ON A CHILLY night in January 1997, a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer recently turned entrepreneur named Andrew Weinreich addressed a small crowd of investors, journalists, and friends at the Puck Building in New York City’s SoHo district and tried to explain what online social networking was, why the product he was announcing was the first example, and how the concept would change the world. It was a heavy lift.
Weinreich had come up with the concept as his contribution to a weekly meeting of would-be start-up founders who got together soon after the first wave of Internet companies like Yahoo!, Amazon, and eBay appeared. They would try to identify business ideas that were possible for the first time ever because of the net. Weinreich came up with an idea based around the concept of people volunteering information about their interests, their jobs, and their connections. He asked himself: What if I could get everyone to index their relationships in a single place?
He called his company sixdegrees, based on a concept that everyone on the planet was only six connections away from anyone else. Weinreich thought it was something Guglielmo Marconi had first stated, but actually it was a Hungarian writer named Frigyes Karinthy. In a short story called “Chain-Links,” the writer assessed this huge shift.
Planet Earth has never been as tiny as it is now. It shrunk—relatively speaking of course—due to the quickening pulse of both physical and verbal communication. This topic has come up before, but we had never framed it quite this way. We never talked about the fact that anyone on Earth, at my or anyone’s will, can now learn in just a few minutes what I think or do, and what I want or what I would like to do.
Hard to believe he wrote this in 1929! Karinthy’s characters in this short piece tried an experiment—to see if a chain of connections could connect them to any random human among the (then) world population of 1.5 billion with only five personal introductions, beginning with one’s personal network of friends and then proceeding to the next person’s introduction. In the story, one of the subjects—a Hungarian intellectual like the author—met the challenge of making the connection to a random riveter at the Ford Motor Company. Karinthy’s concept kicked around the social-science world for some decades until some researchers in the 1960s and ’70s tried to prove it with the limited computer power of their time. In 1967, sociologist Stanley Milgram published a Psychology Today article on what was then called the “small world problem.” In a study published two years later, he and his coauthor tried to connect random people in Nebraska with those in Boston and found that “the mean number of intermediaries between starters and targets is 5.2.” In 1990, the concept would gain wide cultural currency when playwright John Guare used it to illuminate his eponymous play, Six Degrees of Separation, adapted for film in 1993.
Weinreich’s implementation, though inspired by the Six Degrees theory, actually concentrated on two or three degrees of separation. “More often than not, I can meet the people I don’t know through those I do know,” he told the crowd at the Puck Building. For centuries, people have been using their friends and acquaintances to make such connections, but it had always been hit or miss. “Today we hope to change that,” he promised, “with a free, web-based networking service.” He compared it to putting your Rolodex online—and connecting to everyone else’s Rolodex. “If everyone uploads their Rolodex, you should be able to traverse the world,” he gushed.
On that cold night in January, Weinreich expressed a mission that was astounding to consider: connecting the world in a single network. “Imagine for a moment that we had not just you in the database but every Internet user in the world,” he asked his audience. (Of course there were only, he guessed, 40 to 60 million Internet users at that point.)
Weinreich assumed, as a matter of course, that connecting the world would be a boon to humanity. Why would it be otherwise?
Sixdegrees pioneered several tropes that would be part of virtually all social-networking sites. It included the viral-before-there-was-viral plan to use email invites to build the network. At the launch event, Weinreich even supplied printed-out invites inside envelopes to the attendees that were duplicates of the ones hitting their mailboxes. Then he urged them to open their browsers on computers in an adjoining room and begin submitting the emails of their friends and connections to sixdegrees. When those people got their invites they would be asked to confirm that they indeed knew those who suggested them. It was the first time that an online service used such verifications.
Sixdegrees was something new and, had it succeeded, would have been the nexus of endless studies and assessments. But it did not succeed. Weinreich’s great idea was too early. At the time, most people didn’t have email, let alone persistent web connections. And sixdegrees didn’t let you do much besides enter your connections into the giant database. There was no temptation to relieve your boredom on sixdegrees. No way to stalk an ex-lover. No way to watch a silly cat video. You would query the database of your extended social network when you wanted a connection or recommendation. And leave.
Those who did sign up to sixdegrees quickly noted how much better the service would be if you could see pictures of people. In 1997, that was a huge hurdle because very few people had digital cameras. Weinreich even considered hiring hundreds of interns or low-paid employees to sit in a big room and do nothing but scan photographs. But he decided against it, because by then he was already considering selling the company.
While sixdegrees proved the concept of social networking—it peaked at about 3.5 million users, which was impressive at that stage of the Internet—the state of technology was still a couple of years away from nurturing the kind of connectivity that a social network would need to really thrive. Weinreich dreaded having to raise the money to wait it out. In December 1999—just in time to avoid the huge dot-com crash that would soon hit the industry—Weinreich sold sixdegrees to a company called YouthStream Media Networks for $125 million. Included in the purchase price was the pending patent, “Method and apparatus for constructing a networking database and system,” which became known as the “social networking patent.”
Weinreich later would say that by selling early, he never did get to implement two things he had planned all along for sixdegrees. One was allowing for users to post comments and media on the site, sneaking into the territory of other early Internet outposts for what would be called user-generated content. The other was making sixdegrees into an operating system, or platform, where third parties could create applications that would run on top of what Weinreich had dreamed would be a social network that encompassed the globe.
What Weinreich did not know was the person who would build—and surpass—his vision was only twenty-five miles from the Puck Building. And he was twelve years old.
MARK ELLIOT ZUCKERBERG was born to Karen and Ed Zuckerberg in 1984. The day was May 14, almost four months after the launch of the Apple Macintosh, which aspired to push into common use what was still seen as a device for trained experts and batty hobbyists. Not many people had personal computers then, and fewer still had modems, the noisy peripherals that connected PCs to telephone lines. The precursor to the Internet, ARPAnet, was around, but limited to government and some computer-science students.
Ed Zuckerberg had both a computer and a modem. He had a lifelong affinity for technology in general and gadgetry in particular. When he was himself a child, his favorite subject was math.
Considering this, one might justifiably wonder whether Mark Zuckerberg’s later ascension to the status of global tech idol might be a case of the son living out the father’s thwarted ambitions. Ed never said as much, but he did not object when a New York magazine reporter writing about the family in 2012 floated the theory. “Growing up Jewish in New York City,” Ed said, “if you had half a brain, your parents wanted you to be a doctor or a dentist . . . But back then, there really weren’t a lot of jobs in computer programming . . . That was not the ‘appropriate use of my time,’ my parents would have said. It wasn’t for the smart boys.”
If not for the pressure it would have been different. “I would have done something in math, left to my own devices,” he says now. “Absolutely. I loved math.”
The Zuckerbergs lived in Dobbs Ferry, New York, twenty-five miles north of the big city. Both had grown up in working-class neighborhoods in the outer boroughs of that city. Their own parents were first-generation Americans. In 1977, while studying dentistry at NYU, Ed had gone on a blind date with a Brooklyn College coed, Karen Kempner, who hailed from Queens. He was twenty-four, she nineteen. Both had grandparents who emigrated from eastern Europe, and both were diligently studying to accomplish what was the career gold standard in each of their families: becoming a professional like a doctor or lawyer. Especially a doctor. (Ed’s father was a mailman; Karen’s father a precinct captain in “The 79,” in Brooklyn’s tough Bed-Stuy neighborhood. Her mother taught school.) Ed and Karen married in 1979, and after a couple of years living in a White Plains apartment, they moved to the Dobbs Ferry house. Among Westchester County suburbs, the town was known to be less wealthy (and less snooty) than other nearby bedroom communities, but Ed says it was simply the best house for their purposes—a sprawling, multilevel house atop a high knoll, a javelin’s toss away from the busy Saw Mill River Parkway, laid out so it could accommodate a home and a dental office. “It was the only one we could afford,” notes Karen. In the early ’80s, Ed moved his dental practice to the ground floor, with the Zuckerberg clan basically living above the shop.
Ed brought his high-spirited personality to his work. Karen was a psychiatrist who delayed a clinical career to raise Mark and his three sisters while helping her husband run the dental practice. (Mark was the second oldest, born two years after Randi; Donna and Arielle would follow.) “My wife was a superwoman,” Ed Zuckerberg said in a 2010 interview on a local radio show. “She managed to work and be home.” Like many Jewish parents who had gratefully moved up a rung on the ladder to the good life, the Zuckerbergs aspired to an even higher rung for their kids, and fiercely emphasized education. (Zuckerberg once joked about it: “Good Jewish mother . . . You know, go home; get 99 percent on the test, Why didn’t you get 100?”) At one point, Karen did practice in a nearby hospital—a choice made possible because the family always had a foreign au pair helping out—but was discouraged by the failure of medical insurance to cover her patients’ fees. Ed also once remarked that she thought her presence in the home might prevent her children from themselves landing on the psychiatry couch. On a Bermuda vacation, she and Ed decided she should give up the job. Her clinical skills wound up being utilized to calm nervous dental patients. Perhaps as a result of being pressured into a profession she did not formally practice, Karen Zuckerberg felt firmly that her own children should be free to pursue their passions. “You spend a lot of years working—you have to love what you do,” she says. “So we always felt it was up to our children to figure that out for themselves.”
Ed Zuckerberg’s geeky side presented itself in a constant pursuit of exotic new dental technology. When a magazine writer visited in 2012, Ed went on at length about a $125,000 root-canal machine he’d just bought. Zuckerberg’s pitch to his client was that his state-of-the-art equipment, along with a menschy compassion for patients, would make the trip of going to the dentist’s office a more pleasant experience than, say, going to the dentist’s office. “I was the first dentist in Westchester County who had digital X-rays, intra-oral cameras . . . all that tech stuff really got me going,” he says. He billed himself as “painless Dr. Z,” and his website (of course he had an early website) boasted that he “caters to cowards.”
Ed bought his first personal computer in the early 1980s—an Atari 800, a “consumer” machine that was great for games but required patience, skill, and a bit of insane optimism if you wanted to actually do something useful on it. But he taught himself Atari BASIC and kept a patient database. Before Mark was born, he’d upgraded to an IBM PC, which he used to run the practice.
So it wasn’t surprising to Ed Zuckerberg that his son would take to computers. From an early age, Mark had a mind attuned to logic, especially when the answer to one of his requests was no. “If you were going to say no to him, you had better be prepared with a strong argument backed by facts, experiences, logic, reasons,” Ed Zuckerberg once told a reporter. Mark, he said, was “strong-willed and relentless,” a description that many coworkers and rivals would certainly endorse.
As a tyke, Mark played with Ed’s old Atari, which was a great game machine. In sixth grade, he got his own computer. “It was a Quantex 486DX,” he recalled in a 2009 interview with me, and was surprised when I didn’t recognize the brand name of that IBM PC clone. “I don’t think it exists anymore,” he explained, taking me off the hook. “But my family didn’t have a lot of money, so I was lucky just to get a computer.”
From the beginning, Zuckerberg used the computer to indulge a curiosity about the way people organized themselves—and how some people gained power in the process. He seems to have had this obsession since toddlerhood. “When I was a kid I had Ninja Turtles, and they would just have wars and stuff like that,” he says. “What I used to do with my Ninja Turtles was create societies, and just, like, kind of model out how they’d interact with each other and things like that. I was just very interested in how systems worked like that.”
So when Zuckerberg played games on computers, they indulged his world-building imagination. One of his favorites was called Civilization, a popular series in the genre of “turn-based strategy games.” The idea was to build a society. He kept playing it even into adulthood.
After a few months on the computer he told himself, All right, this is interesting—I’ve learned all about it, and now I want to control it. “So I learned programming,” he says. One night he demanded that his parents take him to Barnes & Noble to purchase a guide to writing C++, a key computer language for creating web applications. “He’s ten!” recalls Ed Zuckerberg. When the acolyte coder discovered that a book explicitly targeted to “dummies” lacked key information, Dr. Z hired a tutor. For two years the tutor would visit once a week. “It was his favorite hour of the week,” says his mother. The Zuckerbergs explored enrolling him in an AP computer class at the high school, but the teacher told them Mark already knew everything he’d learn in the class. The local college offered courses, but the only one Mark considered worthwhile was in the graduate department. So one night Ed Zuckerberg took Mark to the college. The teacher told Ed he had to leave his son at home during class. “He’s the student!” said Ed Zuckerberg, who tells the story with pride decades later.
As Mark later told an interviewer, “I’d go to school and I’d go to class and come home. The way I’d think about it was, ‘I have five whole hours to just sit and play on my computer and write software.’ And then Friday afternoon would come along and it would be like, okay, now I have two whole days to sit and write software. This is amazing.”
Later he would remark that from all this programming, “it reached a point where it went into my intuition. I wasn’t really thinking that much about it consciously.”
Zuckerberg didn’t spend all his time in a bedroom lit only by a computer monitor. Teachers would later describe him as well-adjusted; though not much of a talker, when he did speak he expressed his firm opinions articulately. He was strong in math and science. He was smaller than the other kids. He played on his neighborhood Little League baseball team but didn’t like it. He would later use his begrudging participation on the ballfield as an illustration of something that the company he founded might one day mitigate. “I’m not into baseball, I’m into computers,” he said, suggesting that social networks would help people with disparate interests to find their tribes, as opposed to having to endure right field because it was the default activity.
Zuckerberg was much more simpatico with fencing—an individual sport that all the Zuckerberg kids would practice. The Zuckerberg family were also Stars Wars obsessives, and swords had the appeal of being like lightsabers. His bar mitzvah was Star Wars–themed. (Pre-Instagram, no photos were publicly distributed.) He and his sisters made a home movie based on Star Wars.
His mother called him “princely.”
Though he played a lot of games, Mark wasn’t satisfied to be bound by whatever rules the game creator set for the players. Being the creator was a lot better. “I wasn’t into playing games—I just liked making them,” he told me, skipping over the fact that he played them all the time, with a cutthroat competitiveness. One of the first games he built was a version of his favorite board game, Risk, where players attempt to conquer the world country by country, by accumulating power to make their incursions unstoppable. Zuckerberg’s digital version was set in the age of the Roman Empire. You’d try to beat Julius Caesar. Zuckerberg always won.
He’d later admit his creations were terrible by any reasonable measure. But they were his.
“Everything was tech,” his sister Randi once told a reporter about the Zuckerberg household. “We had these toys with voice changers. Mark was always thinking like, We could get Darth Vader’s voice to sound more Vaderlike if I could hack this toy.”
A more practical technology was an Internet-based intercom system that ran through the Dobbs Ferry house and allowed the dental staff to communicate with one another and the family from the downstairs office. This was dubbed “ZuckNet.” Ed Zuckerberg had already hired a professional to wire the house for the T1 line, so Mark offered to write software to link the machines together. Once installed, ZuckNet proved useful not only to signal the arrival of Dr. Z’s cowards but for Mark and sometimes Randi to pull an endless series of pranks, like planting a fake virus on his sister Donna’s computer or tricking his mother into thinking that the Y2K bug had triggered a tech apocalypse.
In 1997, a networking product did for the young people worldwide what ZuckNet had done in the Zuckerberg house a year earlier. AOL’s Instant Messenger product, or AIM, would become the software that most engaged Mark Zuckerberg in the early years of his technology life.
Zuckerberg’s generation—his birth year puts him in the advance guard of the Millennials—was too late for Bye Bye Birdie–esque princess-phone conversations and too early for texting. But they did have computers attached by modems and, increasingly, higher-bandwidth Internet. And they had AIM, a stand-alone application with a virtual monopoly on computer chat. It was common for a kid’s computer screen to have multiple chat windows open, each one an asynchronous conversation with a friend. Zuckerberg loved AIM. Because most of his high school friends lived on the other side of the busy Saw Mill River Parkway, a barrier that discouraged spontaneous visits, Zuckerberg relied on it even more than his peers.
Naturally, Zuckerberg messed with AIM’s system. “If you actually talk to a lot of people who are my age, a lot of us grew up learning how to program by hacking on AOL,” he says. One of the “cool things” he describes is using the Internet programming language HTML to automatically add design elements, like different color schemes, to the multiple chat boxes that populated his screen at all times. Another cool thing was hacking the program in a way that would have spurred agita in AOL chief Steve Case, had he known.
“There were all these holes in AOL where you could manipulate the service,” Zuckerberg says. “Like, I could kick my friends offline because of bugs in the system.”
When Zuckerberg would later build his company, the majority of those he hired were people like him, ’80s kids who had spent the last years of the twentieth century submersed in the chat bubbles on their screens. “We all grew up on AIM,” says Dave Morin, who would later be a key Facebook executive. “I have this whole theory that we’re all not as competent at intimate communication, particularly in marriage and things like that, because we grew up on it. We didn’t learn the nuance of intimate communication in person.”
MARK ZUCKERBERG’S TEACHERS recognized his intelligence—and his intensity. It was clear even in nursery school, where classes would do weeklong projects on various subjects. At one point, his parents noticed that one unit, on space, had been going on longer than usual. When Ed and Karen asked about it, the teacher told them that Mark was so focused on the topic, and he’d gotten the other kids so involved, that they decided to extend the space unit to a month. After the month, Mark’s space obsession continued, and the giant cardboard rocket ship the class painted wound up on his bedroom ceiling.
His parents refused numerous offers to have him skip a grade or two—he was a small kid as it was. In middle school, he had an arrangement with his teachers that after he learned the week’s lessons—usually on Mondays when they were presented, he could do the work from other classes while the teachers drilled the other students. “I never saw him doing homework,” says Ed Zuckerberg.
After two years at the public high school in Ardsley, which was a few miles across the Saw Mill from the Zuckerberg home, Mark clearly felt that he needed a change. He’d calculated the points he would get from taking the courses he wanted, and the mix of honors and AP courses offered at Ardsley fell short of the total he’d need to get into the top schools. And there was another reason. “Our public school didn’t have any computer-science courses,” he says. His parents thought that Horace Mann, an easy commute, would be best, but Mark had heard about Exeter from friends at a summer program for talented youth. Karen Zuckerberg was already sad that her oldest daughter was leaving for college and she didn’t want to send off her son, too. She asked him to interview at another private school. Mark said, “I’ll do it but I’m going to Phillips Exeter.” As often happened, the strong-willed teenager got his way.
Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, New Hampshire, was one of a cohort of haughty prep schools known as the Ten Schools Admission Organization. Modeled on their big brothers in the Ivy League, they were, as the organizational name implies, reliable feeder schools to elite colleges. Zuckerberg enrolled as an “upper” (the Exonian vernacular for juniors) in the class of 2002.
Before the school year began, Exeter held a reception in New York City for incoming students. Zuckerberg found himself chatting with another rising junior, a gangly kid with a similarly low-key demeanor whose name was Adam D’Angelo. Like Zuckerberg, D’Angelo was a suburbanite (hailing from a bedroom community in Connecticut) transferring to the tony boarding school after topping out at his public high school. They had something else in common. When Zuckerberg asked D’Angelo what he was interested in, the answer was one golden word: programming. Zuckerberg was thrilled—none of his public high school friends shared his passion for building things on the computer and now the first person he met at Exeter was a lot like him. “By induction [I figured] there were going to be a lot of other people here who were interested in the stuff,” Zuckerberg says. “It turned out that we were actually the only two.”
If Zuckerberg was intimidated by attending a private school whose students included the very wealthy—it wasn’t unusual to be in a class with a Rockefeller, a Forbes, and a Firestone—he didn’t show it. He seemed to flower at Exeter. He joined the fencing team and proved an energetic competitor, captaining the squad and winning the MVP award. He joined the team that was sent to the Math Olympiad, and though he couldn’t compete at the top level, he won a secondary medal.
Outside of his own circles, he kept to himself. “I think he probably trusts very few people,” says Ross Miller, who was one of his best friends at Exeter. Classes were conducted in a seminar-style participatory fashion known as the Harkness method. The school describes the method as “. . . a way of life . . . It’s about collaboration and respect, where every voice carries equal weight, even if you don’t agree.” Classmates recall that Zuckerberg seldom contributed to the discussions. “He was quite shy and kept to himself, usually doing work and writing code in his room,” a classmate named Alex Demas later told an American Greek news website. His reputation, says Demas, was as a computer nerd. (Zuckerberg would nonetheless later comment that he admired the Harkness method: “It probably shaped my philosophy that people should be participants and not consumers.”)
Thanks to a charismatic teacher at Ardsley, he had already developed a passion for the classics, and ate up Exeter’s Latin program. In particular, he had a fanboy affinity with the emperor Caesar Augustus, whose legacy is a mixed one: a brilliant conqueror and empathetic ruler who also had an unseemly lust for power. The summer before his senior year, he attended a session of the Johns Hopkins program for “gifted youth” and chose a course in ancient Greek; the students worked their way through the grammar and finished by studying a speech of the Attic orator Lysias. One of his instructors, David Petrain, recalls Zuckerberg as “affable and game” and adept at memorizing forms. Zuckerberg once mentioned to Petrain that he’d started a website devoted to the love poet Catullus, but Petrain never saw it. (Petrain would later write a mildly positive recommendation for Zuckerberg’s common application to colleges.)
In his senior year, he was named a dorm leader, which meant he got a bigger room. He brought up a large dental monitor recycled from his dad’s office and used it as a display for Nintendo games. But his favorite game was a recent variation on Civilization, by the same creator, Sid Meier. It was a space scenario called Alpha Centauri, in which players chose one of seven different “human factions” to lead, in a complicated strategy to control the galaxy. Zuckerberg always took the role of the quasi-UN “Peacekeeping Forces.” In the intricate backstory supplied with the game, the spiritual leader of the peacekeepers was a commissioner named Pravin Lal, who opined that “the free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny.” Zuckerberg would later use a Lal quote as the signature on his Facebook profile:
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Every fourth-year Exeter student took a course in Virgil’s Aeneid, and later in life Zuckerberg would cite some key lines, using them to inspire his Facebook workforce. Recounting the plot to a reporter in 2010, he would note the resonance of Aeneas striving to build a city that “knows no boundaries in time and greatness.”
Somewhere in that kid’s head it all seemed to be simmering into a stew: Conquerors. Swashbuckling. Civilization. Risk. Coding. Empire-building. The recipe for Mark Zuckerberg.
ZUCKERBERG AND D’ANGELO weren’t, as he later joked, the only two computer junkies at Exeter: he was part of a small cohort whose passions also lured them into spending long hours at Exeter’s computer center, a recently constructed facility with state-of-the-art equipment. One was a math whiz named Tiankai Liu, who won gold in the Olympiad. Another was a fearless kid named Marty Gottesfeld, who years later would wind up in federal prison for hacking Boston Children’s Hospital (he says he did it to help a fifteen-year-old patient who was being mistreated). When among his computer buddies, Zuckerberg would prance like the king of the roost.
A recent Stanford computer-science grad named Todd Perry was a teaching fellow that year, and he’d taken on extra duties since one of the regular CS instructors left early in the fall semester. He recalls Zuckerberg strolling into the computer center one evening as if he owned the place, and announced that he was about to code a certain project using Microsoft’s Visual Basic. Perry felt that the task was overly complicated for someone at Zuckerberg’s level—it involved techniques that Perry hadn’t encountered until well into his Stanford studies—and bet a buck that Zuckerberg couldn’t do it. They agreed to give Zuckerberg an hour to try to pull it off. All the nerds surrounded Zuckerberg as he coded, as if it were a gladiatorial contest. Zuckerberg collected his dollar.
On another occasion, Zuckerberg had a math teacher who promised that if his students did homework with calculators or other digital shortcuts, he’d make them do push-ups. There was no way Zuckerberg was not going to use computers to do his work, he told his friends in the computer center. Zuckerberg didn’t even bother to mask his disdain for the teacher’s threat—he conspicuously wrote code to do the homework and executed the push-ups as if they were a victory lap.
Exeter students are required to create a senior project before graduation, and Zuckerberg was casting around for one, listening to tunes on his computer, when the playlist he had set up went silent after the final song played. There’s really no reason why my computer shouldn’t just know what I want to hear next, he told himself. He recruited D’Angelo to partner with him in creating what would be their senior project, a personalized virtual DJ they called Synapse.
Both were big fans of an online music player called WinAmp, and they decided Synapse (which was sometimes called Synapse-ai) would ape WinAmp’s functions while providing a personalized playlist. Though both Zuckerberg and D’Angelo were utter novices in artificial intelligence, they boasted about the AI in Synapse-ai, even calling the code that determined the playlist “the brain.” You could either use the discrete music player they ginned up or use a plug-in they provided to AOL’s WinAmp player, and Synapse would suggest songs to you based on what you had listened to before. D’Angelo, the more accomplished programmer, focused on building the brain, while Zuckerberg created the front end. “It would play songs for you based on what it knew you liked in a sequence that made sense, then we could compare different users’ logs and cross-recommend stuff,” Zuckerberg says. “It was cool.” The pair presented Synapse as their senior project, to kudos from their instructors, who were especially impressed with D’Angelo’s AI component.
But of all of the computer capers that occurred during Zuckerberg’s time at Exeter, the one that proved most relevant to his future exploits would be someone else’s project, with minimal participation from Zuckerberg.
It was called Facebook.
ITS CREATOR WAS a senior named Kris Tillery. Born in the Midwest, Tillery lived in West Africa and Nigeria; his parents wanted him to attend school in the United States, and so he boarded at Exeter. By his own admission, he was no computer adept, certainly nowhere as talented as D’Angelo and Zuckerberg, whose reputation was well-known throughout the academy. While Tillery was struggling with the AP course in computer science, he later recalled, he marveled at the duo who had programmed a music player with artificial intelligence!
Still, Tillery had a good vision of what the technology of the day could do. At one point he came up with a prescient idea for the turn of the century: an online grocery delivery system. The product required an automated means of getting the prices from the local store. “That was above my pay grade,” says Tillery, admitting he wasn’t a good enough programmer to pull that off. But he knew someone who was. “Zuckerberg built a script that would scrape prices off of the supermarket site so we could then do our grocery delivery setup,” he recalls. However, the grocery service never took off.
Tillery’s real legacy as an Exonian came from exporting a binder of student headshots and captions known as the Photo Address Book to the malleable and infinitely accessible digital realm. The project came about when Tillery was still a “lower”—a sophomore—who was trying to teach himself about databases. He used the student facebook in his explorations. The head of the student council lived across the hall and suggested he actually finish the project and distribute it. Tillery did so, but not without running afoul of the ever-intolerant Exeter IT Department. Using the school’s servers to distribute information was verboten. Yet the administration recognized the utility of what Tillery had done. They eventually gave him permission to continue.
Thus was the Exeter Facebook sanctioned, and Tillery released it to the school’s entire population, which included Mark Zuckerberg. It was devilishly useful: you could look up someone by name, of course, but users also had the ability to search other things. Phone numbers were included—every student had a landline in the dorm—and Exonians devised a game where the facebook would choose a random person, whom they would prank-call.
Tillery stopped his involvement with the facebook program after graduating from Exeter. His next stop was Harvard University. So he was present at the school in February 2004, when an online facebook suddenly appeared and swept through the school like a tornado. He wasn’t surprised to see that it was created by Mark Zuckerberg. Even in his limited contact with Zuckerberg at Exeter, Tillery noticed that the intense young man had “big, big ambition.” Nor was he bothered by what was arguably an appropriation of his idea. In his view, the online facebook was something he’d worked on in prep school, and he was done with it. More power to Mark.
Tillery, who now owns a vineyard in South Africa, has mixed feelings about first exposing Mark Zuckerberg to the concept of an online facebook. He is happy to have played a small part in a global phenomenon. But more recently he began to question whether that phenomenon has proved to be a good thing.
“Add up all the hours a day that all the people spend on it, and you’re looking at a big number that may not be contributing positively to society’s benefit or to our own personal health,” he says. “The moral ambiguity of the platform—which is today the revenue based on advertising and targeting—raises big questions about how we should spend our time for our own happiness.”
As for his own use, Kris Tillery deleted Facebook—the product he believes was inspired by his germ of an idea—somewhere around 2016. Zuckerberg’s Facebook was, he said, making him feel bad.