The Facebook Effect Part 3

On December 6, Cameron Winkelvoss emailed Zuckerberg again: "One idea I came up with is an 'incest rating.'...Essentially it is a measure of how close your interests and the person's interests you are looking at are....It would be funny to see how closely related and how 'incestuous' it would be to request a date with a given person." He also suggested the site provide recommendations on who a member should date, and mused that maybe Harvard Connection should deceive users by pretending that these matchups were determined by software algorithm: "Perhaps there could be some random element incorporated into it (obviously people viewing the site shouldn't know this, for all they know it's a thoughtfully calculated recommendation)". Winkelvoss considered himself to be creating, as he put it here, a "dating site."

The emails appear to show that Zuckerberg began avoiding the three Harvard Connection founders. By January 8, 2004, he emailed Cameron: "I'm still a little skeptical that we have enough functionality in the site to really draw the attention and gain the critical ma.s.s necessary to get a site like this to run." Yet in late November he had written, "Once I get the graphics we'll be able to launch this thing....It seems like everything is working." The Harvard Connection guys repeatedly requested a meeting. When the four finally convened on January 14, Zuckerberg said he didn't have any more time to work on the project.

Zuckerberg also had a little involvement with houseSYSTEM creator Greenspan. The two met for dinner in early January in the Kirkland dining room. At the meeting, Zuckerberg invited Greenspan to partner with him to create his new project, which he didn't describe in detail. But the older student demurred. In a 333-page self-published, self-justifying autobiography he writes, "I didn't like the idea of working for someone who had just been disciplined for ignoring privacy rights on a ma.s.sive scale." (He's referring to Facemash.) Greenspan, two cla.s.ses ahead of Zuckerberg, had run his own small software company since he was fifteen and clearly felt superior to the soph.o.m.ore.

However, at the same meeting he invited Zuckerberg to incorporate his project, whatever it was, into houseSYSTEM. But Zuckerberg said he didn't want to do that because houseSYSTEM was "too useful," according to the book. Greenspan writes that this statement confused him. "It just does too much stuff," Zuckerberg continued, according to the book. "Like, it's almost overwhelming how useful it is." Today, Zuckerberg won't say much about houseSYSTEM, except that "the trick isn't adding stuff, it's taking away." houseSYSTEM eventually disappeared. Zuckerberg cla.s.smate Sam Lessin, himself a programmer and now an Internet entrepreneur, recalls it as "a huge sprawling system that could do all sorts of things." By contrast, he says, Thefacebook was almost obsessively minimal. "The only thing you could do immediately was invite more friends. It was that pureness which drove it."

Thefacebook launched on February 4. Six days after that, Cameron Winkelvoss sent Zuckerberg a letter saying he had misappropriated the Harvard Connection founders' work and owed them damages. The letter demanded Zuckerberg stop working on Thefacebook. Winkelvoss and his partners complained to the Administration Board-the same body that had disciplined Zuckerberg for Facemash. A Harvard dean got involved and asked Zuckerberg for his account of what happened.

In a long letter he wrote the dean on February 17, Zuckerberg said that from his first work on the project, he had been "somewhat disappointed with the quality of the work the previous programmers had done on the site." He called it "messy and bloated." He dismissed the ideas of the Winkelvoss brothers and Narendra. "My most socially inept friends at the school had a better idea of what would attract people to a Website than these guys." He complained about their planning. "I wasn't happy with the way they had failed to come through with their promises of advertising, the necessary hardware to run the site, or even graphics for the site (last time I checked, their front page was still using an image straight out of a Gucci ad)."

"I'm kind of appalled," he continued, "that they're threatening me after the work I've done for them free of charge....I try to shrug it off as a minor annoyance that whenever I do something successful, every capitalist out there wants a piece of the action." He ended his letter about what he called "ridiculous threats" by saying, "I didn't go through the differences between my site and theirs because the two are completely different." The dean decided not to get involved in the dispute.

Were the two services substantially different? As Cameron Winkelvoss's emails indicate, Harvard Connection was intended largely as a party guide and dating service. The intention was to "broker deals with promoters," taking a cut in the process. Thefacebook was noncommercial. It aimed to replace offline facebooks. It was centered on information about individuals. Everything on Thefacebook was generated by its users, while Harvard Connection was going to include content including "reviews of nightclubs."

The Harvard Connection, rebranded ConnectU, finally launched in late spring 2004. That fall, ConnectU's founders, a.s.sisted by lawyers who usually worked for the Winkelvosses' affluent father, sued Zuckerberg in federal court in Boston. The lawsuit a.s.serted that Zuckerberg stole ideas including "creating the first niche social network for college/university students"; "serving as a directory of people and their interests and qualifications, a forum for the expression of opinion and ideas, and a safe network of connections"; requiring members to register using their ".edu" email addresses; and launching at Harvard and then extending to other schools, with an eventual plan to include "every accredited academic inst.i.tution domestically and internationally."

During the time he was working for Harvard Connection, Zuckerberg may have become uneasy about the fact that he was already working on his own social network. He certainly should have alerted the Winkelvoss brothers and Narendra earlier about what to expect. He was rude. He became very uncooperative. But long before he met the Winkelvosses and Divya Narendra he already was thinking about what kind of social software was possible on the Internet. That's why the Harvard Connection project interested him in the first place. The civil lawsuit filed on behalf of the three alleges The civil lawsuit filed on behalf of the three alleges behavior considerably worse than rudeness: "copyright infringement, breach of actual or implied contract, misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of fiduciary duty, unjust enrichment, unfair business practices, intentional interference with prospective business advantage, breach of duty of good faith and fair dealing, fraud, and breach of confidence." The complainants asked to take over the entire Facebook site and be paid damages equal to its value. Pretty strong stuff for a supposed ten-hour project for which Zuckerberg never had a written contract and was never paid. behavior considerably worse than rudeness: "copyright infringement, breach of actual or implied contract, misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of fiduciary duty, unjust enrichment, unfair business practices, intentional interference with prospective business advantage, breach of duty of good faith and fair dealing, fraud, and breach of confidence." The complainants asked to take over the entire Facebook site and be paid damages equal to its value. Pretty strong stuff for a supposed ten-hour project for which Zuckerberg never had a written contract and was never paid.

Zuckerberg probably refined his own ideas during the course of working on Harvard Connection, but there don't seem to be elements in common between the sites that had not already been used by other services in the past. Every social networking plan on the planet by this time was influenced by Friendster. It did prove critical for Thefacebook to use .edu addresses for registration, but other sites at colleges had already begun taking a similar approach. Club Nexus limited itself to Stanford-only email addresses as early as fall 2001.

In September 2004 when they filed suit against Thefacebook, ConnectU claimed fifteen thousand users at two hundred colleges. Thefacebook competed with it vigorously. ConnectU did lead to one huge success for its founders, however-a 2008 financial settlement of the lawsuit. against Thefacebook, ConnectU claimed fifteen thousand users at two hundred colleges. Thefacebook competed with it vigorously. ConnectU did lead to one huge success for its founders, however-a 2008 financial settlement of the lawsuit. It gave the ConnectU's creators plenty of money It gave the ConnectU's creators plenty of money to go away-reportedly $20 million in cash as well as stock in Facebook worth at least $10 million. ConnectU was already moribund, but now it shut down. to go away-reportedly $20 million in cash as well as stock in Facebook worth at least $10 million. ConnectU was already moribund, but now it shut down.

Aaron Greenspan also accused Zuckerberg of stealing his ideas. In his autobiography In his autobiography, t.i.tled Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era, Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era, he writes that he "invented The Facebook while attending Harvard College." In April 2008 he pet.i.tioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the trademark "Facebook." He claimed he was the rightful owner, because he pioneered the name months earlier than Zuckerberg as part of houseSYSTEM. Greenspan served as his own attorney. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board decided his claims were plausible enough to let the action move forward. Some months later, Facebook settled with Greenspan for an undisclosed sum. he writes that he "invented The Facebook while attending Harvard College." In April 2008 he pet.i.tioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the trademark "Facebook." He claimed he was the rightful owner, because he pioneered the name months earlier than Zuckerberg as part of houseSYSTEM. Greenspan served as his own attorney. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board decided his claims were plausible enough to let the action move forward. Some months later, Facebook settled with Greenspan for an undisclosed sum.

Greenspan doesn't accuse only Zuckerberg. He writes in his book that the Winkelvoss brothers and Narendra took ideas from him, too, and that Harvard Connection was also an imitation of houseSYSTEM.

Social networking has now extended across the entire planet. Facebook is the world's largest such network. It is the rare high school and college student who does not routinely use Facebook or Mys.p.a.ce. These systems have become so pervasive for communication that young people barely use email anymore. From sixdegrees to Friendster to Facebook, social networking has become a familiar and ubiquitous part of the Internet.

4.

Fall 2004.

"Look at the world around you. With the slightest push-in just the right place-it can be tipped."

As the fall semester of 2004 loomed, Thefacebook was on the verge of a serious crisis. Over the summer, members.h.i.+p had almost doubled from about 100,000 to 200,000. That was good and bad. "We were just lucky it wasn't completely bringing down the architecture," says Dustin Moskovitz, who spent as much time as anyone working to keep that from happening. "Our servers were already stretched, but we knew a full load in the fall would be double that. Service got really unstable."

But the crisis wasn't just a technological one. Tension was growing among the company's small team about whether Thefacebook itself ought to be their only priority. Zuckerberg was getting increasingly interested in Wirehog, his parallel project to enable Thefacebook users to share photos and other media peer-to-peer.

Throughout the summer, students and student governments from colleges around the country had been emailing, texting, and calling Thefacebook with pleas to add their school to its roster. Sometimes they sent physical letters and included candy or flowers, or even came to the house in Palo Alto. People were literally begging to get into the service.

Saverin was still sitting on the bank account. Zuckerberg was paying bills out of his own pocket. He and his parents had loaned the company He and his parents had loaned the company many tens of thousands of dollars. But the boys of Thefacebook knew that if they didn't have enough servers when school opened the service might just grind to a halt. "We were really worried we would be another Friendster," recalls Dustin Moskovitz. "We felt that the only reason Friendster wasn't the dominant college network was because they were still having problems scaling." (That's "growing," in non-Net parlance.) many tens of thousands of dollars. But the boys of Thefacebook knew that if they didn't have enough servers when school opened the service might just grind to a halt. "We were really worried we would be another Friendster," recalls Dustin Moskovitz. "We felt that the only reason Friendster wasn't the dominant college network was because they were still having problems scaling." (That's "growing," in non-Net parlance.) And another "Friendster" was unfolding before their eyes. Orkut, after briefly seeming to rival Mys.p.a.ce, was now getting bogged down with performance problems, in addition to being usurped by Brazilians. Even the great Google couldn't help a social network grow smoothly.

Thefacebook was an atypical start-up, in financial terms. It hadn't required outside funding up to this point. By now-with growth likely and costs rising-a new Silicon Valley company would typically solicit venture capitalists to make a big cash infusion, possibly several million dollars for a company of Thefacebook's size. But in such a scenario, VCs take their pound of flesh-a very big chunk of the company, perhaps a quarter or even a third. Parker had gone through that at Plaxo, where he'd lost the battle of wills with the VCs and been kicked out of his own company. He had successfully infected Zuckerberg with his aversion to VCs. The two were resolute about retaining full control of the company's destiny. After all, they just wanted a few hundred thousand dollars to buy more servers.

Within days after he joined Thefacebook, Sean Parker called his friend Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and a big angel investor. Hoffman had been coaching him through the painful denouement of his relations.h.i.+p with Plaxo and had become a close friend. Parker also was pragmatic. He knew it was important to keep that sixdegrees patent close to Thefacebook's camp.

Hoffman was impressed with Thefacebook almost immediately but didn't want to be its lead investor, given his involvement in LinkedIn. By mid-2004, many in the Internet industry were beginning to wonder if social networking might ultimately all converge in one big network. Although Hoffman didn't believe that himself, he knew that some would see it as a conflict of interest if he led an investment in Thefacebook. So he arranged for Parker and Zuckerberg to meet with Peter Thiel, the brooding, dark-haired financial genius who had co-founded and led PayPal and was now a private investor.

Hoffman is a key member of a very distinct and important Silicon Valley subculture-the wealthy former employees of PayPal. Hoffman remained close to many onetime PayPal colleagues, including Thiel. PayPal created the first successful large-scale online payment system and sold itself to eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002, just two years after it was created in a merger of two start-ups. Even before PayPal, Thiel had been a professional investor and he was now investing in start-ups and starting a hedge fund. He had put money into Friendster as well as LinkedIn.

Thiel turned out to be the perfect investor for Thefacebook. He had seen the world from the perspective of a successful entrepreneur at PayPal. He was a fan of Sean Parker, whom he'd gotten to know at Plaxo and through Friendster. He was also a contrarian thinker. Investors were still generally leery about consumer Internet companies, recalling how much they'd lost when the dot-com bubble burst. "So we felt this was the place to look for opportunity," recalls Thiel. "And within the consumer Internet, social networking seemed to be sort of an incipient trend. But in 2004 social networks were perceived as businesses that were very ephemeral, and people thought it was like investing in a brand of jeans or something. There was a question whether all these companies were just fas.h.i.+ons that would only last a very short period of time."

But the message Thiel heard about Thefacebook gave him confidence. In his office sat Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Venuto, the company's new lawyer, who had worked on Plaxo with Parker and had started working with Facebook in the late summer. Hoffman has set up the meeting and included his LinkedIn protege Matt Cohler, an upbeat, brown-haired Yale graduate. Parker, still only twenty-four but already a practiced pitchman, did most of the talking. He explained that while Thefacebook was still relatively small, that was because it required a .edu email address. The potential universe of members was deliberately circ.u.mscribed. Only students at select schools could join. What happened once it opened at a new school was what most impressed Thiel. Within days it typically captured essentially the entire student body, and more than 80 percent of users returned to the site daily! n.o.body had ever heard of such an extraordinary combination of growth and usage in a start-up Internet company.

Zuckerberg wore his then-standard uniform of T-s.h.i.+rt, jeans, and Adidas open-toed rubber flip-flops. It certainly wasn't calculated to impress. Thiel recalls that he seemed kind of introverted. Zuckerberg said little, occasionally answering questions, and asking a few. Yes, they were receiving requests from hundreds of schools that wanted Thefacebook on their campuses. He talked about some of his ideas for how the product might evolve. He also spoke briefly about his hopes for Wirehog. He showed absolutely no impulse to kowtow, and that, combined with his matter-of-factness about what Thefacebook was achieving, made him seem even more impressive. He didn't need to wear a tie to convince someone he was an entrepreneur worth backing.

But Zuckerberg was also unself-conscious about admitting what he didn't know. The conversation quickly turned to the mechanics of an investment, and Thiel was slinging around technical phrases and jargon about the deal. Zuckerberg repeatedly interrupted: "Explain that to me. What does it mean?"

Within days, following a little back-and-forth with Parker, Thiel agreed to what may go down in history as one of the great investments of all time. He agreed to loan Thefacebook $500,000, which was intended to eventually convert into a 10.2 percent stake in the company. That would give Thefacebook a valuation of $4.9 million. One reason Thiel agreed to provide the money as a loan was because until everything was settled with Saverin there were legal obstacles to a formal stock investment. The provisions of the loan were that if Thefacebook reached 1.5 million users before December 31, 2004-less than six months later-it would convert to an equity investment, and the company wouldn't have to pay it back. Zuckerberg and Parker had a big incentive to keep their growth going.

The $4.9 million valuation was lower than others that had been dangled in front of Zuckerberg, but he was pleased to have found an investor who seemed to believe in giving the entrepreneur the benefit of the doubt. Thiel told Zuckerberg Thiel told Zuckerberg "just don't f.u.c.k it up," which the CEO now says was pretty much the only advice he got from Thiel in the company's early years. "I was comfortable with them pursuing their original vison," says Thiel, looking back. "And it was a very reasonable valuation. I thought it was going to be a pretty safe investment." Though Thefacebook didn't meet the December 31 deadline for 1.5 million users, Thiel let the loan convert shortly afterward anyway. Thiel sold almost half his stock in 2009, but even so his remaining shares today are worth-at a minimum-several hundred million dollars. When he made the loan Thiel also joined the company's board of directors. "just don't f.u.c.k it up," which the CEO now says was pretty much the only advice he got from Thiel in the company's early years. "I was comfortable with them pursuing their original vison," says Thiel, looking back. "And it was a very reasonable valuation. I thought it was going to be a pretty safe investment." Though Thefacebook didn't meet the December 31 deadline for 1.5 million users, Thiel let the loan convert shortly afterward anyway. Thiel sold almost half his stock in 2009, but even so his remaining shares today are worth-at a minimum-several hundred million dollars. When he made the loan Thiel also joined the company's board of directors.

Hoffman put in an additional $40,000, as did his friend Mark Pincus, and a couple friends of the company invested small amounts, bringing the total financing to around $600,000. Attending the investment presentation also made a deep impression on Hoffman's LinkedIn employee Matt Cohler. He wanted to buy stock in Thefacebook, but Zuckerberg and Parker felt they had enough money for now. Later, however, Cohler would find a way to get some.

Harvard's incoming freshman cla.s.s in the fall of 2004 was both flattered and shocked when college president Lawrence Summers, former Treasury secretary of the United States, greeted them by announcing he had already acquainted himself with many of them by viewing profiles on Thefacebook. The service was already so entrenched in Harvard's undergraduate culture that incoming students heard about it and created profiles even before they arrived. But the information they had included was intended to impress their peers, not be seen by the president of the college. It made some uncomfortable to think that their personal details and trivia were now so accessible to authorities like Summers. Already Thefacebook was making people wonder how much online self-disclosure was appropriate.

Thefacebook, however, did meet a concrete need among students at Harvard and other colleges. Paper facebooks were handed out freshman year at most schools and typically showed photos of every student along with just their name and high school. Yet for all their limitations they had come to play an outsize role in the social life of schools. If you met a guy at a party, the next morning you'd pull out the facebook to show your roommates what he looked like. If you were by now a junior, the picture would be more than two years old, but it was still the best people had. It was referred to at some schools as the "Freshmenu," and people would play games with it if they were bored on Friday nights. Open to a random page. The winner was the one who had to turn the fewest pages before they came to ten people they'd slept with. Things like that.

So at Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia, Stanford, Yale, and other schools, Thefacebook quickly became an essential social tool-a considerable advance over the outdated paper book. Now if a girl met a guy at a frat party, an elaborate set of electronic rituals was set in motion. They took on even more significance if you had already "hooked up" (slept together). The first key question was whether the guy immediately friended you on Thefacebook. If he didn't, that was a disastrous sign. At the time, any student could see everyone else's profile at his or her school. Another urgent key activity was to closely examine the friends of your new acquaintance. Thefacebook told you which friends you shared. A large number was a promising indicator.

Thefacebook had a strong s.e.xual undertone. You were asked to list your relations.h.i.+p status and whether you were interested in men or women. One of the site's standard data fields was labeled "Looking for." Possible answers included Dating, A Relations.h.i.+p, Random Play, and Whatever I Can Get. Flirting on Thefacebook became a sort of art form, though one feature-the poke-made doing so absurdly easy.

Poking was a particular fascination in those days, even among the supposedly sophisticated students of Harvard. There was no certainty that a poke on Thefacebook would be seen as flirting-at least in theory it could be construed as just a friendly gesture-so even the shy occasionally found the gumption to click on it. The very fact that the meaning of a poke was so indeterminate was one of its appeals. It could mean you liked someone, found them attractive, enjoyed their comment in cla.s.s, wanted to distract them from their homework, or just wanted their attention. The recipient was only told that he or she had been poked, so was left to interpret that information however they would. The proper response? A poke back, which Thefacebook's software politely inquired if you'd like to do.

"Friending" had an element of compet.i.tiveness from day one, as it had on Friendster and Mys.p.a.ce. If your roommate had 300 friends and you only had 100, you resolved to do better. "Compet.i.tion definitely caused Thefacebook to spread faster at Dartmouth," says Susan Gordon, cla.s.s of 2006. She was on an Italian study program in Rome when Thefacebook blanketed Dartmouth almost overnight in March 2004. She immediately began receiving emails from friends telling her that she had to join, otherwise she would be way behind when she returned at the end of the quarter. "It made a lot of sense to all of us immediately," she says. "An online green book-how fun!" (Dartmouth's facebook had a green cover.) The fact that it was Ivy Leagueonly was also rea.s.suringly exclusive. It had started at Harvard. It must be okay.

Perfecting the details of your own profile in order to make yourself a more attractive potential friend occupied a considerable amount of time for many of these newly networked Ivy Leaguers. Find exactly the right picture. Change it regularly. Consider carefully how you describe your interests. Since everyone's cla.s.ses were listed, some students even began selecting what they studied in order to project a certain image of themselves. And many definitely selected cla.s.ses based on who Thefacebook indicated would be joining them there. A subtle form of stalking became almost routine-if someone looked interesting, you set out to get to know them. The more friends you already shared the easier that process would usually turn out to be. Your "facebook," as profiles on the service began to be called, increasingly became your public face. It defined your ident.i.ty.

People spent hours and hours visiting the profiles of other students, initially just at their own school but soon across Thefacebook's network at other elite campuses as well. Nick Summers, Columbia '05, who was user number 796 on Thefacebook, recalls being able to browse through the faces of every user on the entire service from A to Z. There wasn't that much you could do there except maintain your own profile, add friends, poke people, and view the profiles of others. Nonetheless, students spent thousands of hours examining every nook and cranny of others' profiles. You could ask Thefacebook to display ten random students from your school for you to peruse, or you could search for people based on various parameters. The latent nosiness and prurience of an entire generation had been engaged.

In September, Thefacebook added two features that gave students even more reason to spend time there. Now included on user profiles was something called "the wall," which allowed anyone to write whatever they wanted right on your profile. It could be a message to you or a comment about you-the equivalent of a public email. Any visitor to your profile could see it. Now not only could you surf around examining people, but you could react to what you learned. Or you could simply invite someone to meet you in the cafeteria later. Or make a seductive comment. And another friend could comment on that comment in his or her own post to the wall. Suddenly every Thefacebook user had their own public bulletin board.

Over the summer, Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and Parker had coined a term for how students seemed to use the site. They called it "the trance." Once you started combing through Thefacebook it was very easy to just keep going. "It was hypnotic," says Parker. "You'd just keep clicking and clicking and clicking from profile to profile, viewing the data." The wall was intended to keep users even more transfixed by giving them more to see inside the service. It seemed to work. Almost immediately the wall became Thefacebook's most popular feature.

The other new addition was Groups. Now any user could create a group on Thefacebook for any reason. Each group had its own page, much like a profile, which included its own wall-like comment board. Instantly, inane groups sprouted at Harvard with names like "I puke Vitamin Water," which for some reason quickly garnered 1,000 members. Emma MacKinnon, Harvard '05, was writing her senior thesis on the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and remembers belonging to a group on Thefacebook called "I hate the guy my thesis is about." Its members were women writing about men. "There was always also a little description about 'Why I really love him,'" she recalls.

Many students began to abandon their address books because they could use Thefacebook to contact anyone by simply entering their name. You didn't need to remember or store anyone's email address. And if you wanted to reach someone immediately, almost everyone listed both their cell-phone number and their AIM instant-message address in their profile. These were not the anonymous ident.i.ties of an AOL chat room. The Internet had entered a different era. It was becoming personal.

Thefacebook's full-time California staff was down to just Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, Parker, and operations manager Halicioglu, who stayed in San Jose, twenty miles south. Andrew McCollum lived with them, too, still focusing on Wirehog. Thiel's money enabled them to buy new servers, and they were expanding furiously. In the first week of the fall semester they added fifteen or so new colleges. Thefacebook was quickly losing its elitist edge. By September 10, the list included places like the University of Oklahoma and Michigan Tech.

Since they had to move out of the trashed summer sublet, they found a new rental in Los Altos Hills, a few miles south. Its yard backed onto Interstate 280. That helped solve problems with neighbors-it was so noisy there all the time that n.o.body noticed parties and late-night antics. But the construction dust left over in the brand new house made the house almost uninhabitable for Sean Parker. His allergies went into crisis mode there. Luckily his girlfriend let him stay at her place.

They were good at running a website, but not so good at running a house. They turned the living room into a makes.h.i.+ft office with whiteboards on the periphery, tables scattered with laptops, and papers strewn everywhere. One of Zuckerberg's high school friends stopped by and found that all the tables had been pushed to one side of the room. They'd overloaded the wiring and tripped a circuit breaker, which shut off power to some of the outlets. Rather than search for the circuit box, they'd just moved over to the remaining outlets. The visitor found the circuit breakers and flipped a switch, so the geeks could spread back out. Most of the rest of the house was empty, except for mattresses here and there and a bunch of never-unpacked boxes.

Hygiene was, if anything, deteriorating. In the kitchen, dirty dishes spilled out of the sink and n.o.body ever emptied the trash. Ants were everywhere. Zuckerberg continued leaving empty drink cans wherever he happened to finish them. This is how twenty-year-old college kids live.

While the housekeeping may have been immature, the company increasingly wasn't. With its new structure and rapidly growing members.h.i.+p, Thefacebook seemed to be growing up. Demand was even more ferocious than they'd expected. In September alone they nearly doubled members.h.i.+p, to around 400,000. The number hit half a million on October 21, as growth began to accelerate. They'd figured out over the summer how to automate much of the process of adding a new school, so the painstaking a.s.sembly of dorm lists and cla.s.s schedules was gone.

But it was quickly becoming clear that even Thiel's money wasn't enough to cover all the costs of the rapidly growing company's infrastructure. Adding new servers was an almost daily activity. Sean Parker, whom Zuckerberg had deputized to handle all financial matters, got in touch with a firm called Western Technology Investment, which he knew from his Plaxo days. WTI, as it is known, is in the business of "venture lending." It makes short-term loans-usually repayable within about three years-to start-ups at interest rates ranging from 10 percent to 13 percent. Maurice Werdegar, a partner at WTI, negotiated with Parker a $300,000 three-year credit line that was specifically allocated to cover Thefacebook's costs of computer hardware and other physical a.s.sets, which WTI put a lien on until the loan was repaid. The loan closed in December 2004 with its credit line expected to run out by the following July. Werdegar, who was a big fan of Parker's and had not had any difficulty dealing with him at Plaxo, liked what he was hearing from him about Thefacebook's prospects. He asked if WTI could in addition invest $25,000 at the same company valuation Thiel had gotten.

Werdegar, at the time a junior partner in the firm, arranged for the two founders of WTI to join him for a meeting in October 2004 with Parker and an accountant named Mairtini Ni Dhomhnaill (she was Irish) who was temporarily working for Thefacebook. Before the meeting, Werdegar's partners told him that while they were happy to be dealing with Sean Parker again, this company didn't seem to merit a stock investment on top of the loan.

That att.i.tude quickly changed. "After an hour and a half listening to Sean we all walked out and-I will forever remember this-they asked 'How much of that equity can we get?'" recalls Werdegar. Parker was refining his rap, and the facts were just getting better and better.

The company's latest governance structure, following Thiel's investment, had some unusual provisions. The board of directors included four seats: One was held by investor Thiel, one by Parker, and one by Zuckerberg. The fourth seat was Zuckerberg's to allocate as he saw fit, and remained for the time being vacant. The idea was to outnumber outsiders and make it impossible for any future investor to usurp the company. Since Thiel was himself a former entrepreneur and a believer in letting founders control their creations, it didn't bother him.

This is a key way Parker put his stamp on the company. He had been fired twice-from Napster and from Plaxo. He didn't want to be fired from Thefacebook, and he wanted to make it impossible for Zuckerberg to get fired, either. "What I told Mark," says Parker, "was that I would try to be for him what no one had been for me-a person who sort of shepherds his rear and puts him in a position of power so he'd have the opportunity to make his own mistakes and learn from them." Another provision in the company's corporate doc.u.ments guaranteed that if any of the founders, or Parker, ever left the company for any reason, they would be able to keep both their company email address and their company laptop. After being ousted from Plaxo, Parker had found himself without either, and thus n.o.body could get in touch with him.

"It was really beneficial to us that Sean had been a founder who had been burned," says Moskovitz. "We didn't know anything about how to incorporate a company or to take financing, but we had one of the most conservative people figuring it out for us and trying to protect us." When he calls Parker conservative he is referring not to his personal style. Parker could be erratic. But Moskovitz recalls his role at the company in those days fondly, despite some unhappy incidents later. Parker was old enough to buy the alcohol, he knew how to throw a party that involved more than Beirut beer pong, and he could talk the language of venture capital. "It was just a comfort to have him around," says Moskovitz. "Sean is like excitable and kind of a crazy person, but it just generally makes life more interesting when you're a bunch of geeks sitting around a table hacking all day." Parker, twenty-four, seemed a sophisticate to these twenty-year-olds.

Zuckerberg may have been more focused and steady than Parker, but he too had his quirks. They were, however, mostly intellectual and verbal. For instance, he had a way of punctuating a conversation, when it reached a critical moment, by suddenly p.r.o.nouncing, "Now you know who you're fighting!" It was a quote from one of his favorite movies, Troy, Troy, which he had seen on Harvard Square with friends on his twentieth birthday the previous May. Zuckerberg had loved studying the cla.s.sics. In a key scene from the movie, the Greek warrior Achilles, played by Brad Pitt, confronts his Trojan adversary Hector: which he had seen on Harvard Square with friends on his twentieth birthday the previous May. Zuckerberg had loved studying the cla.s.sics. In a key scene from the movie, the Greek warrior Achilles, played by Brad Pitt, confronts his Trojan adversary Hector: Hector: Let us pledge that the winner will allow the loser all the proper funeral rituals.Achilles: There are no pacts between lions and men.[stabs spear into ground, and takes off helmet, throwing it to the side]Achilles: Now you know who you're fighting.

As a fencer-the civilized version of a swordsman-Zuckerberg sometimes saw the world as a fencing match, a forum for combat in which the ideal thrust is the one that catches an opponent off guard.

One battle that had become engaged was the one with the Winkelvoss/Narendra axis. The company had by now hired another law firm just to defend itself against the lawsuit, which was beginning to wend its way through federal court beginning to wend its way through federal court in Boston and had become a significant magnet for the company's limited a.s.sets, costing about $20,000 per month in lawyers' fees. After a phone call from the lawyers, Zuckerberg would briefly recount the latest news to Moskovitz, then stand up and declaim, "Now you know who you're fighting!" At other moments, the phrase made even less sense. in Boston and had become a significant magnet for the company's limited a.s.sets, costing about $20,000 per month in lawyers' fees. After a phone call from the lawyers, Zuckerberg would briefly recount the latest news to Moskovitz, then stand up and declaim, "Now you know who you're fighting!" At other moments, the phrase made even less sense.

But incongruous movie quotes gave Zuckerberg, who could otherwise frequently lapse into long periods of silence, tremendous if inexplicable pleasure. He also inserted them inside Thefacebook. Whenever you searched for something in those days there was a little box below the results. Initially it had some tiny type that said, "I'll find something to put here." Later that was replaced with "I don't even know what a quail looks like." It's a throwaway line from The Wedding Crashers. The Wedding Crashers. Another quote that appeared there was "Too close for missiles. Switching to guns," which is spoken at a critical moment in Another quote that appeared there was "Too close for missiles. Switching to guns," which is spoken at a critical moment in Top Gun Top Gun by the fighter pilot played by Tom Cruise. by the fighter pilot played by Tom Cruise.

The quotes came to encapsulate, in the fas.h.i.+on of schoolboy in-jokes, the spirit of the company-playful, combative, and despite the technical sophistication, a bit juvenile. Students at colleges around the United States spent hours arguing about the significance of these inscrutable epigrams. Not long afterward, Aaron Sittig designed company T-s.h.i.+rts. They showed a fighter plane streaking past a couple of quails.

The twelve-year-old Ford Explorer they'd purchased over the summer finally gave out. One day it just wouldn't start, with or without the key. Zuckerberg and Parker brought it up at their next board meeting with Thiel, who approved buying a company car. "Just keep it under fifty," he exhorted them. They bought a sleek black new Infiniti FX35, a luxury sport utility vehicle. The car has a streamlined, vaguely malevolent look, as if poised on its haunches to leap on top of some unsuspecting Ford. Now you know who you're fighting! They nicknamed it "the Warthog," after a tank in the video game Halo, which they played regularly on their Xbox. The toys were getting better.

Facebook seemed to be thriving, but Zuckerberg was thinking about Wirehog almost as much. "What was so bizarre about the way Facebook was unfolding at that point," says Sean Parker, "is that Mark just didn't totally believe in it and wanted to go and do all these other things." Zuckerberg felt he had cause to hedge his bets. He was worried that once Thefacebook began trying to expand beyond college it would hit a wall of resistance. He was genuinely unsure which of his projects would ultimately lead to the best business. And it wasn't just about business. Zuckerberg hadn't changed much since he was just out of Exeter and turned down millions for Synapse, the MP3-playing tool he built with D'Angelo. The ideas were at least as interesting as the prospect of riches.

In any case he was confident one of his projects would really catch fire. Maybe it would be Wirehog. "Mark always talked about how he just liked to start things, especially back then," says Dustin Moskovitz. "He was like 'My life plan basically is I'll prototype a bunch of these apps and then like try and get people to run them for me.'"

Parker, on the other hand, remained resolutely opposed to Wirehog. "I specifically said Wirehog is a terrible idea and a huge distraction. We shouldn't be working on it,'" he recalls. Yet Zuckerberg prevailed upon Parker, who reluctantly hired Steve Venuto, the same lawyer who had set up Plaxo, to create Wirehog the company. In order to try to seduce Parker's support, Zuckerberg made him one of Wirehog's five shareholders, along with McCollum, D'Angelo, and Moskovitz, who himself was ambivalent about Wirehog. "I needed Mark's attention on Facebook," remembers Moskovitz. Looking back, Zuckerberg concedes that he didn't always make things easy for his partners: "Dustin was fully bought in to what we were doing [with Thefacebook]. And I was always thinking about the next thing. Until we got to this big inflection point, for my calculus it may have just not been worth the amount of work."

The group was split. McCollum and D'Angelo focused almost entirely on Wirehog, while Parker and Moskovitz worked only on Thefacebook. Zuckerberg straddled both projects. "Wirehog was more interesting to a lot of us," says D'Angelo. "There were a lot of social networks. Wirehog was a product I was interested in using myself, and it was more technically interesting, too."

Wirehog was a stand-alone program that users downloaded onto their computers. The entrepreneurs built a little profile box for it on Thefacebook, so it could figure out who your friends were and whether they too had downloaded Wirehog. It gave you a window into their computer and told you what files they were willing to share. Wirehog was intended primarily for photos, since that was what Thefacebook's users were most vociferously asking to share with one another. (At the time you were only allowed one photo of yourself on your profile page.) But Wirehog could also handle video, music, and doc.u.ments. "We kind of thought of Wirehog as the first application that was built on top of Facebook," says D'Angelo. Zuckerberg also talks about Wirehog as the first example of treating Thefacebook as a platform for other types of applications. D'Angelo kept writing code for Wirehog in the fall after he returned to Caltech.

Over the protestations of Parker and Moskovitz, Wirehog launched in November 2004 as an invitation-only site at a few colleges. A page on Thefacebook explained: "Wirehog is a social application that lets friends exchange files of any type with each other over the web. Thefacebook and Wirehog are integrated so that Wirehog knows who your friends are in order to make sure that only people in your network can see your files." Its site listed things you could do with it: "share pictures and other media with friends; browse and save files through the web; roll around in the mud oinking and such; transfer files through firewalls."

But Wirehog was too complicated for most users of Thefacebook, just as Parker had predicted. He was desperate to shut it down, so Thefacebook could avoid the prospect of a debilitating lawsuit. They may have been separate companies, but Thefacebook was where a user went to download the Wirehog software. Soon even Zuckerberg began to cool on Wirehog. "He just like came back to reality on how much time he was spending," says Moskovitz.

On November 2, Mys.p.a.ce hit 5 million users. The boys in Los Altos Hills were bemused. They saw themselves creating an anti-Mys.p.a.ce. Where that service was wide-open, florid and unconstrained, Thefacebook was minimal, with limited flexibility and no decorative freedom. Mys.p.a.ce was unconcerned with who you really were. Thefacebook authenticated you with your university email, and you had no choice but to identify yourself accurately. On Mys.p.a.ce, the default setting was that you could see anybody's profile. On Thefacebook, the default allowed you only to see profiles of others at your school, or those who had explicitly accepted you as a friend. A degree of privacy was built in. "On Mys.p.a.ce people got to do whatever they wanted on their profiles," says Zuckerberg. "We always thought people would share more if we didn't let them do whatever they wanted, because it gave them some order."

While Zuckerberg was relatively unfl.u.s.tered by Mys.p.a.ce's advances, he worried much more about collegiate compet.i.tion. A variety of other university-centric social networks was quickly rising. It became a top company priority to stamp them out. One, called CollegeFacebook.com, was a pure copycat, in look and tone. Its strategy was to go after less snooty schools that the elite Thefacebook hadn't yet targeted. It briefly garnered hundreds of thousands of users until the real thing arrived. The Winkelvoss/Narendra team had finally launched Harvard Connection in May, now dubbed ConnectU to emphasize it was for any school. Columbia's CUCommunity, similarly renamed Campus Network, was also expanding to other campuses and becoming established. These compet.i.tors were expanding more quickly than Thefacebook. They typically had fewer users at each new campus so they could add more users without putting as much demand on their systems as Thefacebook's hordes did. But their widening presence still made Zuckerberg and his partners nervous.

So they embarked on what they called a "surround strategy." If another social network had begun to take root at a certain school, Thefacebook would open not only there but at as many other campuses as possible in the immediate vicinity. The idea was that students at nearby schools would create a cross-network pressure, leading students at the original school to prefer Thefacebook. For example, Baylor University in Waco, Texas, had one of the earliest homegrown college social networks. Thefacebook launched at the University of Texas at Arlington to the north, Southwestern University to the southwest, and Texas A&M University to the southeast. This pincer movement tended to work, since Thefacebook typically saw such a viral explosion when it launched at schools that didn't already have a social network on campus. Zuckerberg was only twenty, but already he was strategically outmaneuvering his compet.i.tors.

Zuckerberg took a utilitarian approach to advertising. If costs were going to go up, ad revenues needed to as well. He wanted to make sure Thefacebook earned enough to cover its costs, which were hovering at around $50,000 a month. "If we're gonna need $100,000 worth of servers or $500,000 worth of new people...then how much advertising do we need now?" he asked rhetorically at the time, in an interview with the Harvard Crimson. Harvard Crimson.

Y2M, the advertising representative for the company, scored a coup in August with a breakthrough ad deal from Paramount Pictures to promote the November premiere of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. In those days the only ads on Thefacebook were long vertical rectangles on the lower left side of a page. Paramount paid Thefacebook $15,000 for 5 million impressions (what ad people call a $3 CPM, or cost per thousand views). Paramount also pioneered a concept that would later become a critical piece of Thefacebook's commercial structure-a special group for fans of the movie. The ad urged users to join the group, which consisted mostly of a discussion board. The "group description" read, "Everyone sing it with me now! 'Who lives in a Pineapple under the sea?'" Some users thought the whole thing idiotic and said so on the movie's page. There were as many comments insulting people who liked the movie as there were notes from fans. Nonetheless, the experiment was deemed a success. Over 2,500 users of Thefacebook mentioned the movie in their profile. In those days the only ads on Thefacebook were long vertical rectangles on the lower left side of a page. Paramount paid Thefacebook $15,000 for 5 million impressions (what ad people call a $3 CPM, or cost per thousand views). Paramount also pioneered a concept that would later become a critical piece of Thefacebook's commercial structure-a special group for fans of the movie. The ad urged users to join the group, which consisted mostly of a discussion board. The "group description" read, "Everyone sing it with me now! 'Who lives in a Pineapple under the sea?'" Some users thought the whole thing idiotic and said so on the movie's page. There were as many comments insulting people who liked the movie as there were notes from fans. Nonetheless, the experiment was deemed a success. Over 2,500 users of Thefacebook mentioned the movie in their profile.

By December, Y2M had signed a landmark deal with Apple Computer. Not only did Apple sponsor a group on Thefacebook for fans of its products, but it also paid $1 per month for every user who joined, with a monthly minimum of $50,000. The group was immediately popular, and the minimum was easily exceeded. This was by far the biggest financial development in Thefacebook's short history. It alone more or less covered the company's expenses. Executives at Apple were thrilled because they had acquired a powerful platform which allowed them to be in constant touch with Apple fans in college, whom they began offering special discounts and promotions like free iTunes songs. The deal gratified Zuckerberg because it wasn't a conventional banner advertis.e.m.e.nt, which he detested.

There were also more modest ads students could buy themselves right on the site, called flyers. A flyer could be targeted just for students at your school. At even the largest campus the ads cost less than $100 per day. It was an effective way for campus groups to promote activities or for a fraternity to announce a big party. The boys wanted to take this further, to create a system so merchants in college towns could buy ads that targeted students. So Parker recruited a new employee, a former roommate of his named Ezra Callahan, who had sold ads for the Stanford Daily Stanford Daily when he was a student there. Parker offered him the job by email while Callahan was traveling in Europe. A few weeks later he showed up direct from the airport at 1 when he was a student there. Parker offered him the job by email while Callahan was traveling in Europe. A few weeks later he showed up direct from the airport at 1 A.M A.M. Parker was at a movie with his girlfriend and hadn't told the others much about the new hire. So when Moskovitz blearily opened the door he had no idea who Callahan was. "I'm Ezra. I work for you guys," insisted Callahan. Moskovitz let him in. Callahan got a bunch of stock options, which he a.s.sumed would be worthless. He planned on going to law school soon anyway. Though the local business product occupied much of his time and that of many others in ensuing months, it never launched. Callahan's other job was to learn from Saverin how to manage and schedule all the other ads. The "CFO" had been doing it remotely from the East Coast. Even though Zuckerberg had for now reached a detente with his erstwhile partner, he was whittling away Saverin's remaining responsibilities.

On November 30, Thefacebook registered its millionth user. It had existed for just ten months. Peter Thiel had recently opened a nightclub and restaurant in San Francisco called Frisson. He offered up its VIP lounge for a party. Parker, the organizer, piggybacked on it a celebration for his own twenty-fifth birthday on December 3.

The email invitations were portentous. At top was a quote from Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point The Tipping Point: "Look at the world around you. With the slightest push-in just the right place-it can be tipped." The invitation continued: "And tip it has..." It was indicative of the way Parker talked about the company. In his opinion the company's success was essentially a fait accompli. Even Zuckerberg was amazed they had gotten to a million so soon.

D'Angelo and Saverin flew in, along with public relations manager and former Zuckerberg roommate Chris Hughes. Investors, friends, and hangers-on drank the night away in glitzy surroundings, regardless of the fact that several of the core team were not yet of legal drinking age. And there were still questions about where priorities lay. One guest at the party asked D'Angelo what he did at Thefacebook. "Oh no," D'Angelo answered. "I work at Wirehog."

Facebook's success was beginning to make waves. And in Silicon Valley, success attracts money. More and more investors were calling. Zuckerberg was uninterested.

One of the supplicants was Sequoia Capital. Among the bluest of blue chip VCs, Sequoia had funded a string of giants-Apple, Cisco, Google, Oracle, PayPal, Yahoo, and YouTube, among many others. The firm is known in the Valley for a certain humorlessness and a willingness to play hardball. Sequoia eminence grise and consummate power player Michael Moritz had been on Plaxo's board and was well acquainted with Sean Parker. It was not a mutual admiration society. Parker saw Moritz as having contributed to his downfall. "There was no way we were ever going to take money from Sequoia, given what they'd done to me," says Parker.

But it seemed a good idea at the time to pitch them instead on Wirehog, as a joke. It was ludicrous, but aside from sticking it to Sequoia it had another, more symbolic purpose. Zuckerberg's acquiescence seems to have been his way to surrender to Parker about Wirehog-to acknowledge that it was dead. "We had done a couple of real pitches for Wirehog, but our theory was that no one cared about that," says Zuckerberg. "They just wanted to do Facebook." Sequoia, for its part, was so eager to get close to them that partner Roelof Botha willingly accepted the idea.

The boys hatched a plan. On the appointed day, they overslept. They were supposed to meet at 8 A.M A.M. Botha called at 8:05-"Where are you guys?" Zuckerberg and Andrew McCollum, his Wirehog partner, rushed over to Sequoia's sw.a.n.ky offices on Menlo Park's Sand Hill Road in pajama bottoms and T-s.h.i.+rts. Though they said they'd overslept, it was deliberate. "It was actually supposed to be worse," says Zuckerberg. "We won't even go there." Then, as the stiff but attentive partners of Sequoia looked on, Zuckerberg made his presentation.

He showed ten slides. He didn't even make a pitch for Wirehog. It was a David Lettermanstyle list of "The Top Ten Reasons You Should Not Invest in Wirehog." It started out almost seriously. "The number 10 reason not to invest in Wirehog: we have no revenue." Number 9: "We will probably get sued by the music industry." By the final few points it was unashamedly rude. Number 3: "We showed up at your office late in our pajamas." Number 2: "Because Sean Parker is involved." And the number one reason Sequoia should not invest in Wirehog: "We're only here because Roelof told us to come."

Throughout it all, the partners seemed to listen respectfully, recalls Zuckerberg, who says he now deeply regrets the incident. "I a.s.sume we really offended them and now I feel really bad about that," he says, "because they're serious people trying to do good stuff, and we wasted their time. It's not a story I'm very proud of." Sequoia never invested in Facebook.

Now, at last, Thefacebook was the sole priority. Not only the world, but Zuckerberg himself had been tipped. President Parker started looking for top talent to fill out its staff. One of the first people he targeted for a senior position was Matt Cohler, Reid Hoffman's right-hand man, who had attended the Thiel investment pitch. Cohler had a combination of qualities Parker liked. He was a natural intellectual, well-versed in the exigencies of the Internet, with extreme social dexterity. Cohler had a degree in musicology with honors from Yale, so he fit in nicely with Thefacebook's Harvard crowd. And he even had international experience, having lived in China while working for an Internet company there. But he was pretty happy at LinkedIn, which at the time was seen as one of the hottest and most promising of the Silicon Valley start-ups.

Cohler talked to a bunch of friends trying to figure out if he should really consider Parker's offer. He was almost twenty-eight-no longer a college kid-and had even spent time at the venerable McKinsey consulting firm. He wasn't one to make rash moves. Cohler called his brother, an undergraduate at Princeton, to ask if he knew about this thing Thefacebook. "The answer was like, 'Duh!' as if I'd asked 'Do you guys have electricity at Princeton?'" remembers Cohler. But he found the numbers Thefacebook was claiming hard to believe.

He asked Zuckerberg if he could spend some time poking through the service's database on his own. Cohler was blown away by what he found. He, Parker, and Zuckerberg came to an agreement shortly afterward. At that point everybody in the company was earning $65,000 a year, plus-and this was critical to Cohler-a fair amount of stock. Cohler was convinced Thefacebook could get big. He had no interest in Wirehog. His job was to help Thefacebook become a real company. His role, as he later put it, was to be Zuckerberg's "consigliere."

5.

Investors.

"I've got to invest in this company."

One of Chris Hughes's friends at Harvard's Kirkland House was Olivia Ma, whose father, Chris, was a senior manager for acquisitions and investments at the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Company. Ma's daughter urged him to take a look at Thefacebook, and between Christmas and New Year's of 2004 he took Zuckerberg to a Sunday lunch in Menlo Park, near Facebook's offices in Palo Alto.

The Post was already an investor in Tribe.net, and Ma found Thefacebook enticing because of its focus on a promising demographic-college students. He also immediately found himself impressed with Zuckerberg. "I concluded in that first lunch that the key to Mark is that he is a psychologist," says Ma. "His central thought was that kids have a deep-seated desire to have certain kinds of social interactions in college and that what drives them is their extreme interest in their friends-what they are doing, what they are thinking, and where they are going. He had some simple but deep insights." Ma talked a little about the Post's hands-off aproach to its investments and suggested that the company would be interested in putting money into Thefacebook. Zuckerberg said he would think about it. He and Ma formed a bit of a bond not only because of Olivia, but because Chris had attended Exeter Academy, Zuckerberg's prep school. Two weeks later Zuckerberg called and told Ma he wanted to come to Was.h.i.+ngton to discuss the possibility of an investment.

Sean Parker, whose family lived near Was.h.i.+ngton, joined Zuckerberg for the trip, and when they arrived at the Post, they found not only Ma and another investment executive, but Post CEO Don Graham crowded into a tiny conference room. The Post's offices were in the midst of a renovation. Ma had asked Graham to join them briefly to meet this impressive young entrepreneur. The ruddy-faced Graham is a renowned leader of American business and a member of the family that has controlled the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post since the 1930s. Zuckerberg explained Thefacebook to Graham, who recalls being immediately taken. "I thought it was a simply stunning business idea," he says. Hearing about Thefacebook's success at Harvard elicited an oddly relevant recollection in Graham, then fifty-nine. He too was a Harvard man and was taken back to his days as a reporter and president of the since the 1930s. Zuckerberg explained Thefacebook to Graham, who recalls being immediately taken. "I thought it was a simply stunning business idea," he says. Hearing about Thefacebook's success at Harvard elicited an oddly relevant recollection in Graham, then fifty-nine. He too was a Harvard man and was taken back to his days as a reporter and president of the Harvard Crimson Harvard Crimson in the mid-1960s. in the mid-1960s.