Drop-out Mark Zuckerberg shares Facebook wisdom with Harvard graduates

Mark Zuckerberg returned to Harvard, where he launched Facebook and then famously dropped out, telling graduates it is up to them to bring purpose to the world, fight inequality and strengthen the global community.

“Change starts local. Even global changes start small — with people like us,” the Facebook chief executive said.

He shared stories about graduates such as David Razu Aznar, a former city leader who led the effort to legalise gay marriage in Mexico City, and Agnes Igoye, who grew up in conflict zones in Uganda and now trains law-enforcement officers.

“And this is my story too,” Zuckerberg said.

“A student in a dorm room, connecting one community at a time, and keeping at it until one day we can connect the whole world.”

Such lofty talk now comes naturally to Zuckerberg, a 33-year-old billionaire who has committed to giving away nearly all his wealth.

In February, he sketched out an ambitious, if vague, vision for Facebook that committed the company to developing “social infrastructure” that would help build a “global community that works for all of us”.

But it also strikes a sharp contrast with the criticism Facebook has taken recently — not so much for connecting the world (a big chunk of it, anyway) as for failing to anticipate how vulnerable that connectedness could be to those who abuse it.

Zuckerberg, who like the graduates is a millennial, started Facebook in his dorm room in 2004. What began as a closed networking site for Harvard students is now a global communications force with nearly two billion members.

He told the graduates how, when Facebook’s investors and executives wanted him to sell the company early on, he resisted.

“You see, my hope was never to build a company, but to make an impact,” he said.

But as a young chief executive, he “wondered if I was just wrong, an impostor, a 22-year-old kid who had no idea how the world worked”.

“Now, years later, I understand that is how things work with no sense of higher purpose. It’s up to us to create it so we can all keep moving forward together.”

Zuckerberg’s voice cracked with emotion as he talked about a high school student he mentors who is living in the US illegally. When Zuckerberg asked him what he wanted for his birthday, the student started talking about others he wanted to help, and asked for a book on social justice.

“Here is a young guy who has every reason to be cynical,” Zuckerberg said, his eyes welling with tears.

“He wasn’t sure if the country he calls home — the only one he’s known — was going to deny him his dream of going to college. But he wasn’t feeling sorry for himself. He wasn’t even thinking of himself.”

If he can do this, Zuckerberg said, “then we owe it to the world to do our part too”.

AP