Challenging Authority with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss

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**Simon Sinek** (1:18)
Most people know Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss as co-founders of Facebook and early investors in Bitcoin. But what drove them to Facebook and Bitcoin is actually a lifelong desire to stand up to authority and centralized power. And in this country where we value freedom and independence so much, it's actually ironic how much of our lives and how much of our information is actually controlled by only a few companies. So I thought it would be interesting to talk to them about what it will take to break away from authority. This is A Bit of Optimism.
Cameron and Tyler, thanks so much for sitting down to talk with me. Firstly, and I don't want to go down a rabbit hole with this, but I am just dying to know, what was your original concept for Facebook way back in Harvard? And did you ever imagine what it would become? Or did you have a glimpse of what it could become?

**Cameron Winklevoss** (2:19)
So we, at the start of our junior year in college, and one of the things that I think drew us there in Cambridge, Massachusetts was this idea that there's something like 50 different universities and colleges. It's a super cool environment and area, and probably one of the neatest academic, and idea-based communities I think in the US if not the world.
What we found as we approached our junior year, we were talking with our friend and who became our partner at that time, Divya Narendra, and we were like, wow, we can't believe we're already halfway through university. It's going so quickly. There's all these opportunities and we felt like we're running out of time, and we've barely scratched the surface of the community where we're at currently, or any of these other communities nearby. What happens is you get into your track, you get into your major, in our case, we are rowers. Between those two, you have this amazing network of the boathouse and your teammates, but you do get locked in to these paths. We started to brainstorm, is there a technical solution to effectively constrain time and geography? And can our fingers do the walking? And if we were to create a social network, where people could link and connect with each other, that could be really interesting. And I think there's two critical points here. The real innovation, the key here is we identified that a.edu was part of your identity. And so, if you had, let's say, a harvard.edu email address, there's a very high probability that you actually go to that institution. It's sort of like your online passport. And prior to that, places like Friendster and Myspace, you really didn't have an identity and there was no control of who was who. And by using the.edu, which could then later be expanded to a.com of, let's say a company, if you said, hey, I work at this company, and you registered with that email address, we could immediately verify and authenticate that you were who you said you were. The other thing at that time was taking digital photos was becoming more and more cheaper and commonplace. So it was a lot easier to start getting your profile and your life online than it would have been even a couple of years before. I think that we felt at the time, if this works at Harvard, there's no real reason why it wouldn't work at any other college or university in the country. That's a pretty big number of institutions and populations. Even if it didn't extend upwards into the professional 20-year-olds or 30-year-olds at that time, this generation was going to grow up and eventually leave school, and they would take this network and all the affinities with them. So we felt like that there was real scale, well beyond just a fun project at a university. But you said, do you think that there's going to be three billion people on a network, and people who have more smart devices and more phones and people on the planet? I don't think we'd probably have quite imagined that all encompassing, but we knew it had legs.