How to Become an Internet Billionaire

The Lives Less Ordinary series brings you the most exciting, adventurous and entertaining true-life writing that is out there, for men who are time-poor but want the best. Lives Less Ordinary drops you into extreme first-hand accounts of human experience, whether that's the adrenaline-pumping heights of professional sport, the brutality of the modern battlefield, the casual violence of the criminal world, the mind-blowing frontiers of science, or the excesses of rock 'n' roll, high finance and Hollywood. Lives Less Ordinary also brings you some of the finest comic voices around, on every subject from toilet etiquette to Paul Gascoigne.

Six years after it was created, over 500 million people use Facebook. But it was started as a lark in a Harvard dorm room by a couple of 19-year-olds. David Kirkpatrick brings you the definitive, first-hand inside story of how the visionary Mark Zuckerberg had the maturity, strategic smarts and luck to keep his company ahead of its rivals, as well as the self-assurance at just 20-years-old to turn down an offer of $10 million dollars for his fledgling, four-month-old website.

This digital bite has been extracted from David Kirkpatrick's fascinating book The Facebook Effect.