Like a lot of young tech workers, Arielle Zuckerberg is eager to make a name for herself in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t hurt that her last name is already famous.
Her big brother is Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, while older sister Randi worked at the social network for six years before carving out a niche as a digital lifestyle guru.
Arielle, the youngest Zuckerberg sibling at 25, is a senior product manager tasked with helping launch Humin, which aims to be a better version of the smartphone apps for managing numbers and contacts.
Being the little sister of an Internet billionaire isn’t the worst thing, but Arielle is clearly uncomfortable capitalizing on the family name even as she courts attention for own digital endeavors.
Despite being offered up for an interview as “Mark Zuckerberg’s little sister” ahead of Humin’s launch, she stammered or clammed up when asked about her brother. At one point, she pleaded with the p.r. contact to intervene in the interview.
The one question she was quick to answer is why she never worked for Facebook.
“Who wants to work for their older brother?” she asked wryly.
Her reluctance to cash in on the family name stands in stark contrast to Randi, who had no such compunction when she left to start her own media company and star in a Bravo reality-TV show on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
After graduating in 2011 from Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., Arielle worked as a junior product manager for Wildfire, a marketing software company later bought by Google.
The deal made headlines after Randi tweeted her congratulations to Arielle and Wildfire followed by the hashtag “#awkward.” Google had just launched Google Plus, a rival social network.
“Not gonna lie … This feels pretty awkward,” Arielle wrote on her own Facebook page about the deal.
Months later in December 2012, Arielle was in the news again after she “liked” an Instagram photo that was critical of the photo app’s new terms of service. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, was requiring users to give the service the right to sell their photos, among other questionable terms.
The photo Arielle “liked” was a screen shot of the most controversial terms with the caption “Instagram’s suicide note.”
After Google, Arielle jumped to Humin in November 2013.
“I translate problems into design and engineering requirements,” she told The Post, in one of her more extensive interviews.
Although she doesn’t like talking about her brother, she was more forthcoming in discussing her career ambitions and passion for diversity.
Her ultimate goal is to be an angel investor, providing seed capital to tech start-ups. She said diversity would be a key factor in determining which companies made the cut.
“I don’t know how to solve men’s problems … and I think there’s a lot of evidence that men don’t know how to solve women’s problems,” she said.
“It’s not just women,” she added. “Companies that don’t have diverse employees are putting themselves at a disadvantage.”