EXCLUSIVE: Mark Zuckerberg on How His Daughters Have Changed His Vision for Facebook's Future
With just a few months to go until his family grows with the arrival of a new baby —a sister for Maxima— Mark Zuckerberg is dedicated to eliminating borders. From the home he shares with his wife Priscilla Chan and inside the MPK20 building, the center of operations of the company he co-founded, Zuckerberg wants us all to be connected, to have a purpose in life and that the world we live in is better. “For a few months during the pregnancy we just had a lot of time to think about the world that she was going to grow up in and there are all these dreams that we had long-term,” says the director and chief operating officer of Facebook, 33, exclusively to People en Español, from his glass conference room at the social networking headquarters in Menlo Park, CA.
With his slow and deliberate delivery, as if he had all the time in the world, his eyes lit up when he mentioned that there was another baby on the way. “I’m about to have another daughter, so I’m excited about that,” he says. “Leading up to having Max changed my perspective a lot. We actually had a few miscarriages before having Max so at the time we actually knew that we were going to have her, we were just so happy that it’s like, ‘okay, we think that she’s going to be healthy and is going to come.’”
From the few years he spent at Harvard University, Zuckerberg’s best memory there was meeting Chan, who now heads his foundation, which aims to promote equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy. “We want to help in making the education system better, or improve health. We always just viewed these as long-term goals, but if you want your children to see the benefits of that, then it’s like, ‘okay well we better get on that.’ She’s going to go to school in four or five years right? So we have to,” he says.
Facebook’s new mission — “Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” — is what Zuckerberg is focusing on right now. With more than 2 billion users, his co-founder wants us all to be connected through Facebook communities, online and offline. “It’s hard to have a community be a meaningful part of your support structure if you’re not also connecting in the real world,” he explains. “We’re going to keep focusing on giving everyone a voice and helping them stay connected to their friends and family but understanding that now we need to do more to help bridge some of the divides in society and bring the world closer together.”
And from the looks of it, he is already succeeding.
