Mark Zuckerberg, a Microsoft engineer? Could have happened without Facebook

Meet Mark Zuckerberg, an impressive and talented Microsoft engineer.

That might have been a truthful sentence had Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, not gone off and revolutionized the social networking world.

The young CEO spoke to entrepreneurs at Stanford this past weekend and said if not for Facebook, he’d most likely be at a big tech company like Microsoft working as an engineer. As VentureBeat reported:

It was a shock to hear that if Facebook hadn’t worked out, Zuckerberg would have joined a tech giant, rather than a startup. “I probably would have taken an engineering job…[and] always had a lot of respect for Microsoft,” he said. “A lot of people from Harvard went to work there.”

During his talk, which was part of an annual conference called Startup School, the 28-year-old said a large part of Facebook’s success had to do with timing and added that the social networking site will remain relevant because people will continue to share content at an exponential rate.

There were also some other interesting bits of info he shared, including the fact that Zuckerberg never intended to drop out of Harvard and that he was in favor of online ads during Facebook’s first days.

Reach staff reporter Taylor Soper at or on Twitter @Taylor_Soper