Facebook born
The origins of Facebook have been in dispute since the very
week a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched the site as a Harvard sophomore on
February 4, 2004. Then called
"thefacebook.com," the site was an instant hit. six years later, the
site has become one of the biggest web sites in the world, visited by 400
million people a month. The controversy surrounding Facebook began
quickly. A week after he launched the
site in 2004, Mark was accused by three Harvard seniors of having stolen the
idea from them. This allegation soon bloomed into a full-fledged lawsuit, as a
competing company founded by the Harvard seniors sued Mark and Facebook for
theft and fraud, starting a legal odyssey that continues to this day. New information
uncovered by Silicon Alley Insider suggests that some of the complaints against
Mark Zuckerberg are valid. It also suggests that, on at least one occasion in
2004, Mark used private login data taken from Facebook's servers to break into
Facebook members' private email accounts and read their emails--at best, a
gross misuse of private information. Lastly, it suggests that Mark hacked into
the competing company's systems and changed some user information with the aim
of making the site less useful. The primary dispute around Facebook's origins
centered around whether Mark had entered into an "agreement" with the
Harvard seniors, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and a classmate named Divya
Narendra, to develop a similar web site for them -- and then, instead, stalled
their project while taking their idea and building his own. The litigation
never went particularly well for the Winklevosses. In 2007, Massachusetts Judge
Douglas P. Woodlock called their allegations "tissue thin." Referring
to the agreement that Mark had allegedly breached, Woodlock also wrote,
"Dorm room chit-chat does not make a contract." A year later, the end
finally seemed in sight: a judge ruled against Facebook's move to dismiss the
case. Shortly thereafter, the parties agreed to settle.
But then, a
twist.
After Facebook announced the settlement, but before the
settlement was finalized, lawyers for the Winklevosses suggested that the hard
drive from Mark Zuckerberg's computer at Harvard might contain evidence of
Mark's fraud. Specifically, they suggested that the hard drive included some
damning instant messages and emails.
The judge in the case refused to look at the hard drive and
instead deferred to another judge who went on to approve the settlement. But,
naturally, the possibility that the hard drive contained additional evidence
set inquiring minds wondering what those emails and IMs revealed. Specifically, it set inquiring minds
wondering again whether Mark had, in fact, stolen the Winklevoss's idea,
screwed them over, and then ridden off into the sunset with Facebook. Unfortunately,
since the contents of Mark's hard drive had not been made public, no one had
the answers. But now we have some over the past two years, Media taken interviewed
more than a dozen sources familiar with aspects of this story -- including
people involved in the founding year of the company. We have also reviewed what
we believe to be some relevant IMs and emails from the period. Much of this information has never before
been made public. None of it has been
confirmed or authenticated by Mark or the company. Based on the information we
obtained, we have what we believe is a more complete picture of how Facebook
was founded. This account follows. And
what does this more complete story reveal?
We'll offer our own conclusions at the end. But first, In the fall of 2003, Harvard
seniors Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra were on the
lookout for a web developer who could bring to life an idea the three say Divya
first had in 2002: a social network for Harvard students and alumni. The site
was to be called harvardconnections.com now this URL is
http://socialholdings.com. The three had
been paying Victor Gao, another Harvard student, to do coding for the site, but
at the beginning of the fall term Victor begged off the project. Victor
suggested his own replacement: Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard sophomore from Dobbs
Ferry, New York. Back then, Mark was known at Harvard as the sophomore who had
built Facemash, a "Hot or Not" clone for Harvard. Facemash had
already made Mark a bit of a celebrity on campus, for two reasons. The first is
that Mark got in trouble for creating it. The way the site worked was that it
pulled photos of Harvard students off of Harvard's Web sites. It rearranged
these photos so that when people visited Facemash.com they would see pictures
of two Harvard students and be asked to vote on which was more attractive. The
site also maintained a list of Harvard students, ranked by attractiveness. On
Harvard's politically correct campus, this upset people, and Mark was soon
hauled in front of Harvard's disciplinary board for students. According to a November 19, 2003 Harvard
Crimson article, he was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights,
and violating individual privacy. Happily for Mark, the article reports that he
wasn't expelled.
The second reason everyone at Harvard knew about Facemash
and Mark Zuckerberg was that Facemash had been an instant hit. The same Harvard
Crimson story reports that after two weeks, "the site had been visited by
450 people, who voted at least 22,000 times." That means the average
visitor voted 48 times.
It was for
this ability to build a
wildly popular site that Victor Gao first recommended Mark to Cameron,
Tyler, and Divya. Sold on Mark, the Harvard Connection trio reached out to him.
Mark agreed to meet.
They first met in an early evening in late November in the
dining hall of Harvard College's Kirkland House. Cameron, Tyler, and Divya brought up their
idea for Harvard Connection, and described their plans to A) build the site for
Harvard students only, by requiring new users to register with Harvard.edu
email addresses, and B) expand Harvard Connection beyond Harvard to schools
around the country. Mark reportedly
showed enthusiastic interest in the project.
Later that night, Mark wrote an email to the Winklevoss brothers and
Divya: "I read over all the stuff you sent and it seems like it shouldn't
take too long to implement, so we can talk about that after I get all the basic
functionality up tomorrow night." The next day, on December 1, Mark sent
another email to the Harvard Connections team.
Part of it read, "I put together one of the two registration pages
so I have everything working on my system now. I'll keep you posted as I patch
stuff up and it starts to become completely functional." These two emails
sounded like the words of someone who was eager to be a part of the team and
working away on the project. A few days
later, however, Mark's emails to the Harvard Connection team started to change
in tone. Specifically, they went from
someone who seemed to be hard at work building the product to someone who was
so busy with schoolwork that he had no time to do any coding at all.
December 4: "Sorry I was
unreachable tonight. I just got about three of your missed calls. I was working
on a problem set."
December 10:
"The week has been pretty busy thus far, so I haven't gotten a chance to
do much work on the site or even think about it really, so I think it's
probably best to postpone meeting until we have more to discuss. I'm also
really busy tomorrow so I don't think I'd be able to meet then anyway." A
week later: "Sorry I have not been reachable for the past few days. I've
basically been in the lab the whole time working on a cs problem set which
I"m still not finished with."
Finally, on January
8: Sorry it's taken a while for me to get back to you. I'm completely
swamped with work this week. I have three programming projects and a final paper
due by Monday, as well as a couple of problem sets due Friday. I'll be
available to discuss the site again starting Tuesday. I"m still a little
skeptical that we have enough functionality in the site to really draw the
attention and gain the critical mass necessary to get a site like this to
run…Anyhow, we'll talk about it once I get everything else done.
So what happened to change Mark's tune about Harvard Connection?
Was he so swamped with work that he was unable to finish the project? Or, as the Harvard Connection founders have
alleged, was he stalling the development of Harvard Connection so that he could
build a competing site and launch it first?
Our investigation suggests the latter. As a part of the lawsuit against
Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, the above emails from Mark have been public for
years. What has never been revealed publicly is what Mark was telling his
friends, parents, and closest confidants at the same time. Let's start with a
December 7th (IM) exchange Mark Zuckerberg had with his Harvard classmate and
Facebook cofounder, Eduardo Saverin.
Former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel gets a lot of credit for being the first
investor in Facebook, because he led the first formal Facebook round in
September of 2004 with a $500,000 investment at a $5 million valuation. But the real "first investor" claim
to fame should actually belong to a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg's
named Eduardo Saverin. To picture Eduardo, what you need to know is that he was
the kid at Harvard who would wear a suit to class. He liked to give people the
impression that he was rich -- and maybe somehow connected to the Brazilian
mafia. At one point, in an IM exchange,
Mark told a friend that Eduardo -- "head of the investment society"
-- was rich because "apparently insider trading isn't illegal in
Brazil." Eduardo Saverin wasn't
directly involved with Facebook for long: During the summer of 2004, when Mark
moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time, Eduardo took a high-paying
internship at Lehman Brothers in New York.
While Mark was still at Harvard, however, Eduardo appears to have
bankrolled Facebook's earliest capital expenses, thus becoming its initial
investor. In January, however, Mark told a friend that "Eduardo is paying
for my servers." Eventually, Eduardo would agree to invest $15,000 in a
company that would, in April 2004, be formed as Facebook LLC. For his money, Eduardo would get 30% of the
company. Eduardo was also involved in Facebook's earliest days, as a confidant
of Mark Zuckerberg. In December, 2003, a week after Mark's first meeting with
the Harvard Connection team, when he was telling the Winklevosses that he was
too busy with schoolwork to work on or even think about HarvardConnection.com,
Mark was telling Eduardo a different story.
On December 7, 2003, we believe Mark sent Eduardo the following IM: Check
this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to
harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. 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 IM suggests that, within a week of meeting with the Winklevosses for the
first time, Mark had already decided to start his own, similar
project--"the facebook thing."
It also suggests that he had developed a strategy for dealing with his
would-be competition: Delay developing it. A few weeks after the initial
meeting with the HarvardConnection team, after Mark sent the IM to Eduardo
Saverin talking about developing "the facebook thing" and delaying
his development of HarvardConnection, Mark met with the HarvardConnection
folks, Cameron, Tyler, and Divya, for a second time. This time, instead of
meeting in the dining hall of Mark's residential hall, Kirkland House, the four
met in Mark's dorm room. Divya is said to have arrived late. In Kirkland House, the dorm rooms aren't laid
out in cinder-block-cube style: Mark's room had a narrow hallway connecting it
to his neighbor's. As Cameron and Tyler sat down on a couch in Mark's room,
Cameron spotted something in the hallway. On top of a bookshelf there was a
white board. It was the kind Web developers and product managers everywhere use
to map out their ideas. On it, Cameron read two words, "Harvard Connection."
He got up to go look at it. Immediately, Mark asked Cameron to stay out of the
hallway. Eventually Divya arrived and the four of them talked about plans for
Harvard Connection. One feature Mark brought up was designed to keep more
popular and sought-after Harvard Connection users from being stalked and
harassed by crowds of people. In this second meeting, Mark still appeared to be
actively engaged in developing Harvard Connection. But he never showed the Harvard Connection
folks any site prototypes or code. And
they didn't insist on seeing them. During the weeks in which Mark was juggling
the two projects in tandem, he also had a series of IM exchanges with a friend
named Adam D'Angelo (above). Adam and Mark went to boarding school together at
Phillips Exeter Academy. There, the pair became friends and coding partners.
Together they built a program called Synapse, a music player that supposedly
learned the listener's taste and then adapted to it. Then, in 2002 Mark went to
Harvard and Adam went to Cal Tech. But
the pair stayed in close touch, especially through AOL instant messenger.
Eventually, Adam became Facebook's CTO. Through the Harvard Connection-Facebook
saga and its aftermath, Mark kept Adam apprised of his plans and thoughts. One
purported IM exchange seems particularly relevant on the question of how Mark
distinguished between the two projects--the "facebook thing" and
"the dating site"--as well as how he was considering handling the
latter:
Zuck: So you know
how I'm making that dating site
Zuck: I wonder
how similar that is to the Facebook thing
Zuck: Because
they're probably going to be released around the same time
Zuck: Unless I
fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I'd
have it done.
D'Angelo: haha
Zuck: Like I
don't think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for
dating
Zuck: and I think
people are skeptical about joining dating things too.
Zuck: But the guy
doing the dating thing is going to promote it pretty well.
Zuck: I wonder
what the ideal solution is.
Zuck: I think the
Facebook thing by itself would draw many people, unless it were released at the
same time as the dating thing.
Zuck: In which
case both things would cancel each other out and nothing would win. Any ideas?
Like is there a good way to consolidate the two.
D'Angelo: We
could make it into a whole network like a friendster. haha. Stanford has
something like that internally
Zuck: Well I was
thinking of doing that for the facebook. The only thing that's different about
theirs is that you like request dates with people or connections with the
facebook you don't do that via the system.
D'Angelo: Yeah
Zuck: I also hate
the fact that I'm doing it for other people haha. Like I hate working under
other people. I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait
until the last day before I'm supposed to have their thing ready and then be
like "look yours isn't as good as this so if you want to join mine you
can…otherwise I can help you with yours later." Or do you think that's too
dick?
D'Angelo: I think
you should just ditch them
Zuck: The thing
is they have a programmer who could finish their thing and they have money to
pour into advertising and stuff. Oh wait I have money too. My friend who wants
to sponsor this is head of the investment society. Apparently insider trading
isn't illegal in Brazil so he's rich lol.
D'Angelo: lol
