Mark Zuckerberg turns 28; how does that make you feel about your life?

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg turns 28 on Monday. He’s considerably younger than the average FORTUNE 500 CEO. How does that make you feel about your life? (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg turns 28 Monday. It would
be hard for anyone to compete with all he has achieved.
Should we feel bad if we’re older than him and haven’t
reached near his level of success?

“You should be the most bothered as the most senior
member of the staff,” Luke Burbank said to co-host Dave
Ross on 97.3 KIRO FM’s Ross and Burbank Show. “It
should just go in order of age, so you should be the most
bothered, then probably Ursula, then it should be me, and
then Andrew, because Andrew is slightly younger than me.”

Burbank described his discovery of Zuckerberg’s age as “a
kick to the crotch.”

Ross said he was more bothered by the success of local
wunderkind Bill Gates.

“I was questioning what led me not to be Bill Gates,” said
Ross. “I was fooling around with computers when you made
them out of plastic straws.”

“You were interested in computing and all these things.
You’re a smart guy. You went to an Ivy League school. What
happened Dave?” Burbank asked.

Even though he was really into computers, Ross said he
didn’t connect the dots that these machines could be big
moneymakers.

“It did not occur to me this is a potential gold mine. It
occurred to me this is a lot of fun to play with in the
computer lab,” said Ross. “This is a lot of fun to play
with, with my soldering iron and make things chirp and
whine and flash, but the idea of making money from it did
not occur to me.”

Burbank said he also had a brush with a great idea that he
didn’t see the value in.

“I was in college. I was at the UW and there was this guy
in one of my classes, this really nice guy, and he was
working at this place trying to sell books on the
Internet. It’s like 10 employees or something and he was
the front desk person.”

Burbank was doing Metro traffic reports at the time and
said he felt bad for the guy working at this weird book
company [that would become Amazon.com].

“Of course, I ran into him some years later and we were on
a ferry to Bainbridge where he was going to buy his
parents a house so they could live there when they come up
to visit him. It wasn’t his house. He already had a few of
those,” said Burbank. “That’s one of the great regrets of
my life. Sometimes I’ll lie in bed and think if I had a
time machine I would just go back and be like, ‘Take me
with you.'”

By JAMIE GRISWOLD, MyNorthwest.com Editor