Mark Zuckerberg revealed that he went to visit India when he got lost on the road to his Facebook mission on the advice of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
In a highly anticipated townhall session last weekend that included the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that he took a trip to India when he was in his lowest morale.
Among the
highlights of over 50 minute Q&A session at the Facebook headquarters at the Menlo Park, California, Zuckerberg confessed that he visited a temple in India following the advice of Steve Jobs. Zuckerberg said,
“Early on in our history when things weren’t really going well – we had hit a tough patch and a lot of people wanted to buy Facebook – I went and I met with Steve Jobs and he said that to reconnect with what I believed was the mission of the company, I should go visit this temple in India that he had gone to early in the evolution of Apple, when he was thinking about what he wanted his vision of the future to be.”
And the result, Facebook is one of the biggest brands today and has declined billion-dollar offers to reach the top.
India being one of the favorite places for the spiritual wanderers, Mark was urged by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to visit Kainchi Dham Ashram in Nainital, in the Indian state of Uttrakhand. The temple is an ashram of Baba Neem Karoli who was looked upon as an incarnation of Lord Hanuman.
Zuckerberg reminisces that it was in India he saw people being connected to each other and learned the importance of what he was doing at the moment- developing Facebook to connect the world.
As it is well known that the current target of Facebook is to connect everyone and its ambitious but highly criticized Internet.org (some say it intends to monopolize the Internet) is a step towards achieving that goal.
Now, it seems a bit skeptical that Zuckerberg chose to tell this particular story while he was with the Indian PM as the incident meant so much to him. So either Facebook’s Internet.org will really do people some good, or this could this be another shrewd strategy from America’s one of the richest men.