The Beginning

Sophomore Mark Zuckerberg arrived at his dorm room in Harvard's
Kirkland House in September 2003 dragging an eight-foot-long whiteboard,
the geek's consummate brainstorming tool. It was big and unwieldy,
like some of the ideas he would diagram there. There was only
one wall of the four-person suite long enough to hold it—the one in the
hallway on the way to the bedrooms. Zuckerberg, a computer science
major, began scribbling away.
The wall became a tangle of formulas and symbols sprouting multicolored
lines that wove this way and that. Zuckerberg would stand in
the hall staring at it all, marker in hand, squeezing against the wall if
someone needed to get by. Sometimes he would back into a bedroom
doorway to get a better look. "He really loved that whiteboard," recalls
Dustin Moskovitz, one of Zuckerberg's three suite-mates. "He always
wanted to draw out his ideas, even when that didn't necessarily make
them clearer." Lots of his ideas were for new services on the Internet.
He spent endless hours writing software code, regardless of how much
noncomputing classwork he might have. Sleep was never a priority. If
he wasn't at the whiteboard he was hunched over the PC at his desk in
the common room, hypnotized by the screen. Beside it was a jumble of
bottles and wadded-up food wrappers he hadn't bothered to toss.
Right away that first week, Zuckerberg cobbled together Internet
software he called Course Match, an innocent enough project. He did
it just for fun. The idea was to help students pick classes based on who
else was taking them. You could click on a course to see who was signed
up, or click on a person to see the courses he or she was taking. If a
cute girl sat next to you in Topology, you could look up next semester's
Differential Geometry course to see if she had enrolled in that as well,
or you could just look under her name for the courses she had enrolled
in. As Zuckerberg said later, with a bit of pride at his own prescience,
"you could link to people through things." Hundreds of students immediately
began using Course Match. The status-conscious students of
Harvard felt very differently about a class depending on who was in it.
Zuckerberg had written a program they wanted to use.
Mark Zuckerberg was a short, slender, intense introvert with curly brown
hair whose fresh freckled face made him look closer to fifteen than the
nineteen he was. His uniform was baggy jeans, rubber sandals—even
in winter—and a T-shirt that usually had some sort of clever picture or
phrase. One he was partial to during this period portrayed a little monkey
and read "Code Monkey." He could be quiet around strangers, but
that was deceiving. When he did speak, he was wry. His tendency was to
say nothing until others fully had their say. He stared. He would stare at
you while you were talking, and stay absolutely silent. If you said something
stimulating, he'd finally fire up his own ideas and the words would
come cascading out. But if you went on too long or said something
obvious, he would start looking through you. When you finished, he'd
quietly mutter "yeah," then change the subject or turn away. Zuckerberg
is a highly deliberate thinker and rational to the extreme. His handwriting
is well ordered, meticulous, and tiny, and he sometimes uses it to fill
notebooks with lengthy deliberations.
Girls were drawn to his mischievous smile. He was seldom without
a girlfriend. They liked his confidence, his humor, and his irreverence.
He typically wore a contented expression on his face that seemed to say
"I know what Fm doing." Zuck, as he was known, had an air about him
that everything would turn out fine, no matter what he did. It certainly
had so far.
On his application for admission to Harvard two years earlier, he
could barely fit all the honors and awards he'd won in high school —
prizes in math, astronomy, physics, and classical languages. It also
noted he was captain and most valuable player on the fencing team and
could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. (His
accent was awful, so he preferred ancient languages he didn't have to
speak, he told people with typical dry humor.) Harvard's rarefied social
status was neither intimidating nor unfamiliar. He'd attended the elite
Phillips Exeter Academy, where you are expected to proceed to the Ivy
League. He'd transferred there as a kind of lark. He'd gotten bored after
two years at a public high school in Dobbs Ferry, New York, north of
New York City.
Zuckerberg is the second-oldest of four children of a dentist father
and a psychologist motherland the only boy. The family home, though
the largest in the neighborhood, remains modest. Its dental office in
the basement is dominated by a giant aquarium. The elder Zuckerberg,
something of a ham, is known as "painless Dr Z." His website
announces "We cater to cowards," and a sign outside the home office
shows a satirical scene of a wary dental patient. Mark's sisters, like him,
are academic stars. (His older sister Randi is now a senior marketer at
Facebook.) From his early years Zuckerberg had a technical bent: the
theme of his bar mitzvah was "Star Wars."
The suite was one of the smallest in Kirkland House. Each of the two
bedrooms came with bunk beds and a small desk. Zuckerberg's roommate
was Chris Hughes, a handsome, tow-headed, openly gay literature
and history major with an interest in public policy. They dismantled
the bunks—it was fairer, they decided, if nobody had to sleep on top.
But now the two single beds took up almost all the space. There was
hardly room to move. The desk was useless anyway—it was piled high
with junk. In the other bedroom was Moskovitz, a hardworking, Brillohaired
economics major who was himself no intellectual slouch, and
his roommate, Billy Olson, an amateur thespian with an impish streak.
Each boy had a desk in the common room. In between were a
couple of easy chairs. It was, like the entire suite, a mess. Zuckerberg
had a habit of accumulating detritus on his desk and nearby tables.
He'd finish a beer or a Red Bull, put it down, and there it would stay
for weeks. Occasionally Moskovitz's girlfriend would get fed up and
throw out some garbage. Once, when Zuckerberg's mother visited, she
looked around the room embarrassedly and apologized to Moskovitz for
her son's untidiness. "When he was growing up he had a nanny," she
explained.
This warren of tiny rooms on the third floor pushed the boys toward
greater intimacy than they might have shared under less constrained
conditions. Zuckerberg was by nature blunt, even sometimes brutally
honest—a trait he may have acquired from his mother. Though he
could be taciturn he was also the leader, simply because he so often
started things. A habit of straight talk became the norm in this suite.
There weren't a lot of secrets here. The four got along in part because
they knew where each stood. Rather than getting on one another's
nerves, they got into one another's projects.
The Internet was a perennial theme. Moskovitz, who had little
training in computing but a natural penchant for it, kept up a constant
repartee with Zuckerberg about what did and did not make sense online,
what would or would not make a good website, and what might
or might not happen as the Internet continued its inroads into every
sphere of modern life. At the beginning of the semester, Hughes had
zero interest in computing. But by midyear he too had become fascinated
by the constant discussion of programming and the Internet, and
started chiming in with his own ideas, as did Moskovitz's roommate,
Olson. As Zuckerberg came up with each new programming project,
the other three boys had plenty of opinions on how he should build it.
In the common room of Suite H33 in Kirkland House, Ivy League
privilege and high geekdom converged. What happened there turns
out not to have been common, but at the time it seemed pretty routine.
Zuckerberg was hardly the only entrepreneur beavering away on a business
in his dorm room. That wasn't too noteworthy at Harvard. Down
every hall were gifted and privileged children of the powerful.
It's presumed at Harvard that these kids are the ones who will go on
to rule the world. Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and Hughes were just three
eggheads who loved to talk about ideas. They didn't think much about
ruling the world. But from their funky, crowded dorm room would
emerge an idea with the power to change it.
Emboldened by the unexpected success of Course Match, Zuckerberg
decided to try out some other ideas. His next project, in October,
he called Facemash. It gave the Harvard community its first look at his
rebellious irreverent side. Its purpose: figure out who was the hottest
person on campus. Using the kind of computer code otherwise used to
rank chess players (perhaps it could also have been used for fencers),
he invited users to compare two different faces of the same sex and say
which one was hotter. As your rating got hotter, your picture would be
compared to hotter and hotter people.
A journal he kept at the time, which for some reason he posted
along with the software, suggests Zuckerberg got onto this jag while
upset about a girl. " is a bitch. I need to think of something to
make to take my mind off her," he wrote, adding "I'm a little intoxicated,
not gonna lie." Perhaps that pique is what led him to the idea,
mused about in the journal, of comparing students to farm animals.
Instead, according to the journal, Billy Olson came up with the idea
of comparing people to other people and only occasionally putting in
a farm animal. By the time the program launched, the animals were
gone completely. "Another Beck's is in order," Zuckerberg wrote as he
continued his Facemash chronicles. The entire project was completed
in an eight-hour stretch that ended at 4 A.M., said the journal.
The photos for the Facemash website came from the so-called
"facebooks" maintained by each of the Harvard houses where undergraduates
live. They were the pictures taken the day students arrived for
orientation—the kind of clumsy, awkwardly posed shots almost everyone
would prefer to disavow. Zuckerberg cleverly found ways to obtain
digital versions from nine of Harvard's twelve houses. Student newspaper
the Harvard Crimson later called it "guerrilla computing." In most
cases he was able to simply hack in over the Web. At Lowell House a
friend gave Zuckerberg temporary use of his log-in. (The friend later regretted
it.) At another house, Zuckerberg snuck in, plugged an Ethernet
cable into the wall, and downloaded names and photos from the house
computer network.
The fact that he was doing something slightly illicit gave Zuckerberg
little pause. He could be a touch headstrong and liked to stir things
up. He didn't ask permission before proceeding. It's not that he sets out
to break the rules; he just doesn't pay much attention to them.
He started running the Facemash website on his Internet-connected
laptop in mid-afternoon of Sunday, November 2. "Were we let in [to
Harvard] for our looks?" the site asked on its home page. "No. Will we
be judged by them? Yes." Zuckerberg emailed links to a few friends,
later claiming he had only intended them to test it out and make suggestions.
But once people started using it, they apparently couldn't stop.
His "testers" alerted their own friends and Facemash became an instant
underground hit.
The Crimson somewhat eloquently opined on the appeal of the
software afterward, even as its editorial scolded Zuckerberg for "catering
to the worst side of Harvard students": "A peculiarly-squinting senior
and that hottie from your Medieval manuscripts section—click! Your
blockmate and the kid who always glared at you in Annenberg—click!
Your two best friends' respective significant others—pause . . . click,
click, click! . . . We Harvard students could indulge our fondness for
judging those around us on superficial criteria without ever having to
face any of the judged in person." Yes, it was fun.
One gay resident of a suite near Zuckerberg's was elated when,
in the first hour, his photo was rated most attractive among men. He
of course alerted all his own friends, who then started using the site.
When Zuckerberg returned to his room at 10 P.M. from a meeting, his
laptop was so bogged down with Facemash users that it was freezing
up. But neighbors were not the only ones suddenly paying attention to
Facemash. Complaints of sexism and racism quickly started circulating
among members of two women's groups—Fuerza Latina and the
Association of Harvard Black Women. Quickly the computer services
department got involved and turned off Zuckerberg's Web access. By
the time that happened, around 10:30 P.M., the site had been visited by
450 students, who had voted on 22,000 pairs of photos.
Zuckerberg was later called before Harvard's disciplinary Administrative
Board, along with the student who'd given him the password at
Lowell House, his suite-mate Billy Olson (who, as the online journal
noted, had contributed ideas), and Joe Green, a junior who lived in the
next suite through the fire door, who had helped out as well. Zuckerberg
was accused of violations of the college's code of conduct in the
way the site handled security, copyright, and privacy. The board put
him on probation and required him to see a counselor, but decided
not to punish the others. If Zuckerberg hadn't omitted the farm animal
photos, he probably wouldn't have gotten off so lightly. He apologized
to the women's groups, claiming he had mainly thought of the project
as a computer science experiment and had no idea it might spread so
quickly.
Green's father, a college professor, happened to be visiting his son
the night Zuckerberg was celebrating his comparatively light sentence
for Facemash. The sophomore had gone out and bought a bottle of
Dom Perignon, which he was exultantly sharing with his Kirkland
neighbors. Says Green: "My dad was trying to drill it into Mark's head
that this was a really big deal, that he'd almost gotten suspended. But
Mark didn't want to hear it. My dad came away with the notion that I
shouldn't do any more Zuckerberg projects." It would later prove to be
a very expensive prohibition.
But to everyone else, the episode was a clear sign: Zuckerberg had
a knack for making software people couldn't stop using. That came as
little surprise to his roommates. They knew he had even been talking
to Microsoft and other companies about selling a program he'd written
with a friend as his senior project at Exeter, called Synapse. The
software watched what kind of music someone liked so it could suggest
other songs. His friends called the program "The Brain" and were
especially excited when they heard Zuckerberg might get as much as a
million dollars for it. If that happened, they pleaded, could he please
buy a large flat-screen TV for the common room?
Zuckerberg kept making little Web programs, like one he created
quickly to help himself cram for his Art in the Time of Augustus course.
He had barely attended the class all first semester. As the final loomed,
he cobbled together a set of screens with art images from the class. He
emailed the other class members an invitation to log in and use this
study aid and add comments alongside each image. His classmates took
his cue. After they all used it, he spent an evening scrutinizing what
they'd said about the images. He passed the final. He also wrote a program
he called "Six Degrees of Harry Lewis/' an homage to a favorite
computer science professor. He used articles in the Harvard Crimson
to try to identify relationships between people, and created a whimsical
network of connections to Lewis based on these links. You could type in
any Harvard student's name and the software would tell you how they
were connected to Professor Lewis.
He also worked on other people's projects. After the Facemash episode
he mended fences with the Association of Harvard Black Women
by helping them set up their own website. And he worked for a while
with three seniors who aimed to build a dating and socializing site they
called Harvard Connection. They had an idea for a service that would
tell you about parties and provide discounted admission to nightclubs,
among other intended features. But they weren't programmers. The
three, athletic six-foot-five-inch identical twins Cameron and Tyler
Winkelvoss, both champion rowers on the crew team, and their friend
Divya Narendra sought out Zuckerberg in November after reading
about Facernash in the Crimson. They offered to pay him to do the
programming for their service.
"I had this hobby of just building these little projects," says Zuckerberg
now. "I had like twelve projects that year. Of course I wasn't fully
committed to any one of them." Most of them, he says, were about "seeing
how people were connected through mutual references."
Zuckerberg's interest in building websites with social components
had arisen the previous summer. He was living in a dormitory at the Harvard
Business School with two Exeter friends, including Adam D'Angelo,
with whom he'd developed Synapse, the music suggestion software, and
who was now studying computer science at the California Institute of
Technology. Another close friend and Harvard computer science major
named Kang-Xing Jin lived there, too. All three had lucrative programming
jobs they found undemanding, and Zuckerberg had broken up
with his girlfriend. There was a lot of time for bull sessions, which tended
to center on what kind of software should happen next on the Internet.
D'Angelo had launched a provocative project of his own the previous
year from his dorm room at Caltech. Called Buddy Zoo, it invited
users to upload their AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) buddy lists to a
server and compare them to the lists belonging to people who had also
uploaded theirs. You could see who shared which friends, thus illustrating
your network of social connections. At the time AIM was the
de facto communications tool of American youth (and many adults).
Hundreds of thousands of AIM users tried out Buddy Zoo, and it had
a brief online celebrity. D'Angelo made no effort to commercialize it,
and eventually let it die. But it pointed in a promising direction.
During the winter break, Zuckerberg got deep into coding yet another
project. He was particularly eager to get this one done. His bemused
friends didn't pay much more attention to this new project than to all
the other sites he had launched that year.
On January 11, Zuckerberg went online and paid Register.com
thirty-five dollars to register the web address Thefacebook.com for one
year. This site borrowed ideas from Course Match and Facemash as
well as from a service called Friendster that Zuckerberg belonged to.
Friendster was a social network, a service that invited individuals to create
a "profile" of themselves, complete with data about hobbies, tastes
in music, and other personal information. On such services people
linked their own profiles to those of their friends, thereby identifying
their own "social network."
Friendster, like most social networks up to that time, was primarily
intended to help you connect with people for dating. The idea was that
you might find romantic material by scrutinizing the friends of your
friends. Friendster had taken Harvard by storm the previous year but
had fallen from favor after its almost overnight nationwide success led
to millions of users. That created technical strains that made it slow and
difficult to use. Another, more flashy social network called MySpace
had launched the previous August in Los Angeles. It was growing
quickly and already had about a million members, though it hadn't
made much of an impression at Harvard.
Harvard had been claiming for many months that it was going to
take all the "facebooks" maintained by each House—the ones Zuckerberg
had cannibalized for Facemash—and unify them online in searchable
form. Studying these photos was a common recreational activity.
There was a college-wide printed facebook called the Freshman Register,
issued each year, but it only included entering students. Copies
were extensively annotated—boys, for instance, would circle photos of
the best-looking girls.
Now that students had seen what was possible with Friendster, they
wanted an online facebook. It was obvious that it wasn't that hard to
create online directories. If an entrepreneur in San Francisco could
do it, why couldn't Harvard's administration? This impulse was surprisingly
widespread. At many colleges that year, students were pushing
administrations to put student photo directories online. The Crimson
included extensive references to the need to create an online facebook.
The editors took the view that if a student could build Facemash, there
was no reason a programmer couldn't build a facebook. In a December
11 editorial titled "Put Online a Happy Face: Electronic facebook for
the entire College should be both helpful and entertaining for all," its
editors practically described how to build one. The essay strongly emphasized
the need for students to control their own information in such
a system. That fall Zuckerberg took a math class on graph theory. At
semester's end everyone in the class went out to dinner and ended up
talking about the need for a "universal facebook." So Zuckerberg went
home and built one.
"There was definitely a little bit of a 'fuck you' to Harvard," says
one classmate and friend of Zuckerberg's. "They always said they were
going to do a centralized facebook, but they had all these worries about
how it's their information. They thought they had legal issues. Mark just
figured you could get people to upload the information themselves."
In fact, Zuckerberg later said that it was the Crimsons editorials about
Facemash that gave him the initial idea for how to build Thefacebook.
"Much of the trouble surrounding the facemash could have been eliminated,"
wrote the Crimson, "if only the site had limited itself to students
who voluntarily uploaded their own photos."
That simple insight, combined with Zuckerberg's desire to create a
reliable directory based on real information about students, became the
core concept of Thefacebook. "Our project just started off as a way to
help people share more at Harvard," says Zuckerberg, "so people could
see more of what's going on at school. I wanted to make it so I could get
access to information about anyone, and anyone could share anything
that they wanted to."
His new service for Harvard students was not a dating site like
Friendster. It was a very basic communications tool, aimed at solving
the simple problem of keeping track of your schoolmates and what was
going on with them. Some of Zuckerberg's friends later speculated that
it was also intended to help him deal with his own introverted personality.
If you're a geek who is a little uncomfortable relating to other
people, why not create a website that makes it easier?
Thefacebook also drew inspiration from another important
source—the so-called away messages that users of AIM posted when
they weren't at their computers. These short, pithy phrases were often
used by AIM users to show off their creativity. Though there was room
for only a few words, users included political statements and humor as
well as practical information about the account holder's whereabouts.
AIM away messages were so important to Zuckerberg that another one
of his earlier software projects was a tool that alerted him when friends'
messages changed. Thefacebook was going to be a robust combination
of the AIM away message and that alert tool—a place where you could
host more information about yourself so friends could keep track of you.
(Today's Facebook status update traces its heritage directly back to those
AIM away messages.)
Both Course Match and Facemash had operated over Zuckerberg's
dorm-room Net connection from his laptop, but Course Match's success
had taken its toll on the hard drive. Zuckerberg lost quite a lot of
data. And part of what got him in trouble with the administrative board
over Facemash was that he used Harvard's network to host it. So this
time he took a more serious approach. He searched around online and
found a hosting company called Manage.com, where he entered his
credit card number and started paying eighty-five dollars a month for
space on a computer server. That's where Thefacebook's software and
data would reside. This would be Thefacebook.com, not part of the
www.harvard.edu network. He wasn't sure, but in the back of his mind,
Zuckerberg had a notion that this could end up as more than just a brief
entertainment.
Here's another sign he thought something unusual might happen:
he made a deal with a business-savvy classmate, Eduardo Saverin, to
give him one-third of Thefacebook in exchange for Saverin making a
small investment and helping out with business matters. Zuckerberg
knew Saverin from Alpha Epsilon Pi, a selective fraternity for Jewish
students to which both had recently pledged. Saverin was supposed to
figure out how Thefacebook, if it took off, could make some money.
The polished and well-liked son of a wealthy Brazilian business magnate,
Saverin was an officer in the college Investment Club and a superb
chess player who was known by his friends as a math genius. The
two nineteen-year-olds agreed to invest $1,000 each. (Joe Green says
Zuckerberg also approached him to be a business partner, but when
Professor Green heard about it, he got "kind of pissed," so Joe declined.
Later he took to calling it, always with a pained laugh, his "billiondollar
mistake.") -
On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg clicked
a link on his account with Manage.com. Thefacebook.com went live.
Its home screen read: "Thefacebook is an online directory that connects
people through 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." Zuckerberg labeled himself user number four. (The
first three accounts were for testing.) User number five was roommate
Hughes; number six was Moskovitz; and number seven was Saverin.
Zuckerberg's friend and classmate Andrew McCollum designed a logo
using an image of Al Pacino he'd found online that he covered with a
fog of ones and zeroes—the elementary components of digital media.
The software spread quickly from the very beginning. The first
users—Zuckerberg's Kirkland House neighbors—sent emails to other
students asking them to join and become their friends. That begat other
emails from those students inviting their own friends to join. Someone
suggested sending an email to everyone on the Kirkland House mailing
list—about three hundred people. Several dozen signed up almost
immediately.
Thus began a viral explosion. By Sunday—four days after launch —
more than 650 students had registered. Three hundred more joined on
Monday. Thefacebook almost instantly became a main topic of conversation
in Harvard dining halls and between classes. People couldn't
stop using it.
To sign up, you created a profile with a single picture of yourself,
along with a bit of personal information. You could indicate your relationship
status. Pick one from the drop-down menu: single, in a relationship,
or in an open relationship. You could include your phone
number, AIM username, and email address; indicate which courses you
were taking (a feature inspired by Course Match); favorite books, movies,
and music; clubs you belonged to; political affiliation: very liberal/
liberal/moderate/conservative/very conservative/apathetic; and a favorite
quote. Thefacebook had no content of its own. It was merely a piece
of software—a platform for content created by its users.
Privacy controls were part of the original design. And there were
some big restrictions: you couldn't join unless you had a Harvard.edu
email address, and you had to use your real name. That made Thefacebook
exclusive, but it also ensured that users were who they said
they were. Zuckerberg later told the Crimson that he "hoped the privacy
options would help to restore his reputation following student
outrage over facemash.com." Validating people's identity in this way
made Thefacebook fundamentally different from just about everything
else that had come before on the Internet, including Friendster
and MySpace. On Thefacebook you could set your privacy options to
determine exactly who could see your information. You could limit
it to current students, just people in your class, or only those in your
residential house.
Once you set up your own profile, the interaction began. It was
pretty limited. After you invited others to be your friend, you could see
a diagram of your social network, which showed all the people you were
connected to. You could also direct something called a "poke" at other
users by simply clicking on a link on their page. When you did, an indication
would show up on their home page. What did that mean? Here's
the insouciant answer Zuckerberg posted on the site: "We thought it
would be fun to make a feature that has no specific purpose. . . . So
mess around with it, because you're not getting an explanation from us."
Much activity on Thefacebook from the beginning was driven by
the hormones of young adults. It asked you whether you were "interested
in" men or women. In addition to giving you the option to list
whether you were in a relationship, you were asked to fill in a section labeled
"Looking for." One frequently chosen option was "Random play."
When you poked someone, an indication of that simply showed up on
their profile. That person could poke you back. For at least some, the
interaction had a distinctly sexual meaning. This was college, after all.
Many people, on the other hand, found practical and wholesome
uses for Thefacebook—creating study groups for classes, arranging
meetings for clubs, and posting notices about parties. Thefacebook was
a tool for self-expression, and even at this primordial stage of its development
people were starting to recognize that there were many facets of
the self that could be projected on its screen.
Another feature was timely for many students. You could click on a
course and see who was taking it, just as in Course Match. At Thefacebook's
launch, students were in the middle of choosing courses for the
following semester. It was what's called "shopping week" at Harvard,
when classes have begun but students can add or drop them at will. For
any Harvard student who picked his or her courses partly based on who
else was in class, this feature of Thefacebook was immediately useful. It
helps explain the rapid spread of Thefacebook in its early days, and also
why Zuckerberg launched it that week.
The whiteboard by the bedrooms in Kirkland Suite H33 now took
on a different, less abstract character. Zuckerberg began filling it with
charts and graphs indicating Thefacebook's growth—how many people
were joining each day and what features they used. It also tracked which
users had the most friends.
On Monday the 9th the Crimson interviewed Zuckerberg, something
its staff was becoming accustomed to. "The nature of the site," he
told the paper, "is that each user's experience improves if they can get
their friends to join it." Still smarting from the rebuke he received for
Facemash, he emphasized to the Crimson that he was "careful . . . to
make sure that people don't upload copyrighted material." The Crimson
did a little probing about his motives: "Zuckerberg . . . said he did
not create the Website with the intention of generating revenue. . . .
Tm not going to sell anybody's e-mail address/ he said. 'At one point I
thought about making the Website so that you could upload a resume
too, and for a fee companies could search for Harvard job applicants.
But I don't want to touch that. It would make everything more serious
and less fun/ "
Making Thefacebook fun was more important than making it a
business. It was a statement that would reverberate down through the
short history of Facebook.
Thefacebook may have been meant to replace the Harvard house
facebooks, but from the beginning there was one obvious difference.
Whereas photos taken by college photographers the first week of school
were often awkwardly posed, poorly lit, and unflattering, the ones
people posted of themselves on Thefacebook tended to cast them in
a very positive light. These were the young superstars of tomorrow, as
envisioned by themselves. In only the second article ever written about
Thefacebook, on February 17 a prescient columnist for the Crimson
pinpointed several characteristics that would forever after form a central
part of Facebook's appeal. Wrote junior Amelia Lester (who five
years later would be named managing editor of the New Yorker): "While
Thefacebook.com isn't explicitly about bringing people together in romantic
unions, there are plenty of other primal instincts evident at work
here: an element of wanting to belong, a dash of vanity and more than
a little voyeurism."
And competitiveness was immediately in evidence. From Thefacebook's
first day, some users thought of it more as a way to accumulate
the largest possible number of friends than to communicate and gather
useful information. Many users of Facebook still do.
By the end of the first week, about half of all Harvard undergraduates
had signed up, and by the end of February approximately three-fourths.
But students were not the only ones showing their faces online. The only
requirement for membership was that you have a Harvard email address,
which meant Thefacebook was available not only to students—graduate
as well as undergrad—but also to Harvard alumni and staff. Some students
griped that the staff didn't belong there. While only a few had joined so
far, about a thousand alumni had, mostly recent ones. After three weeks
Thefacebook had more than 6,000 users.
Within days, Zuckerberg realized that he was going to need help
to operate and maintain Thefacebook. So he turned to those closest
at hand—his roommates. About a week after Thefacebook launched,
Zuckerberg signed an employment contract with Dustin Moskovitz. A
year later, in a talk, he told the story of Moskovitz joining this way: "One
of my roommates was 'Hey, Fll help you!' I said 'Dude! You can't program!'
So he went home for the weekend and bought the book PERL
for Dummies and said 'Now I'm ready.' I said 'Dude, the site's not written
in PERL.'" Regardless, Zuckerberg adjusted the ownership of Thefacebook
to give the eager Moskovitz 5 percent. He reduced his own
stake slightly to 65 percent and Saverin's to 30 percent. Moskovitz's
main job was to spearhead expansion to other campuses.
From even the second week, students at schools other than Harvard
were emailing Zuckerberg asking when they could have it, too. Moving
beyond Harvard had been in Zuckerberg's mind from the beginning.
Even the home page implied it—"an online directory that connects
people through social networks at colleges" —not "Harvard," but "colleges."
And his ambition did not stop there. Moskovitz says that while
he was hired to help add new schools, "in that same conversation it was
like —Teah, and then we'll go beyond that.'"
Moskovitz mimicked Zuckerberg's code wherever he could, and set
out to learn. He wasn't always fast, but he immediately became known
for his amazing capacity for hard work. "Mark would get kind of impatient,"
says one friend. "But Dustin just trudged through and through
and through." Some in Kirkland House started calling the sophomore
from Florida "the ox."
Zuckerberg now says Moskovitz's role during this period was "critical"
to Thefacebook's success. To add a school, Moskovitz had to figure out
how email was addressed for students, staff, and alumni so he could set
up the registration procedure. Then he would obtain a list of courses and
residential dorms. He also had to set up a link to the college newspaper,
because Thefacebook then had a feature, later discontinued, that linked
your profile to any article in the campus paper that mentioned you. It
took about half a day to do all the legwork and coding to add each school,
but Zuckerberg and Moskovitz started expanding to new ones quickly
even though both were still taking a full course load. They opened to students
at Columbia on February 25, to Stanford the next day, and to Yale
on the 29th. Columbia started slowly, but Stanford is where the broad
appeal of Thefacebook was first proven. After just a week, the Stanford
Daily was writing that "Thefacebook.com craze has swept through campus."
It reported 2,981 Stanford students had already registered.
Zuckerberg hated doing interviews and talking in public, but he
gave the Stanford Daily a lot of time. "I know it sounds corny, but I'd
love to improve people's lives, especially socially," he told the paper. He
also said that since the site was still only costing him eighty-five dollars
per month, he didn't feel any business imperative: "In the future we
may sell ads to get the money back, but since providing the service is so
cheap, we may choose to not do that for a while."
He didn't want to do many interviews like that in the future. The
newspaper at every new school seemed to want to talk to him, and the
guys were planning to add a lot of colleges. So shortly thereafter, Zuckerberg
recruited yet another likely prospect, his own roommate, Chris
Hughes. Hughes became Thefacebook's official spokesman. The company's
founding quartet was complete. Thefacebook had 10,000 active
users. It had been operational for one month.
As Thefacebook grew at Harvard, Zuckerberg continued to disavow any
serious business motivation. But once he began extending it to other
schools, he started showing strategic instincts that would befit a CEO,
as well as a steely willingness to confront competition. The reason he
decided to expand first to Columbia, Stanford, and Yale, he says now,
is that those three schools each already had its own homegrown social
networks. It was a sort of market test—putting his product up against
the best competition that was out there. "If TheFacebook still took off at
those schools and displaced those [other networks] then I would know
it would go really well at all the other ones," he explains.
At Stanford, Thefacebook took off like a rocket. A school-specific
social network there called Club Nexus had already mostly flamed out.
When students saw Thefacebook, it felt to many like exactly what they'd
been waiting for. "It wasn't something that had to be explained," says a
2005 graduate.
But at Columbia, a student named Adam Goldberg had launched
a commercial site called CUCommunity a month before Zuckerberg
created Thefacebook. By the time Thefacebook came to Columbia
four weeks later, 1,900 of the school's 6,700 undergraduates were active
on CUCommunity. It would be several months before Thefacebook
overtook it. CUCommunity also soon started expanding to other
schools. At Yale, the student-run College Council had launched a dating
website and online facebook called YaleStation on February 12.
Though it had fewer features than Thefacebook, it was experiencing a
similar stratospheric uptake—by the end of the month about two-thirds
of undergraduates had registered.
But Zuckerberg was convinced that his service had legs, so he decided
to extend it further into the Ivy League—launching at both Dartmouth
and Cornell on Sunday, March 7. At Dartmouth, a friend of
Zuckerberg's from Exeter was chair of the Student Assembly's Student
Services Committee. Like student governments at Harvard, Penn, Yale,
and other schools, it had been lobbying to put the campus facebook
online. The friend agreed to promote Thefacebook using the assembly's
email system to all students. That message went out at 10 P.M. By the following
evening, 1,700 of Dartmouth's 4,000 undergraduates were users.
The speed of adoption got Zuckerberg so excited he agreed again to
talk to the college newspaper, the Dartmouth. "It blows my mind that
people have actually used the site," he told the paper. "I'm all about
people expressing, and however people see fit to use the site, that's cool."
Zuckerberg had also gotten help at Stanford, where a childhood friend
from Dobbs Ferry provided him with a password to get into the Stanford
network as well as a list of student email addresses and dormitories.
Pretty quickly, though, it was more about fending off interest than
stimulating it. Emails started to arrive from around the country, begging
Zuckerberg and crew to bring Thefacebook to other schools. Within
weeks the four Harvard sophomores—all still carrying a full course
load—had launched their service at MIT, University of Pennsylvania,
Princeton, Brown, and Boston University. By mid-March the total user
number hit 20,000. Yet another high school classmate of Zuckerberg's
at Exeter entered the picture. This time it was Adam D'Angelo, Exeter's
other programming whiz, Zuckerberg's summer roommate, and
co-author of music recommendation program Synapse. From his dorm
at Caltech, D'Angelo helped Moskovitz do programming to add new
schools. The Ivy League and similar schools were the first to launch
largely because that's where the real-world social networks of users at
Harvard could be found—mostly friends from high school. Thefacebook
had an elite edge.
Up until now, it had been designed so that within each school, users
could see one another's profiles unless they chose not to. You could
deliberately ratchet up your privacy settings, but most students didn't.
Any user from Harvard, for example, could see most Harvard students'
profiles. That was the default. Harvard students could not, however,
see profiles of students at Stanford. But for Thefacebook to continue to
grow, it would need cross-campus linking, and there was a growing chorus
of complaints that it wasn't possible. So Zuckerberg and Moskovitz
decided that such links could be created by the mutual agreement of
both people. This became the template for how Facebook connections
are established to this day.
As costs mounted, Zuckerberg mused to the Crimson, which had
taken to idolizing him, that "it might be nice in the future to get some
ads going." By the end of March, with the active-user number surpassing
30,000, Thefacebook was paying $450 per month for five servers from
Manage.com. Zuckerberg and Saverin each agreed to invest another
$10,000 into the company. Meanwhile, Saverin had begun selling a
little advertising and had secured a few small contracts with companies
that sold moving services, T-shirts, and other products to college students.
These ads began to appear in April.
It was harder and harder simply to keep Thefacebook operating
smoothly. Thousands of users could be online at once, straining the
servers. Zuckerberg and Moskovitz tried to delay adding new schools
until they had worked out kinks for the users they already had. "Our
growth to other colleges was always constrained by our server capacity,"
recalls Moskovitz. "We simply could not scale the architecture fast
enough." Luckily they could hold off on new schools until they resolved
the kinks. The two programmers were continually re-architecting how
the site operated and working to make it more efficient. Moskovitz was
trying to pick up as much as he could from the more experienced Zuckerberg,
and from D'Angelo, twenty-five hundred miles away at Caltech.
Zuckerberg now marvels with gratitude when he recalls Moskovitz's
dedication in those days. "Dustin took the competition so seriously," he
says. "I'd be like 'Hey, I heard through the grapevine that this other service
is thinking of launching at this college/ He'd be 'Really? No way!'
And that paper he was supposed to be doing he'd just like scrap it and
go and launch at that school. He was just a workaholic and a machine.
Early on I viewed it as a project. I wasn't super-invested in it because it
wasn't clear to me it was going to be this huge thing. I was. like 'Yeah,
this is pretty neat. It's not the end-all be-all, but it's cool. And I have
these other classes.' But Dustin joined and really helped scale it."
The boys were using free open-source software like the MySQL
database and Apache Web server tools, which made the entire undertaking
affordable. But while the software might have been free, it was
not simple to operate. Zuckerberg was a more practiced programmer
than Moskovitz, but he had never operated these kinds of programs
before. He was learning by the day, even as he studied for four courses,
including a demanding one in computer science. But so popular was
Thefacebook that by the end of the semester, each time they added a
new school its students signed up almost en masse.
Zuckerberg had a burning desire to try new things, but his ability to create
a fast-growing website in his spare time had a lot to do with where he
was situated. "Having genius and ambition alone isn't going to get you
there. It's really important to be lucky/' says Moskovitz. "But Mark had
all three in spades, including luck. He just fell into the right situations
a lot, and had extremely good timing. And when he saw a good idea he
wanted to pursue it, whereas another person might have felt he needed
to finish school first."
Facebook's ultimate success owes a lot to the fact that it began at
college. That's where people's social networks are densest and where
they generally socialize more vigorously than at any other time in their
lives. Moskovitz actually studied this question during that fateful spring
semester. He wrote a paper for a statistics class using data from Thefacebook.
It demonstrated that, as he describes it, "any individual student is
within two degrees of everybody else on a given campus." On average,
students are separated from each other by no more than one intermediary
relationship. "That's why Thefacebook grew so well in college,"
explains Moskovitz. He got an A in the statistics class, which wasn't bad
considering that the majority of his time that semester was spent working
on the site. "And I got a bunch of sweet-ass bonus points for the data
set," Moskovitz remembers with relish.
Harvard offered Zuckerberg unique resources for developing his
business. "At Harvard people were starting up websites pretty frequently,"
says Moskovitz. "Even an impressive hedge fund—people were doing
that as undergrads. So it wasn't that crazy to say 'my roommate happens
to like to do these big consumer websites.'" Several others, like the Winkelvoss/
Narendra team, were even working on social networks.
And the sheer talent that existed among Zuckerberg's roommates
was extraordinary. There aren't many schools where he could find
someone as talented as Moskovitz in the bedroom on the other side
of the wall. The two hadn't met until move-in day at the beginning
of the year, but Zuckerberg found in his suite-mate not only a hardworking
programmer but an intellectual and leader who would effectively
serve as Facebook's chief technology officer for years. Likewise,
Chris Hughes, his own roommate, was so articulate and polished that
he served as Facebook's spokesman. Later Hughes played an important
role in the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama.
Then of course there's the allure of something that began in the
most exclusive halls of all academia. Harvard confers an imprimatur
that carries unique weight in any field. A Harvard connection makes
a product less suspect. To join a social network that began at Harvard
might seem perfectly natural to anyone with a high opinion of himself.
That was an important early dynamic.
It also didn't hurt that Harvard students are preternaturally statusconscious.
The service served as a validation of the scale of your social
ambitions even as it measured your success. Sam Lessin, a Zuckerberg
friend and classmate who was an early user, says, "There is incredible
latent social competition at Harvard which I think really helped Facebook
in the early days." If people were going to maintain their profile
and social networks online, then the kind of natural elitists who attend
Harvard had no compunction attempting to construct the best and largest
of them. Back in that Crimson opinion piece written when Thefacebook
was less than two weeks old, Amelia Lester nailed it: "There's
little wonder why Harvard students, in particular, find the opportunity
to fashion an online persona such a tantalizing prospect. Most of us
spent our high school careers building resumes so padded they'd hold
their own in a sumo match, an experience which culminated in the college
application.... Most of all [Thefacebook] is about performing . . .
and letting the world know why we're important individuals. In short,
it's what Harvard students do best."
But some proffer a darker narrative for how and why Zuckerberg
got Thefacebook started at Harvard. By these accounts, Zuckerberg is
a thief, and Thefacebook was the idea of other Harvard students. The
most serious accusation is one made by Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss
and Divya Narendra. The trio say Zuckerberg stole numerous
ideas from their plan for Harvard Connection after they hired him to
The 'Beginning;
program it. After a month or two of work, Zuckerberg concluded that
their plan was unlikely to succeed. Shortly thereafter he began work on
Thefacebook. This disagreement would become an expensive problem
for Zuckerberg's nascent company.
In mid-April 2004, over two months after the site had gone live,
business manager Saverin, now calling himself the company's chief financial
officer, took steps to formalize Thefacebook as a business. He set
up a limited-liability company in Florida, where he had attended high
school. The partners listed were Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and Saverin.
Though revenues for Thefacebook were nonexistent in its first
weeks, by mid-February Zuckerberg had already begun fielding calls
from people interested in investing. They'd heard about the extraordinary
growth of this new site and wanted to get a piece. At the end of
the semester, classmate Lessin, whose father was a well-known investor,
took Zuckerberg around New York to meet with venture capitalists and
executives in the finance and media industries.
At one of those meetings in June, a financier offered Zuckerberg
$10 million for the company. Mark had just turned twenty. Thefacebook
was four months old. He didn't for a minute think seriously about
accepting.