At the age of 19, Mark Zuckerberg started the company called “The Facebook,” allowing college students to connect with other students at their university. The website allows users to see the interests, hobbies, major, and friend group of other users and allows them to easily connect with one another. Zuckerberg initially only expected a few hundred people to use the platform, but his expectations were far exceeded. While Zuckerberg says he was only expecting a few hundred people to use platform, his expectations were far exceeded. Today, there are nearly 3 billion active users on Facebook nationwide. Zuckerberg explains that his focus has been on building something good for people.

Despite Zuckerberg’s wild success, he was not the creator of social media. In 1997, Andrew Weinreich created Six Degrees, the first social media site. But while his site experienced some success, its popularity diminished by 2003. In 2003 Chris DeWolfe, Tom Anderson, and Jon Hart founded Myspace, which became the most popular social media site before Facebook. But Facebook appealed more to people because it was the most entertaining. Zuckerberg innovated past social media networks and created something which became far more successful than all its predecessors: a place of fun, entertainment, and connecting with friends. And Facebook kept adapting as time progressed. For example, it adopted the hashtag from Twitter and later stories like Snapchat.

Facebook is a great example of not only innovation, but of adapting on the fly. The site is much different than it was originally designed although it accomplishes the same fundamental idea: connecting with friends. Adaptation contributed to Facebook’s exorbitant success. Coming up with an innovative idea is one thing but often success requires continually pivoting in a slightly new direction. Contrarily, being too rigid and unwilling to pivot may make creating a successful business more difficult because you are unwilling to adapt to an ever-changing world. For example, the rapid advancement of technology and the use of the internet worldwide has made having a business website extremely important. Before the internet, this wasn’t the case.

I found Zuckerberg inspiring because he was able to create a successful business by innovating an idea that already existed. Creating a business to necessarily require you to invent something entirely new. Oftentimes, synthesizing ideas into a new context is enough to create something extraordinary.