9781422287194

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Exper ience Is Everything

Make Connections: Networking One of the greatest ways to get your idea out there is to share it with other people. Kevin and Mike had the pleasure of meeting a few very well-known people in the technological world through his time at Stanford and during his first internships. A few of the influential people he met were Sean Parker, one of the cofound-

ers of Napster and first president of Facebook; Mark Zuckerberg, one of the cofounders of Facebook; and Adam D’Angelo, the Chief Technology Officer of Facebook. Knowing all these people would help Kevin and Mike get their idea for Instagram off the ground.

Kevin attended high school at Middlesex School, a boarding school located in Concord, Massachusetts, for students in grades nine through twelve. Many of the students stay at the school full-time, while only about a third are considered day students. It costs a lot to attend Middlesex School, but Kevin’s parents had the money to give their son this educational oppor- tunity. His mother, Diane, worked as a marketing executive, and his father, Douglas, was a president in a human resources position. They knew that students who graduate from Middlesex School are well-prepared for col- lege life. Classes are very small at the school to encourage students to get in- volved and stay interested in what they are learning. The unique attitude of the school allowed Kevin to replace a class he wasn’t interested in—biol- ogy—with a different class that grabbed his attention: computer science. By the time he graduated, he was more than ready for the next step of his education. He had no difficulty being accepted into Stanford University. Meanwhile, Mike Krieger had grown up in a very different area of the world. He was born on March 4, 1986, in São Paulo, Brazil. His birth name is Michel, but his friends and colleagues in the United States refer to him