Facebook is a classic Silicon Valley success story: from a Harvard dorm to the top of the world.

It has made Mark Zuckerberg into a legendary figure and turned a hoodie and tennis shoes into the height of tech industry fashion.

These days, Facebook is worth $364 billion, with over 1.71 billion people using the site every month.

Here's the story behind Facebook's insane growth, from February 2004 through today.

10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook Show all 10 1 /10 10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook 10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook Around 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day, with the site estimating in September last year that users had so far put up more than 250 billion images. That’s 4,000 photos uploaded every second and around 4 per cent of all photos ever taken, according to a study by Nokia. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton 10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook Facebook’s logo is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colour blind. “Blue is the richest color for me. I can see all of blue," said Zuckerberg in an interview with the New Yorker. The colour is so popular that Facebook’s campus store even sells nail polish in the exact shade named ‘social butterfly blue’. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith 10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook Zuckerberg's famously low-key wardrobe (either a grey t-shirt or a hoodie) is so that the CEO saves time deciding what to wear each day. However, Zuckerberg is known to dress up when the occasion demands it. For a 2011 event with Barack Obama he showed up in a suit, with the president introducing himself by saying: “I’m Barack Obama and I’m the guy who got Mark to wear a jacket and tie.” REUTERS/Brian Snyder 10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook In July 2006 Zuckerberg turned down a $1 billion offer for the site from Yahoo. He was 22 years old at the time and owned 25 per cent of the company. Zuckerberg reportedly turned it down by saying “I don't know what I could do with the money. I'd just start another social networking site. I kind of like the one I already have.” He definitely made the right choice: Facebook is now valued at $135 billion. 10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook A YouGov poll claimed that three-quarter of UK Facebook users' photos showed someone drinking or inebriated. However, the poll did ask users to estimate the number of boozy snaps themselves, and like all things on Facebook, there might have been an element of exaggeration involved. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith 10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook Facebook operates a bounty hunter program – for bugs. Like many other big technology companies Facebook offers cash rewards to security researchers who point out flaws in the site’s code. The minimum payout is $500 and the largest prize to date has been $33,500. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith 10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook More than a third of divorce filings in 2011 referenced Facebook, said a survey from UK-based legal firm Divorce Online. The exact figures may be an estimate, but with just under 8 trillion Facebook messages sent in 2013 it’s certain that a substantial body of evidence is to be found on the social network. 10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook Zuckerberg isn’t much of a Twitter fan. Despite having nearly three hundred thousand followers on the service he’s only tweeted 19 times - once in 2012 and the rest in 2009. Although Facebook dwarfs twitter in terms of active users (1 billion compared with 200 million by some accounts) the micro-blogging site handles breaking news better. Facebook has introduced trending topics and hashtags to counter this. 10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook Following the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 Iceland decided to rewrite their constitution using Facebook to solicit suggestions from citizens. Unfortunately, despite this forward thinking approach, the document was killed by politicians in mid-2013 for various (mostly technical) reasons. 10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook You can browse Facebook upside down. Facebook currently supports more than 70 different languages – including English (Pirate) and English (Upside Down). Check the bottom of the column on the right of your newsfeed and click your current language to change!

Spoiler alert: It involves a lot of beer.

Facebook got its start at Harvard's Kirkland House dormitory — the same dorm that Wallace Shawn (who played Vizzini in "The Princess Bride" and the voice of "Toy Story's" Rex) lived in during his Harvard years.

(Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia Commons)

In 2003, Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg would build a program called "Face mash." It was a Hot or Not-style app using the pictures of his classmates that he hacked from the school administration's dormitory ID files. It got 22,000 page views from 450 people in the first four hours it was up. A few days later, Harvard ordered it to be taken down, citing copyright and security concerns.

(Facebook/Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook/Mark Zuckerberg)

Zuckerberg faced disciplinary action from Harvard but was allowed to stay at the school. Undeterred, he launched "TheFacebook" on February 4, 2004.

(Wikipedia (Wikipedia)

Six days after the launch, three Harvard seniors — twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra — claimed that they had reached an agreement with Zuckerberg where he would create a website called HarvardConnection.com for them, but they alleged he abandoned them and used their ideas to create Facebook.

(REUTERS) (Reuters)

They'd go on to file a lawsuit that was only settled in 2008, when they were given 1.2 million Facebook shares in a settlement. Those shares would be worth $300 million when Facebook had its IPO.

Within a month, half of Harvard's students were members of Thefacebook. By March 2004, it had expanded to Yale, Columbia, and Stanford universities. Zuckerberg brought in fellow Harvard students Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, and Chris Hughes as cofounders to help manage that growth and keep building the site into a business.

Dustin Moskovitz (Getty Images)

Facebook's first ad-sales pitch deck came out just a few months after the launch, and showed the site's amazing early growth — and its limited functionality.

(Facebook (Facebook)

At this point, Facebook was still run out of his dorm room, but it was time to get serious. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in 2004, much like Bill Gates before him.

(Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg)

In mid-2004, Zuckerberg hired Napster cofounder Sean Parker as the company's first president.

Sean Parker (AP)

Around the same time, in June 2004, Facebook moved to Palo Alto, California, into a tiny office downtown. Back then, the company was known for being as much a party hub as it was a serious startup.

(YouTube (YouTube)

These images were taken from "Now Entering: a Millennial Generation," a 2008 documentary.

That office, right in downtown Palo Alto, was incredibly unassuming. See that glass door, No. 471? That led to a set of stairs that would take you up to the space. I briefly worked for a company that would use the same office space, years later. There's a good sushi place around the corner.

(Google Street View (Google Street View)

Mark Zuckerberg would often hang out in the office in shorts, barefoot, and with a beer in hand.

(YouTube (YouTube)

No, seriously, they loved beer. Here's Andrew McCollum with a lady friend while a Facebook employee gets beer from the office keg.

(YouTube (YouTube)

That office was also well-known for having risqué graffiti art on its walls.

(YouTube (YouTube)

The same month it moved into these offices, Facebook got its first outside funding in the form of a $500,000 investment from famed ex-PayPal executive Peter Thiel, with fellow PayPal exec and later Tesla founder Elon Musk.

Peter Thiel (Getty ) (Getty)

By this point, Facebook was starting its rapid ascent toward cultural superstardom. In May 2005, Facebook raised $13.7 million in funding. In 2006, Facebook created its iconic and breakthrough News Feed, which gave people a real-time stream of what their friends were doing.

The early Facebook team pushes the button to launch the News Feed into the site (Mark Zuckerberg)

In late 2007, Zuckerberg met a Google executive named Sheryl Sandberg at a Christmas party. At the time, she was considering taking a new position with The Washington Post. But after meeting Sandberg, Zuckerberg decided that Facebook needed a chief operating officer, and managed to convince her to come aboard in early 2008.

Sheryl Sandberg (EPA)

It was a prescient hire. Facebook was already growing quickly, but the rise of the smartphone brought with it a lot more users. In 2009, Facebook moved into a slightly larger Palo Alto office in the Stanford Research Park, amid explosive growth. By late 2010, it hit a trillion page views a month.

(Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia Commons)

That space wouldn't hold Facebook for long. In 2011, the social network moved into a corporate campus once occupied by Sun Microsystems, which had fallen from grace and been acquired by Oracle.

(Owen Thomas, Business Insider (Owen Thomas, Business Insider)

Facebook even established the main thoroughfare of the campus as "Hacker Way," referring to Zuckerberg's famous philosophy of the same name: "Move Fast and Break Things."

Facebook had also established itself as a major political power at this point. That was perhaps most prominent in February 2011's Egyptian uprising, which was largely organised via social-networking sites like Facebook.

(Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia Commons)

On the flip side, Zuckerberg himself has only gotten more involved in politics over the years, and has spoken to world leaders in support of spreading internet access all over the globe.

Mark Zuckerberg at the China Development Forum in Beijing (AP)

Facebook has also long been a proponent of marriage equality and equal rights.

The social network became unstoppable. Facebook had its historic $5 billion initial public offering May 18, 2012.

Mark Zuckerberg speaks about Messenger at a summit in 2015 (Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)

Starting that same year, in 2012, Facebook employees were given the legendary "Little Red Book," a book of propaganda-like slogans to make sure that the growing company's employees were all on the same page.

The day after the IPO, Zuckerberg somehow found the time to marry his long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan, whom he met while still a Harvard student.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan (Kimberly White/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize)

Facebook is always on the lookout for the next startup that threatens to disrupt it. So the company has snapped up a bunch of hot startups along the way, including photo-sharing service Instagram, which it bought for $1 billion in 2012 and now has more than 400 million users; ...

(Facebook (Facebook)

... early-stage virtual-reality company Oculus, which Facebook bought in March 2014 for $2 billion; ...

The virtual reality industry is trying to figure out why the technology for immersive games and stories has not taken off among consumers (Facebook)

... and mobile-messaging company WhatsApp, which Facebook paid a whopping $19 billion for in February 2014. Its cofounder, Jan Koum, is now a Facebook board member and the service now has more than 1 billion monthly users.

Jan Koum (EPA)

By the time Facebook turned 10 on February 3, 2014, over 1.23 billion people were visiting the social network every month — a billion of them on their mobile devices. The world had changed, but Facebook just kept growing.

Mark Zuckerberg (Getty)

To support all that growth, Facebook had to expand its offices. Just this year, Facebook opened a new campus, designed by legendary architect Frank Gehry, to support over 2,800 employees.

(Facebook (Facebook)

Whatever happens next, the company remains powered by Zuckerberg's mission to connect everybody in the world. As he put it in a letter to investors in Facebook's IPO filing, "Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services."

(AP)

In December 2015, Zuckerberg announced the formation of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a limited-liability corporation that will receive 99% of his wealth and reinvest it in world-changing causes.

Zuckerberg gives away 99% of shares to charity

But even with all of his wealth redistributed to charitable causes, Zuckerberg is keeping his iron grip on the company, thanks to a stock scheme that keeps him in control no matter what else happens to the company. So he's not losing control of the company he founded out of a Harvard dorm room any time soon.

(Screenshot via MSQRD (Screenshot via MSQRD)

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