THOUGH ZUCKERBERG WAS still not quite a campus celebrity, the Crimson account of the Facemash episode drew the attention of three seniors who were planning their own online project. Late in 2002, Divya Narendra had approached two of his friends, twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, with an idea of a website that would deliver services, notably dating, to their classmates—and maybe beyond. They were calling it “The Harvard Connection.” (Later they changed the name to the more generic ConnectU.) For much of 2003, they had been brainstorming the site, but at a seemingly leisurely pace, due to their other activities, which in the Winklevosses’ case included training for the crew team (they were aspiring Olympians), attending the fancy Finals Club events, and of course their studies. Earlier in 2003, they’d hired a programmer to do the hard work of making their ideas tangible, but he bowed out with other commitments before finishing. The programmer suggested they contact the sophomore behind the Facemash caper to be the coder who could put their idea into production.
Narendra emailed Zuckerberg on November 3, and soon after he met with the ConnectU trio and agreed to do the work for them. At first he seemed enthusiastic. Over the next few weeks, though, much to the frustration of the Winklevoss twins and their partner, he would not meet his deadlines, instead offering a mix of excuses. On November 30, for instance, Zuckerberg told Cameron Winklevoss, “I forgot to bring my charger home with me for Thanksgiving so I haven’t had access to my laptop since the battery ran out Wednesday evening.” He promised that when he returned he’d do the work quickly.
On January 14, at a meeting at Kirkland H33, Zuckerberg finally told the ConnectU team that he was bowing out.
“It was clear to him what we wanted,” Cameron Winklevoss told the Stanford Daily later that year. “He stalled us for months while he worked on his own idea, which he launched in February as an original idea.”
Winklevoss had a legitimate gripe. As Zuckerberg said in an AIM conversation with a friend at the time:
Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I’m like delaying it so it won’t be ready until after the facebook thing comes out.
This message is one of a number of damning instant messages from that time unearthed by Business Insider in 2010. These are a minuscule slice of Zuckerberg’s output of messaging in that and other years, but bluntly address issues like dissembling and privacy that would forever haunt the adult who once wrote them. Zuckerberg would later chalk up this and other damaging instant messages in his Harvard days to immaturity, and said he regretted them. The messages, he’d argue, were out of context and did not reflect his true feelings. Later, in a text to me, he explained the impact of his being judged on casual teenage expressions that he felt gave a distorted view of his personality: “I got so frustrated that old instant messages and emails from when I was a kid kept getting surfaced out of context and making jokes or small off-handed comments seem like reflections on my core personality or values that I just decided to stop storing my older stuff.” In a later interview, he’d return to the subject: “Would you want every joke you made to someone being printed and taken out of context later?”
While the conflict between Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins would be later memorialized in depositions and cinema, a less celebrated competitor had already launched a program at Harvard that performed some of the social functions that the others were only planning.
Aaron Greenspan was a junior that year. Like Zuckerberg, Greenspan was a builder and budding founder who inveterately created and launched small digital products. Soon after arriving at Harvard, he’d chafed at the school’s implicit bias against start-ups, starting a Student Entrepreneurship Council. Greenspan had been working on his own tools to help classmates in the individual houses navigate their coursework, social life, and the general minutiae of campus life, such as textbook exchanges, or notifications that they had received packages. He linked those together in a program he called houseSYSTEM. He launched it in August 2003. One component was a student directory that he called the Universal Facebook.
To Greenspan’s frustration, though, he had not been able to get much traction. He was especially miffed that he could not convince anyone at the Crimson to tout his efforts. After no luck with repeated emails, he marched into the newspaper’s offices and managed to get someone to look at the site. Nothing came of it. In subsequent months, Greenspan seethed with envy when he read about Zuckerberg’s exploits with Synapse and Facemash in the school paper. Why did they pay him such attention?
Greenspan didn’t hold it against Zuckerberg personally, at least at the time. He had been trying to get Zuckerberg to join his student entrepreneur group. Zuckerberg professed interest but never got around to attending a meeting.
In January, their communication picked up. Zuckerberg said he was working on another project, but was “trying to keep the project on the DL” (an abbreviation for “the down-low,” indicating stealth). Greenspan wondered if Zuckerberg might make his project part of houseSYSTEM, but Zuckerberg demurred, claiming that the intricacy of Greenspan’s system would be a challenge for him. As with the Winklevosses, he kept his cards so close to his chest that the clubs and spades could have left imprints. “The general problem I have with these things is I don’t usually have a long attention span for lots of coding,” Zuckerberg messaged Greenspan, making a claim that his roommates would surely dispute. “I like coming up with ideas and implementing them quickly.”
They met for dinner on January 8 at Kirkland House. Zuckerberg was with his suitemate Dustin Moskovitz and a young woman who seemed to have just randomly accompanied them. Zuckerberg struck Greenspan as very confident and incredibly laid-back. In the middle of the New England winter, he crossed the quad wearing shorts, as if he’d just stepped out of the shower. Because in his IMs Zuckerberg had been cagey about what he had been building, Greenspan relished the chance to ask him directly. Something, Zuckerberg said, about graph theory.
Is he building a Friendster for Harvard? Greenspan wondered. Zuckerberg’s vagueness bothered him. But he had already made up his mind about this brash sophomore. “I didn’t trust him from the moment I met him,” says Greenspan now.
Greenspan felt his suspicions justified when he examined the houseSYSTEM logs from early January. Zuckerberg had left the equivalent of bread crumbs in the trail as he accessed Greenspan’s website, apparently looking for ideas of his own. The logs allowed Greenspan to follow those crumbs and track Zuckerberg’s activities, much as Zuckerberg’s Facebook would later shadow users—and even nonusers—as they navigated their way around the World Wide Web.
But Zuckerberg wasn’t hiding the fact that he was building something that might compete with Greenspan in some respects, and during the process he was messaging Greenspan to ask him how he’d done certain things with houseSYSTEM. Greenspan tacitly agreed with this dynamic, keeping his reservations about Zuckerberg to himself. That stance would change much later, when Greenspan would become the subject of a New York Times article claiming that Zuckerberg had plundered him as well as the Winklevosses in creating Facebook.
In truth, the idea was out there for the taking. Social media was exploding—Friendster was a phenomenon and millions of people were piling onto MySpace. And the concept of putting a school’s facebook online was not quite on a par with the theory of relativity; even Kris Tillery’s project at Exeter was seen by its creator simply as an obvious step in an era of digitalization.
With all that time coding, Zuckerberg’s class attendance clearly suffered. He was often a no-show at the notoriously tough Operating Systems course. So much so that in January 2004, his instructor, Matt Welsh, called in the wandering student for a chat. Welsh had seen by then that Zuckerberg had no problem handling the course material without attending lectures. But he pointed out to the sophomore that in-class participation was part of the grade for CS 161. Didn’t he want an A? Didn’t every Harvard student want all A’s?
Zuckerberg told Welsh his complicated situation, recounting his ad-board ordeal over Facemash, and explained how most of his time was being spent on writing an online facebook with social-networking aspects. Welsh was not impressed. You think you’re going to compete against Friendster and Orkut? he asked the nineteen-year-old. (Orkut was a brand-new social network released by the search giant Google.) As Welsh later recounted in a blog post, Zuckerberg was “unfazed.”
“It wasn’t that Mark was a bad student,” says his friend Andrew McCollum. “At that point Harvard had less to offer him because he basically had his path laid out; it was less and less about what happened in the classroom and more and more about these other things.”
ON JANUARY 11, while he was still staving off increasingly peevish queries from the ConnectU team, and giving vague descriptions to Greenspan, Zuckerberg registered the website thefacebook.com. Facebook.com was already taken.
It’s not clear how much work Zuckerberg had done on the project by then. During the winter break, in the early part of January 2004, he visited some friends in the Bay Area and was blown away by visiting the home of the big tech companies. But it is indisputable that, later that January, Zuckerberg spent one or two weeks—his own accounts vary—coding what would be known as thefacebook.com. Certainly the project was his priority that month.
He viewed this new site as the culmination of all the projects he’d been working on previously. The common thread of all those projects, Zuckerberg would later explain, was his belief that with the Internet we now had the means to more efficiently share information, but people weren’t building the tools to make that happen. Building such tools would help push the world to that efficient place. “That’s a really good thing,” he says. “So I built these little ones like Course Match and Rome of Augustus. Facebook was kind of like the master one, because it was, like, everything about the people that you cared about.”
He drew lessons from each of his previous projects. From Course Match: the ability to know the sections where your friends were enrolled. Facemash: people really wanted to see stuff about their friends. Rome of Augustus: people would gladly provide you content for free. (He would avoid the pitfalls of Facemash—and another ad-board investigation—by using only content that people voluntarily provided to the site.) In addition, he almost certainly had in mind D’Angelo’s work on Buddy Zoo and how crosshatching friend lists could lead to an entire network of connections.
In that vein, Zuckerberg did one more tiny project before launching Thefacebook. One of the features he planned would allow users to include on their profiles any mentions of them in the Crimson, so others could match those localized news articles to real people. When he scraped the archives of the Harvard Crimson in preparation for this, he found he could construct a Buddy Zoo–esque graph to find out how many jumps it took to connect people on his grand network. It turned out that one person who appeared a lot in the Crimson was a Harvard dean and computer-science professor named Harry Lewis. As a lark, Zuckerberg decided to release an application called Six Degrees to Harry Lewis, where people could find out, through stories where multiple people were mentioned, how many leaps it took to connect them to Lewis. In a rare moment of caution, he emailed Lewis to ask if the dean was cool with the idea.
Lewis had no problem with the idea, but, as he later told the Atlantic’s Alex Madrigal, he gave the young coder a caveat. “It’s all public information,” he wrote of the data Zuckerberg was gathering. “But there is somehow a point at which public information begins to feel like an invasion of privacy.”
Zuckerberg’s previous projects used minimal interface elements; basically he tossed text on the screen and had people click links to get to other pages or perform functions. But he felt this one was important enough to require some actual graphic design. McCollum had created some nice-looking pages, so Zuckerberg IMed him, saying he had created a prototype of Thefacebook and basically ordering McCollum to do the page design and the logo. McCollum objected that he was no expert in design, just a computer scientist who’d done some experiments with pirated copies of Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. But Zuckerberg insisted, instructing him to build a page header with something like a silhouette of a person that fades into ones and zeros. (Even then, this was a tired and familiar trope to illustrate anything that deals with computers.)
McCollum wound up creating a logo with a “vector art” head shot of a young man he found online, where the edges of the picture decomposed into a digital flurry. It seemed to be based on a photo of the actor Al Pacino. Only years later did someone point out to McCollum that the original photo of what became known to millions as “Thefacebook Guy” was a picture of Peter Wolf, former lead singer of the Boston-based J. Geils Band.
Still, the site was not particularly visually arresting. And compared to its later incarnations Thefacebook was utterly primitive. It greeted visitors with the site name and the Peter Wolf graphic at the top of the page, with a block of text explaining what the site was about.
[Welcome to Thefacebook]
Thefacebook is an online directory that connects people to social networks at colleges.
We have opened up Thefacebook for popular consumption at Harvard University.
You can use Thefacebook to
Search for people at your school
Find out who are in your classes
Look up your friends’ friends
See a visualization of your social network
To get started, click below to register. If you have already registered, you can log in.
At the bottom of the page—and every page of the site—Thefacebook creator made sure everyone knew who was responsible, with a line that read:
a Mark Zuckerberg production
Thefacebook © 2004
Upon signing up, you could connect with (or “friend”—the noun would quickly become a verb) classmates who were signed up—or invite ones who hadn’t yet joined.
Privacy was perhaps the defining characteristic of this new website. By limiting enrollment to those who had emails on the Harvard.edu domain, he made a safe space for students to share information they volunteered about themselves. By verifying emails, he ensured that people would be interacting on the site with their real identities, a built-in safeguard against misbehavior.
Furthermore, you could restrict what you shared to certain people. By providing those protections, Thefacebook offered more privacy than any of the other social networks of its time.
The Winklevosses would later claim that using an Internet domain to ensure privacy within a community was their original, top secret idea that they shared with Zuckerberg. But that wasn’t an original concept; in fact, Aaron Greenspan’s houseSYSTEM, which the ConnectU team was familiar with, used the Harvard.edu domain to verify users.
Despite his apparent insouciance during the ad-board investigation of Facemash, Zuckerberg had clearly taken a lesson from the ordeal. “Facemash was probably one of the best things that could’ve happened to Mark and the future of Facebook because it made him extremely aware of the importance of people controlling their own data,” says his classmate Meagan Marks. “When he created Thefacebook.com it was fully opt-in. He didn’t scrape any data systems. You had to sign yourself up, and within a month they had more than half the student body using it. So there was no need to scrape the data.”
The users would provide the data. Thefacebook started with no content whatsoever: just the scaffolding that allowed people to bring their own. They would do this by creating profiles of themselves. They were allotted much more space than a two-line description in a physical directory. Thefacebook urged students to upload a picture of themselves—something they chose, not the stiff-smiled portrait of their graduation photographer—and a host of other information, generally geared toward socializing and (one could dream) hooking up. You could put in your relationship status, and what you’re “looking for.” There was space for personal data like phone numbers or AIM handles, as well as your interests, political preferences and favorite books, the courses you were taking, and a “favorite quote.” Though you could not have a conversation via the system, Zuckerberg did concoct a means to send a direct signal to someone—designating another user to be a recipient of a digital “poke.” Exactly what that meant would be totally up to the poker and pokee, though it seemed to carry a sexual frisson. (Years later I would ask Zuckerberg if he was aware that in Larry McMurtry’s celebrated book Lonesome Dove, characters consistently used the term “poke” as a gentle stand-in for the fornication word. It was news to him.)
But it wasn’t only the profiles that provided valuable data for Thefacebook. As with Friendster, the site allowed you to “friend” other people to signal that they were in your network. But unlike Friendster, Thefacebook allowed others to browse each other’s networks. “A lot of people sort of just wanted to see who other people knew,” Zuckerberg would later say. “There was nothing like that that existed.”
On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg officially opened Thefacebook, and began sending emails to his friends, urging them to try it out. It was the time of year when students were shopping for courses for the new semester, and Thefacebook provided an instant utility. The feature also gave early adopters something to do when the network was sparse for them because their friends hadn’t yet signed up. That sparseness didn’t last long. Within minutes after Zuckerberg posted its availability, people began signing up.
The night he launched his site, Zuckerberg went for pizza with friends at a place called Pinocchio’s, which they called Noch’s. He’d often go there with his friend Kang-Xing Jin, also known as KX, who was his frequent partner in problem sets for the CS courses they were enrolled in. They would usually wind up speculating about what kind of earth-shattering changes technology would bring. On the evening of February 4, after watching the rapid adoption of Thefacebook, Zuckerberg and KX concluded that someone was going to connect the whole world someday. Not that they thought the glue for the human race would be the program just launched on Zuckerberg’s laptop. It would probably come from Microsoft or some other giant company, they figured.
One Harvard student who knew Zuckerberg only slightly was a junior named Sam Lessin. Also living in Kirkland House, Lessin was among the cadre of Harvard students who had fiddled around with building digital services; the summer before, he had launched what he describes as “a Harvard-only eBay,” called Crimson Exchange. It hadn’t ended in glory.
Lessin believed Thefacebook was something extraordinary. Zuckerberg had somehow managed to bottle the lightning of social networking, a subject that Lessin had been obsessed with. Lessin’s father was an East Coast tech investor who had funded sixdegrees, and Lessin had idolized Andrew Weinreich. He had watched that company’s demise with sorrow and now was following the rise of Friendster, which he felt was a good product but flawed. The problem was a lack of trustworthiness, because users were not reliably identified by their true names. Now this kid from his own house had created a website that provided the security that comes with knowing whom you’re dealing with, and the privacy that comes from being bounded within your community.
He immediately arranged to sit with Zuckerberg at lunch. This could be huge! Lessin told a poker-faced Zuckerberg. This could be worth . . . a hundred million dollars! It was the biggest number Lessin could think of.
What did Zuckerberg say? “He was nonchalant,” Lessin later recalls. What seemed more exciting to Zuckerberg was how he could do more interesting things with Thefacebook. Not so much the money.
Still, Zuckerberg had been thinking that Thefacebook had more business potential than the other projects he’d worked on. Even before the launch he had begun talking of starting a company based on Thefacebook, and having some friends invest. He had learned from Facemash that you couldn’t run a campus-wide system off a laptop and he needed some money to rent server space. Zuckerberg had first asked Joe Green, but Green, who was more into politics than computers anyway, heeded his dad’s instructions to steer clear of Mark Zuckerberg’s project.
Zuckerberg did manage to interest a fraternity friend named Eduardo Saverin. Saverin was a Brazilian scion to a wealthy Jewish family that left the country for Miami when Eduardo was in high school. He was involved in the Harvard Investment Club. “None of us really knew anything about business, and Eduardo was sort of the guy who seems to know about business,” says Green.
Saverin kicked in $1,000, a sum matched by Zuckerberg. He would later kick in $15,000 to a joint bank account. The pair agreed to split ownership of Thefacebook. Zuckerberg would get two-thirds of the new company. Saverin, as the guy who seemed to know about business, would get the other third. “We were starting a company,” Zuckerberg later explained in a deposition, when all of this became a legal matter. “It seemed like we should talk about that.”
The money helped Zuckerberg rent server space. It cost $85 a month.
Over the next few days, Thefacebook began a relentless takeover of the Harvard student body. As more Harvard students signed up, the chances increased that they would find profiles of their friends, of people they might like to have as friends. In the early 1980s, computer scientist Bob Metcalfe wrote about the network effect, postulating that the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of people joining (this became known as Metcalfe’s law). Hour by hour, the impetus for students to sign up began to flip from engaging in a diverting pastime to an absolute necessity, as not being on Thefacebook made you a virtual exile on the physical campus.
Later, sociologists and start-up gurus would endlessly analyze what happened at Harvard in February 2004, painstakingly deconstructing the forensics of the lightning that Zuckerberg had bottled. “In the Ivy League, where very few incoming freshmen know more than one or two people, the [physical] facebook is really a key piece of infrastructure,” says danah boyd, who was a sociologist in her early twenties at the time, and one of the first to understand that a new era in social science was being born right on her computer screen. “Zuckerberg made it interactive. It had a slight social stalking element too. It was addictive. And the fact that you could see only people on your network was crucial—it let you be in public but only in the gaze of eyes you want to be public to.”
A few days after launch, the Crimson—whose staff was beginning to regard Kirkland Suite H33 as Harvard’s own Silicon Valley—weighed in on this phenomenon. “Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website,” read the headline (Hundreds!), with a deck that noted that the creator of the scandalous Facemash was making a dramatic bid to restore his reputation. Zuckerberg came off as rather cocky in the story, casting Thefacebook mainly as a response to Harvard’s slow-walk toward its own online facebook. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it,” he said, vocalizing the first notes of a leitmotif that he would return to regularly over the next few years: this new technologic era belongs to the young. “I can do it better than they can and I can do it in a week,” he boasted.
But he also took pains to note that this new project reflected how seriously he accepted the paper’s recent admonition to him that students were concerned about privacy. He outlined the various ways that users could limit who saw their information. And he promised that his website would respect its users’ privacy in the future. “I’m not going to sell anybody’s e-mail address,” he told the Crimson.
Zuckerberg’s takeover of virtual Harvard compared favorably with the overwhelming use of force exercised by his classical heroes like Augustus, Alexander the Great, or one of the online avatars he adopted in the game Civilization. Like those ambitious warriors, he was already looking at future conquests. Instead of refining Thefacebook in the laboratory of Harvard and deliberately rolling it out to other campuses, Zuckerberg began plotting right away to colonize the nation’s colleges with Thefacebook. Some of these institutions had existing online directories that would have to be overthrown. In order to do this, he needed a team to perform the chores of setting up databases for individual schools and promoting the site before the snowball of adoption would tumble down the hillside. The roles fell to those who would become Facebook’s co-founders. All of them would, of course, be secondary to the single ur-founder, the one whose name appeared on every page. A Mark Zuckerberg production.
Dustin Moskovitz was to be Zuckerberg’s key technical lieutenant. Born eight days after Zuckerberg, Moskovitz was an economics major from Gainesville, Florida. During the school year, he had kibitzed over Zuckerberg’s shoulder as his roommate concocted various projects—he thought that Facemash was a stupid prank—and he became an avid participant in late-night bull sessions about how the Internet would change the world. When Facebook launched, Zuckerberg asked Moskovitz for some help to administer the site. “I didn’t really pitch him,” Moskovitz later told a journalist. “It was more like he was working on this thing and I was sitting next to him, and he would say, ‘Hey, can you help me with this?’” But seeing Thefacebook adopted so quickly on campus, Moskovitz wanted a larger role, which would mean he’d have to actually do some coding. He undertook a crash course in programming, buying the PERL for Dummies book and staying up all hours to teach himself. He was unfazed when Zuckerberg informed him that the site was built not in PERL but modern languages PHP and C++. No big deal—Moskovitz would learn those too. He had an unbelievable propensity for work; eventually people would refer to him as the Ox—a nickname that gave short shrift to his intelligence and organizational skills. He quickly figured out how to mimic Zuckerberg’s work, and became a master at executing the tasks required to move Thefacebook into new campuses.
Zuckerberg’s roommate, Chris Hughes, immediately saw that this project wasn’t a lark or a prank like Facemash. Hughes had been a big fan of Friendster but realized that a private network, limited to the digital boundary of the Harvard domain, would address the privacy concerns that Friendster raised. To Hughes, Thefacebook was the first Zuckerberg project that made him want to get involved. Though Hughes was not technically inclined, Zuckerberg asked him to take on public-facing tasks he’d rather not endure himself.
Andrew McCollum, who’d done the graphics for the page, had grown up in Idaho loving the computer, and was one of the few people at Harvard actually majoring in CS. He had been instantly impressed with Zuckerberg’s intensity and his determination to do whatever it took to complete the products he dreamed up.
The co-founder with the second-largest stake, behind Zuckerberg’s, was Eduardo Saverin, whose money represented skin in the game. He was charged with doing businessy things while the team planned its assaults on other campuses.
While that made five co-founders, there was no question who was alpha. Zuckerberg’s self-description on the site was “Founder, Master and Commander, Enemy of the State.” He was beginning to see Thefacebook as different from all his previous projects. For the first time, one of his experiments had the potential to grow into something worth all his time and attention.
Now to take over other campuses. Zuckerberg approached the task as if American colleges were nations in a giant game of Risk. Indeed, the field was not wide open—some of the schools already had some sort of facebook equivalent—and as with Risk, he would have to outsmart them.
The first was Columbia University. On the surface, that might not have seemed like the most propitious takeover site. A competitor had existed there: in mid-2003. But game master Zuckerberg was making a counterintuitive move. Instead of moving first to the schools where Thefacebook had the highest chance of working, he attacked the schools where he thought he had the lowest chance of success. Meaning those schools where students had other choices.
“That was a critical difference in Mark’s personality,” says McCollum. “The other people who had created these things were really happy that they were successful at the school they kind of focused on, maintaining and improving the feature set and just sort of continuing to offer a great social network. Mark wanted to see how Facebook could compete with an entrenched popular social network.”
Zuckerberg had an important decision to make as he extended Thefacebook beyond Harvard: would the newcomers to the system be regarded as part of a single contiguous network, or would they be regarded as a discrete unit? Specifically, could you cruise the profiles of students from another school as you would on your home campus? He later explained the trade-off: “Would it be better for people to be able to see everyone and maybe not feel like this was a secure environment in which they can share their interests and what they thought and what they cared about? Or would it be better that more information and more expression was available, but to a smaller audience, which is probably the relevant audience for any person?” After a lot of thought, Zuckerberg decided that he would limit profile-surfing to one’s own school. People would be more likely to share things like their cell-phone numbers if they knew that only others in their community could see it.
Privacy would rule. Or, as Zuckerberg later put it, “If people feel like their information isn’t private, then that screws us in the long-term too.”
They began to invent what would become the template for infiltrating and dominating a new campus. First, they set up a separate database. Got the Internet domain. Secured the server space. Scanned the course catalogs. Contacted the college newspaper. And finally, went live, emailing key people—friends or siblings in their own social networks, or people who had been asking when Thefacebook might come to their campus. They went live at Columbia on February 26.
One advantage that Thefacebook had over the incumbent at Columbia: privacy. Though CC Community allowed students to post more photos, and write blog posts, its contents were exposed to the general public.
One would have thought that Zuckerberg might have spent the evening of the launch monitoring Thefacebook’s progress in its first extension outside Cambridge. But a special opportunity arose: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was on campus for a talk at the Lowell Lecture House. Gates had famously dropped out of Harvard after starting his business, a career path that he did not recommend in his lecture. Instead, he urged CS majors in the audience to graduate, and then apply for Microsoft jobs.
Gates shared what Zuckerberg would later cite as a valuable piece of information—Harvard allows students to take indefinite leaves to temporarily pursue other ventures. “If Microsoft fails, I’m going back to Harvard!” joked the billionaire. Zuckerberg would later say that had he not heard about this safety net at the lecture, he probably would not have dropped out of Harvard to work on Facebook. (But this may have been a case where his family knew him best: before he began his college adventure, his mother bet him that he would drop out; he insisted he’d get the degree. He’d later joke that he agreed to do his commencement speech in order to collect the honorary degree that would win the wager.)
In the next few days, Thefacebook launched at Stanford and Yale. The pattern was set. Over the next few months, the team would expand Thefacebook to more than one hundred campuses.
Barely six weeks after Thefacebook launched, the Crimson was back again, this time with a prescient think piece about how social scientists might come to view Thefacebook. Zuckerberg described himself as “just a dumb programmer” and let Hughes do the philosophizing. “It’s a tool to help people improve social relations by networking with people you only know tangentially,” he told the Crimson. Zuckerberg, despite his self-deprecating description, chimed in an objection when the reporter asked him about the resemblance to Friendster, which he dismissed as a dating site. “The type of information on the site is fundamentally different,” he said. “People aren’t as biased in how they represent themselves.” The article concluded with kudos: “Amateur anthropologists like Zuckerberg and Hughes are changing daily lives,” it read, “one poke at a time.”
WHEN ZUCKERBERG HAD launched Thefacebook on February 4, the ConnectU team felt blindsided. While this guy was giving them excuses for not finishing their Harvard social-media product, he was working on his own! They set about finding another programmer, all while suffering the dread realization that they might have missed their window. Indeed, for weeks after Thefacebook appeared they had watched in horror as it not only captivated Harvard but began to colonize the rest of the Ivy League, as well as other top universities around the country. The ConnectU trio even took their grievance to Harvard’s president, Larry Summers, who was clearly not thrilled that yet more budding entrepreneurs with a dream of connecting Harvard students had found their way into his office. He told them that the university had no business refereeing business disputes among students. (Summers would later call the Winklevosses “assholes” and mock them for wearing business suits to the meeting.)
If the ConnectU team had known what Zuckerberg was boasting to his friends, they might have gone into cardiac arrest. In one of those embarrassing AIM exchanges, he confirmed the obvious conclusion: Zuckerberg was intentionally stalling the Winklevoss team while he prepared his own product.
“yea, I’m going to fuck them,” he wrote, “probably in the year.”
Then he corrected himself.
“Ear.”
Fifteen years later, I tell Zuckerberg that it seems pretty clear he dragged his feet on fulfilling his arrangement with ConnectU.
“I’m not sure,” he says. “I think I might have been conflict-avoidant. But it was . . . I don’t know, I think I was pretty clear.”
HE WAS MORE politic (and less candid) in a letter to a Harvard dean who had asked him to write a timeline of events of the dispute. In Zuckerberg’s account, while he originally agreed to help out the ConnectU team, they kept adding on new tasks. Eventually, Zuckerberg explained, he became disenchanted with Narendra and the Winklevoss brothers, concluding that their project committed the unforgivable sin of being boring and clueless. What’s more, they wanted him—were ordering him like he was some sort of backroom techie—to fix the site by the “busy work” of improving the code. Zuckerberg made it clear that such work was beneath him. During the course of that conversation, he claimed, he became appalled at the ignorance and lack of imagination of the ConnectU team. “It became apparent [they] were not as clued-in or business-savvy as they led me to believe. It almost seemed that my most socially inept friends at the school had a better idea what would attract people to a website than these guys.” In the letter, Zuckerberg complained that defending himself from their charges was impinging on his classwork. “The university should be upset with them for affecting my academics by forcing me to deal with ridiculous threats.”
For all of his bluster, Zuckerberg had a point. The ConnectU team had drawn its plans in the belief that success in the Internet world came from thinking up a good idea and moving it online, taking advantage of digital’s superpowers. That had been the theory in the first wave of Internet start-ups, a movement that had crashed ignominiously when the inflated values of companies like Pets.com exhaled like punctured balloons. But the next wave of successes were start-ups whose founders were technically minded. They often referred to themselves as hackers. Their ideas were only starting points for a product that they would rush to release and then iterate to excellence. By the mid-2000s, the way to glory did not involve hiring people like Mark Zuckerberg as cheap labor to code up the concept you brainstormed with pals at your finals club—it was driven by the Zuckerbergs themselves.
In May, fed up with Harvard’s failure to sanction Zuckerberg on grounds of insufficient honor, Cameron Winklevoss decided to go public with Zuckerberg’s perfidy. Naturally, the chosen forum was the Crimson. Winklevoss sent a blind tip to the paper, which, not wanting to miss a single iteration in the Zuckerberg saga, assigned the story to a reporter named Tim McGinn, who interviewed the ConnectU principals. McGinn then asked Zuckerberg to come to the Crimson office for comment.
Zuckerberg came with computer in hand, ready to prove to McGinn and his editor, Elisabeth Theodore, that Thefacebook was an original product that owed nothing to the ConnectU idea. But first he took the odd step—for a college student who was still professing that his project was not a business—of asking the two student journalists to sign a nondisclosure agreement. (Foreshadowing, it turns out, the NDA that the thousands of visitors to Facebook HQ must sign before they are permitted to cross the threshold into its offices.) They refused to do so, but Zuckerberg proceeded anyway. He convinced them his website was in no way a clone of whatever the Winklevosses had in mind. Anyway, he admitted, “Thefacebook isn’t even a very novel idea. It’s taken from all these other [social networks].”
Zuckerberg was anxious, almost panicky, about the upcoming article. In an IM exchange to Greenspan, he complained about the Winklevosses. “They blame me for stealing stuff because I helped them for like a month.” He was desperate to see what the Crimson was up to. (The irony here is that the whole time, Greenspan was thinking, He stole from me too! But Greenspan did not file a complaint. “I just didn’t see the logic in making a huge deal out of something that was a student project,” he says. “For all I knew, it was going to disappear in a week.” Besides, at the time, Greenspan considered Zuckerberg a friend.)
Zuckerberg asked Greenspan if he knew how to get on “News Talk,” which was a closed mailing list for Crimson staffers that discussed upcoming stories and other editorial matters. Greenspan said he couldn’t help.
“Oh well,” Zuckerberg typed. Then he speculated what life would be like post-Harvard, when such annoyances would be behind him.
there are no school newspapers and ad boards after you graduate.only the new york times and the federal courts haha.
In retrospect, Zuckerberg should have dropped the mic after making that remark, which would stand up well to Nostradamus. Instead, he tried to read the emails of the Crimson writer and editor.
Business Insider would later show, via Zuckerberg’s IMs, how he used the users’ private accounts on Thefacebook to do it. First he searched for users who identified themselves as Crimson staffers. Then he dove into that subset of accounts, using the site logs to see instances where someone had mistakenly entered a wrong password. He was looking specifically for a case where one of them used their email password to log into Thefacebook. Whether or not that was the scheme, he managed to access the email of at least one Crimson reporter. In one email that Zuckerberg obtained, Theodore discussed his visit, describing his demeanor as “sleazy.” But after she viewed his demonstration of how the two sites differed, she concluded that his behavior with the ConnectU people didn’t mean he stole their work.
For all of that trouble, the article itself was a fairly straightforward recitation of the charges and countercharges, concluding that, in any case, both of the sites looked like copies of Friendster. Zuckerberg wrote to the Crimson complaining that they should have more forcefully exonerated him, but soon dropped the matter. He had more important things to do.
That September, the ConnectU team would begin a long legal process that would eventually yield them a $65 million settlement. That would seem to be an excellent return, considering that they had no formal deal with Zuckerberg—a judge described the arrangement as “dorm chit-chat.” In any case, Zuckerberg’s prevarications delayed them only two months in producing a site they had been dithering on for more than a year. Nonetheless, Narendra and the Winklevoss twins later complained about how the payout was calculated, joining what would be a surprisingly large population of unhappy people who got enormously rich through Mark Zuckerberg. (houseSYSTEM’s Greenspan, too, would eventually win a multimillion-dollar settlement involving the copyright status of the word “facebook,” and would also harbor a contempt of Zuckerberg akin to Ahab’s for the White Whale.)
But in June 2004, all of that was far in the future. Zuckerberg had big plans for the upcoming summer.
Thefacebook was going west.
THE IDEA CAME about in casual discussion. For several years, because of a family connection to Electronic Arts executive Bing Gordon, Andrew McCollum had been interning for the game company and was intending to return to Silicon Valley. Adam D’Angelo had a Google internship for the break, and was also planning to be in the Bay Area. Since Thefacebook couldn’t operate from Suite H33 during the summer, and things seemed headed toward the Valley anyway, Zuckerberg figured maybe the team should get a house in California and keep working. It seemed a much better alternative than finding a summer job. “This was a cool place to spend the summer, my friends were there, and this is Silicon Valley,” he later explained.
He went to Craigslist and saw an ad for a furnished house in the Barron Park section of Palo Alto, a leafy area a few miles from downtown. It had a pool. The names on the lease were Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and McCollum. Before leaving town, he recruited two talented freshman engineers as “interns” for the company, even though they would pretty much be doing the same coding work as everyone else.
The idea of having interns was as close as his venture came to the practices of an actual company. “We didn’t really think of Facebook as a start-up,” says McCollum. “2004 was close to the depths of the start-up recession after the dot-com bubble burst. And so, it just wasn’t really in the cultural zeitgeist, certainly not at Harvard. It was cool to see that it was successful, but it was still just this little college social network.”
Before embarking on his big adventure, Zuckerberg took time to be interviewed in yet another Crimson article, this one a profile of “the whiz behind thefacebook.com.” A reporter visited the Kirkland common room, finding clothes on the floor and half-packed boxes. Zuckerberg seemed to be either bored or impatient; everything that came out of his mouth seemed a variation of “whatever.” Between the lines, you can sense a frustrated reporter enduring painful pauses between questions and barely communicative answers.
Zuckerberg resisted the Crimson correspondent’s insinuations that he might be sitting on a gold mine. “Having [thefacebook] be wildly successful is cool, I guess,” he said. “But I mean, I dunno, [money is] not the goal.”
Would he ever sell the company?
“Maybe . . . if I get bored. But not anytime soon. At least not for seven or eight days.”
Zuckerberg’s business partner, Eduardo Saverin, is not mentioned in the story.
“My goal is to not have a job,” Zuckerberg said. “Making cool things is just something I love doing, and not having someone tell me what to do or a timeframe in which to do it is the luxury I am looking for in my life.”
When the reporter asked how this luxury would be paid for, Zuckerberg tossed off a verbal shrug. “I assume eventually I’ll make something that is profitable,” he said. “I mean, like, anyone from Harvard can get a job and make a bunch of money. Not everyone at Harvard can have a social network.”