The Facebook Effect

Veteran technology reporter David Kirkpatrick traces how Facebook grew from a dorm-room novelty into a company with 500 million users; Mark Zuckerberg and other key executives cooperated fully with him. He explains how a nineteen-year-old Harvard student created it, why it flourished and where it seemed headed, with its missteps and successes. Zuckerberg emerges as a founder who would not compromise his vision and put growth ahead of profits, even when that meant selling equity to investors to raise money. He also weighs its effects on marketing, politics and identity, including its role in protests from Colombia to Iran. It reached the shortlist for the Business Book of the Year Award given by the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs.

Angela Pham, a content strategist at Facebook, said it made her an admirer of the company's leaders years before she took her role there. Craig Pearce, co-founder of Kid Genius, listed it in an interview among founding stories that offer lessons along with entertainment.