuckerberg looks as if he would be more at home stalking the halls of a college dormitory after a late-night coding session than at the helm of the internet's next multi- billion-dollar company.	身着日常的服装——牛仔裤、羊毛衫和阿迪达斯(Adidas)便鞋，马克•扎克博格(Mark Zuckerberg)看起来更愿意在晚间编码课后徜徉在大学宿舍的会所，而不是执掌互联网领域下一家价值达数十亿美元的公司。
Yet at just 23 years old, the founder and chief executive of Facebookis being hailed as a potential new internet mogul. Reports this week that Microsoft – and possibly Google – are mulling an investment that could value Facebook at $10bn, are an astonishingly rapid endorsement for the fast-growing social network Mr Zuckerberg launched from his Harvard dorm room four years ago. With daily visitor numbers on Facebook having overtaken those on Ebay, some observers have drawn comparisons with Steve Jobs, the mercurial chief executive of Apple, and Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft. Indeed, it is from this older generation that Mr Zuckerberg has drawn inspiration.	然而，人们却将这位年仅23岁的Facebook创始人兼首席执行官称作潜在的互联网新巨头。最近有报道称，微软(Microsoft)（可能还有谷歌(Google)）正考虑进行一笔投资，可能将Facebook的估值定为100亿美元，这说明，扎克博格4年前在哈佛大学(Harvard)宿舍里推出的这个发展迅速的网络以令人惊讶的速度得到了认可。由于Facebook的日访问量已超过Ebay，一些观察人士已开始将他与苹果(Apple)机智的首席执行官史蒂夫•乔布斯(Steve Jobs)和微软董事长比尔•盖茨(Bill Gates)相提并论。的确，扎克博格正是从老一代人那里得到灵感的。
Born and raised just north of New York City in the exclusive Westchester County suburb of Dobbs Ferry, Mr Zuckerberg was the second of four children and the only son of a dentist and a psychiatrist. He displayed an early aptitude for computers and got his first computer when he was 10; by high school he was writing his own programmes, such as a version of the board game, Risk.	扎克博格出生在纽约市以北富人区威郡郊区的Dobbs Ferry，并在那里长大。他是家中唯一的儿子，在4个孩子中排行老二，父母分别是牙科医生与精神病医师。他在很小的时候就表现出了电脑方面的天资，10岁时得到了自己的第一台电脑；到上高中的时候，他已经开始自己编程，比如棋盘游戏《风险》(Risk)的一个版本。
After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite New Hampshire boarding school, he enrolled at Harvard in 2002, where he planned to focus on psychology. In 2004, he launched Facebook as a networking tool for Harvard students. Within the year it had spread to hundreds of colleges and universities. It then expanded to high schools and companies. The site now has nearly 40m users – with new registrations doubling about every six months.	从新罕布什尔的精英寄宿学校菲利普斯埃克塞特学院(Phillips Exeter Academy)毕业后，他于2002年入学就读于哈佛大学，打算在那里专攻心理学。2004年，他推出了Facebook，作为哈佛学生的网络工具。就在当年，这个网络就推广到了数百所院校，随后又扩展到高中和企业。该网站现在拥有近4000万名用户——新增注册用户数大约每6个月就翻一番。
Even in those early days, Mr Zuckerberg exhibited that rare blend of technical prowess, self-confidence and ruthlessness found in successful technology entrepreneurs. In 2003, he was hauled before Harvard authorities after hacking into a university database to get photos of students for use on a website he had designed to allow classmates to rate each other's attractiveness.	甚至在最初的那些日子里，扎克博格就已表现出成功科技创业者技术才能、自信与冷酷相混合的珍贵气质。2003年，他曾被拖到哈佛大学校领导面前，因为他此前侵入了学校的一个数据库，将学生的照片拿来用在自己设计的网站上，供同班同学评估彼此的吸引力。
Later that year, Mr Zuckerberg helped briefly with a social website being designed by some fellow Harvard students. After a few months he drifted away from the project, only to emerge the following year with Facebook.	那年晚些时候，扎克博格为哈佛同学设计的一个社交网站提供了短期帮助。几个月后，他淡出了这个项目，在第二年就推出了Facebook。
As Mr Zuckerberg's creation became a runaway success, his former collaborators accused him of stealing their idea – a charge Mr Zuckerberg has denied. They filed a complaint with Harvard authorities. The ensuing drama, detailed in the pages of The Harvard Crimson and other student papers, made it to Lawrence Sum- mers, then Harvard's president. When he declined to intervene, Mr Zuckerberg's former collaborators filed a lawsuit that is still being pursued in the courts.	随着扎克博格的Facebook取得巨大成功，他以前的合作者们指责他盗取了他们的想法——扎克博格否认了这一指控。他们向哈佛大学管理层提起了申诉。事情最终闹到了时任哈佛校长的劳伦斯•萨默斯(Lawrence Summers)那里。哈佛校刊Harvard Crimson和其他学生的论文对此有详细记载。由于萨默斯拒绝干预，扎克博格的前合作者们向法院提出了诉讼，案件如今仍在审理中。
By that time, Mr Zuckerberg and two partners had moved their growing operation from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Palo Alto, California, where they ran it from a sub-let apartment. There, a chance encounter with a co-founder of Napster (whom they let crash in their flat), helped them land a meeting with Peter Thiel, a Valley financier and co-founder of PayPal, the online money-transfer system. Mr Thiel eventually became Facebook's first investor, contributing $500,000 to get it off the ground.	那时，扎克博格和他的两位合作伙伴已将他们日益壮大的业务从马塞诸塞州的剑桥迁往了加州的帕洛阿尔托，在一所转租的公寓里经营着网站。在那里，与Napster一位联席创始人（他们曾让他在他们的公寓里留宿）的偶遇，帮助他们赢得了与硅谷融资家、在线转账系统PayPal联席创始人彼得•塞尔(Peter Thiel)的会面机会。塞尔最终成为了Facebook首位投资人，出资50万美元，令Facebook顺利启航。
Weighing on his decision to leave Harvard, as he told Forbes in 2006, was a talk Mr Gates gave in 2004 to his computer science class. “He really encouraged all of us to take time off school to work on a project. That's a policy at Harvard . . . Gates says to us: ‘If Microsoft ever falls through I'm going back to Harvard.'?”	扎克博格2006年告诉《福布斯》(Forbes)杂志，促使他决定离开哈佛的，是盖茨2004年在他电脑科学班上的一次讲话。“他确实鼓励我们所有人利用课余时间从事某个项目。这是哈佛的政策……盖茨对我们说：‘如果微软失败，我会重返哈佛。'”
The same self-assuredness that led Mr Zuckerberg to drop out and create Facebook was evident last year, when he walked away from what is understood to have been a $1bn buy-out offer from Yahoo, the internet portal.	让扎克博格辍学创建Facebook的那种自信去年再次得到明显体现。当时，他拒绝了互联网门户网站雅虎(Yahoo)的收购出价。据信，雅虎的出价为10亿美元。
Many observers were incredulous that Facebook's young and relatively inexperienced founder would make that choice. A year earlier, Rupert Murdoch had bought MySpace, a rival whose audience even today remains bigger than Facebook's, for $580m.	许多观察人士简直不敢相信，Facebook这位年轻而且经验相对欠缺的创始人会做出那个决定。一年前，鲁珀特•默多克(Rupert Murdoch)以5.8亿美元收购了Facebook的竞争对手MySpace。直至今日，MySpace的用户数量仍然比Facebook多。
A year later, in May, Mr Zuckerberg announced plans to turn Facebook into a platform for launching internet applications – a move some contemporaries likened to Mr Gates's strategy of turning the Windows operating system into the dominant platform for desktop computers. The aim is forFacebook tobecome the main platform for internet users to accesssocial applications. In his presentational style, Mr Zuckerberg has looked to mimic the self-assured swagger of Mr Jobs. His unveiling of Facebook's strategy in front of an audience of 800 developers was polished and used catchy graphics, but still showed the nervousness that might be expected of a 23-year-old pitching a new idea.	一年后的今年5月，扎克博格宣布计划，要将Facebook转变为发布互联网应用软件的平台——一些同时代的人将此举比作盖茨将Windows操作系统转变为台式电脑主导平台的战略。此举旨在将Facebook打造为互联网用户获得社交应用软件的主要平台。带着表演般的风格，扎克博格希望效仿乔布斯那种旁若无人的自信。他在800名程序员面前公布Facebook战略时，用词经过仔细推敲，还使用了引人注目的图表，但还是显示出了一名23岁年轻人在提出新创意时可能会有的紧张。
Mr Zuckerberg remains, above all, a geek's geek, interested more in Facebook's technological and social potential than in its ability to turn him into a billionaire (as recently as May he was still living in rented accommodation with a mattress on the floor). His desk at Facebook's headquarters is next to engineers who work the late-night coding shift, and he often works through the night with them. He continued to write code for the site long after most chief executives would have delegated such responsibilities. It took Facebook's venture backers to convince him to stop coding and focus his full attention on running the business.	扎克博格首先是奇客中的奇客，他更关心的是Facebook的技术和社交潜力，而非该网站将他变为亿万富翁的能力（直到今年5月，他仍在租房住，床垫就放在地板上）。他在Facebook总部的办公桌位于夜班编码工程师的旁边，他经常与他们一起通宵达旦地工作。多数首席执行官早已将编码任务交给他人，但他还在继续为网站编码。是Facebook的风险投资支持者们说服他不再编码，而将全部精力集中在经营业务方面。
Even so, Mr Zuckerberg has shown maturity to carry through his vision, even when it meets resistance from older, more experienced advisers. He recently eliminated a dual-reporting arrangement whereby half the company's top managers reported to another executive. Now the top seven managers report to him. Mr Zuckerberg keeps close counsel with Adam D'Angelo, a school friend and accomplished coder who is now Facebook's chief technology officer.	即便如此，扎克博格业展示出了贯彻理想的成熟一面，甚至在遇到更年长、更有经验的顾问的反对时也是如此。公司曾经实行双重报告制度，一半的最高层经理要向另一位高管报告。他最近取消了这一安排，如今7名最高层经理都直接向他报告。扎克博格一直密切倾听亚当•迪安格罗(Adam D'Angelo)的建议。迪安格罗是他在学校时的朋友，也是一位高超的编码工程师，如今担任Facebook首席技术官。
Mr Zuckerberg can sometimes come across as awkward, but he “leads on open ambition and complete and utter confidence in what he is doing”, says one person close to the company.	一位熟悉该公司的人士表示，扎克博格有时可能会让人感觉不舒服，但他“有远大的抱负，对自己的所作所为有全然的信心”。
With Facebook generating revenues of just $150m last year, comparisons between Mr Zuckerberg and Mr Gates or Mr Jobs seem premature. The site remains, in the words of Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal, a “lemonade stand” compared with a giant such as Google. Internet users are fickle. Things could fall apart. Yet, as he joked in 2006, “I always say, if Facebook ever falls through, I'll consider going back to Harvard.”	Facebook去年的收入仅为1.5亿美元，因此，把扎克博格与盖茨或乔布斯相提并论似乎为时过早。用《华尔街日报》(The Wall Street Journal)卡拉•斯威舍(Kara Swisher)的话说，与谷歌等巨擘相比，该网站仍是“小巫见大巫”。互联网用户反复无常。一切仍可能功亏一篑。然而，就像扎克博格2006年开玩笑时所说的，“我总说，如果Facebook失败，我会考虑重返哈佛。”