#14 The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal

**David Senra** (0:00)
His name was Marc Zuckerberg. He was a sophomore, and although Eduardo had spent a fair amount of time at various Epsilon Pi events with him, along with at least one pre-punch Phoenix event that Eduardo could remember, he still barely knew the kid. Marc's reputation, however, definitely preceded him. A computer science major who lived in Elliott House, Marc had grown up in the upper middle class of Dobbs Ferry, New York, the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist.
In high school, he's supposedly been some sort of master hacker, so good at breaking into computer systems that he ended up on some random FBI list somewhere, or so the story went. Whether or not that was true, Marc was certainly a computer genius. He had made a name for himself at Exeter, when after he had honed his coding skills, he created a computerized version of the game Risk. He and a buddy had created a software program called Synapse, a plug-in for MP3 players that allowed players to, that allowed the players to learn, end quotes, a user's preferences, and create tailored playlists based on that information. Marc had posted Synapse as a free download on the web, and almost immediately major companies came calling, trying to buy Marc's creation. Rumor was, Microsoft had offered Marc between one and $2 million to go work for them, and amazingly, Marc had turned them down.
He followed Synapse up with a program he'd written at Harvard, something called CourseMatch that allowed Harvard kids to see what classes other kids had signed up for. Eduardo had checked it out himself once or twice, trying to track down random hot girls he'd met in the dining hall to little avail.
But the program was good enough to get a pretty big following. Most of the campus appreciated CourseMatch, if not the kid who created it.
Okay, so that was Eduardo's impressions of Marc when he first met him. They wound up hanging out in the same, kind of geeky Jewish fraternity. They ran in similar circles, and they wound up becoming friends. And Eduardo becomes the first co-founder of Facebook. Before he does that, you'll see how he talks about all these programs that Marc's making. So CourseMatch, you'll see a little bit of that in the first iteration of Facebook. But the precursor to that was this thing called Facemash, which is how Marc gets in trouble at Harvard. And we have a pretty good history of breakdown of how he's making this, because he was emailing and instant messaging with people. And so I'm going to read this part. It's called The Making of Facemash. And the reason I included this part is because a lot of this, as much as I can, I want to use Marc's own words, because there's a lot of them in here, and a lot of them came to light through various different lawsuits at the time. I just think it's interesting. So this part is a little longer, but this is the precursor to Facebook, in case you haven't seen the movie and haven't read the book.
Behind every great fortune, there lies a great crime. If Balzac had somehow risen from the dead to witness Mark Zuckerberg storm into his Kirkland dorm room that monumental evening during the last week of October 2003, he might have amended his famous words. Because that historical moment, one that inarguably led to one of the greatest fortunes in modern history, did not begin with a crime so much as a college prank. If the newly revived Balzac had been there in that Spartan claustrophobic dorm, he might have seen Mark head straight for his computer. There would have been no question that the kid was angry, that he had with him a number of Bex beers. As usual, he was probably wearing his Adidas flip-flops and a hoodie sweatshirt. It was well known that he pretty much hated any shoes that weren't flip-flops, and one day he determined to be in a position where those were the only shoes he'd ever have to wear. Maybe Marc took a deep swig of beer, let the bitter taste bite the back of his throat, and as he was typing his fingers against his laptop keyboard, gently summoning the thing awake.
Since high school, it could be observed, his thoughts had always seemed clearer than when he let them come out through his hands. To an outside observer, the relationship he had with his computer seemed much smoother than any relationship he'd had with anyone in the outside world. He never seemed happier than when he was looking through his own reflection into the glassy screen. Maybe deep down, it had something to do with control. With the computer, Marc was always in control. Or maybe it was more than that, an almost symbiosis that had grown out of years and years of practice. The way Marc's fingers touched those keys, this is where he belonged. Sometimes, it probably felt like this was the only place he belonged. That evening, at a little after 8 p.m., he stared into the brightly lit screen, his fingers finding the right keys, opening up a fresh blog page, something that had most likely been percolated in the back of his mind for a few days. The frustration, likely the result of the evening he had just had, was, it seemed, the final impetus to move further along with the idea, turn the kernel into corn. He started with a title. This is his words, Harvard Facemash, forward slash the process. Back to the book. He might have looked at the words for a few minutes, wondering if he was really going to go through with this. He might have taken another drink from his beer and hunched forward over the keys. Now, this is Marc's words at 8:13 p.m. And it's a girl's name that's been edited out. So it's blank, which some girl's name is a bitch. I need to think of something to take my mind off her. I need to think of something to occupy my mind. Easy enough now, I just need an idea. This is back to the book. Maybe you're somewhere inside of Marc's thoughts. He knew that blaming it on a girl who had rejected him wasn't exactly fair. How were this one girl's actions different from the way the most girls had treated Marc throughout high school and college? Even Eduardo, geek that he was, had better luck with girls than Marc Zuckerberg did. And not that Eduardo was getting into the Phoenix. Well, tonight, Marc was going to do something about his situation.