COED MAGAZINE
MARCH 2006
BY JULIA ALLISON
Little more than two years ago, Harvard roommates Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes were all fairly normal college sophomores. They slept in, they studied occasionally, and for 10 days during winter finals they rallied around Mark as he programmed a little website called … Facebook.
Ah, Facebook. Launched to the world of Harvard (is there another?) on February 4th, 2004, it has since expanded to more than 2,100 campuses and become a bona fide phenomenon. A sensation. A revolution. And for millions of college students fighting against the powerful pull of procrastination, an obsession.
If you haven’t heard of Facebook, put down your Sony PSP immediately and log on. Growing at the speed of mold in your dorm shower, Facebook currently has 5 million registered users, almost all of them college students or recent grads.
Officially, “Facebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at schools.” Of course, that bland one-sentence tag line does little to explain it’s infectious popularity, or why it’s ranked seventh in traffic amongst all – ALL – websites on the entire internet, one spot behind Google. If you’ve been on it, you know why it’s addictive. But how did this tangled web of too-much-time-on-their-hands profiles, photos and comments come to be?
Hughes, a senior at Harvard and the official spokesperson for company, explains that Facebook was “just a fun project Mark was thinking about for school.” (Wouldn’t it be great if all fun projects undertaken while studying for finals made their college founders millionaires? I guess perfecting Beirut doesn’t have much market value.)
When three weeks later 6,000 Harvard students had already signed up, it seemed clear to the founders that their little idea might “become pretty big.” That summer the three trekked out West to Palo Alto, scene of all things Internet, where they spent their days solidifying the rapidly expanding site. When it came time to re-enroll for the fall, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz made a Bill Gatesian decision to not to go back.
“It was clear at that point that the continuous work on the site was not abating,” says Moskovitz. “It only took me about ten minutes to decide that if I went back to school I would almost certainly fail all my classes, and after that there was no looking back. Hughes was the lone member of the triad to return, offering guidance from a distance.
Later that year, Peter Thiel, founder of Pay Pal and all around rich guy, gave Zuckerberg and his nascent company $500,000 in start-up cash for servers and, we assume, beer. Several months after that, they were approached by hordes of investors all throwing money at the idea. By 2005, they had 12.7 million dollars in venture capital and an alleged valuation of $100 million plus, made all the more believable by MySpace’s recent jaw-dropping $580 million sale to News Corp.
Currently Facebook.com has 60 employees, almost all older than the founders themselves, with a revenue stream consisting solely of advertisers, although they will not disclose how much.
According to Hughes, “we try to keep the advertising as rare as possible – we want it to not bust up in the users face every time they log on. We’re never going to have pop-ups.”
Facebook doesn’t consider Myspace or Friendster to be in direct competition with them, although the idea of merging has been raised by more than one outsider. As for plans for the future, the baby moguls are keeping their cards close to their (hairless?) chests. “We are developing ideas [both] small scale and big scale,” says Hughes, while continuing to engineer the network so they are “responsive to day to day life of users, perhaps even more so than they are now.”
For would be college entrepreneurs, Moskovitz offers the following advice “Don't try to do too many things at once. If you overextend yourself, you'll fail at all your goals.”
Although they occasionally get offers to sell, they’re not interested at this moment. For one, “Facebook is priceless,” says Moskovitz. More importantly, “We’re just having fun doing what we’re doing,” says Hughes.
Don’t think they’re just playing around, though. “A few years from now,” says Moskovitz, “we'll hopefully look back on this as a time when Facebook was relatively small.” Bill Gates is quaking in his boots.
SIDEBAR: Booty Logging?
Given that 70% of Facebook users log on every single day, there must be something they’re logging on to see. According to Hughes, it could be a host of different reasons: “for fun or a name comes up in conversation or because they need certain information.” Yes, like the number of that girl you wanted to booty call.
“Sure,” says Hughes, “that’s definitely one of the reasons people log on. You meet someone at a party and then you like talking to them for five or ten minutes, so you go on Facebook to get more info. I think that happens all the time.”
In other words, never, ever underestimate human kind’s fascination with the possibility of getting laid. Of course, it’s more than just that – Facebook continually adds new gizmos and tools to show off yourself (from your own profile to your own online photo albums), your friends (from a running tally of how many you have to descriptions of how you know them next to each of their photos), and your wit (the sarcastically esoteric “clubs,” intra-Facebook messaging and of course, the wall posts). After all, if there’s one thing we like more than getting laid, it’s ourselves.
THE FOUNDERS THEMSELVES
With the exception of the “About” section, the following are quotes from their REAL Facebook entries.
*Mark Zuckerberg
Job: “Kind of a big deal at facebook”
Geography: San Francisco, CA
School: Harvard ’06
Status: Dropout
Birthday: 05.14.84
Concentration: Psychology / Computer Science
Clubs and Jobs: just facebook
Favorite Books: mostly books about smart people
Favorite Quote: never run out of ammo
Interests: minimalism, meditation, driving, writing, making things, social dynamics, culture, information flow, lockdown, domination
About: Zuckerberg, for his part, follows a long tradition of painfully awkward technology start up founders, and was too cool to interview with COED. According to Hughes, he only interviews with important, national media like “The New Yorker,” and “USA Today.” Hmm … last time I checked COED was distributed all across the country, which would technically constitute it as “national.” But that’s splitting hairs. In an interview with Marketwatch, a website owned by Dow Jones, Zuckerberg, who engages frequently in up-talk (where one’s statements sound like questions) wore a shirt that said simply, “My mother thinks I’m cool.” She’s the only one, Mark.
*Chris Hughes
Job: Facebook Spokesperson, “Empath”
Geography: Boston, MA
School: Harvard '06
Status: Still trying to finish
Major: History and Literature
Birthday: 11.26.83
Interests: espresso, algiers, new york, vanity fair, harper's, balance bars, cafés, french fries, far left politics, bojangles, modern art, technology, sweatshirts, dinners with wine, newspapers, wandering, american literature, baudelaire, streets
About: Hughes, not the most eloquent of spokespeople, has an attitude one might expect from President Bush’s handlers – that is to say, snobby, too-good-for-you, and generally incompetent. When asked what his official position at the company was, he said – and I quote, “Right now I just work as spokesperson and you know, generally hang out, give some advice.” When I wondered whether he gets paid for “generally hanging out” he got offended and insisted “it’s a job, we’re a real company.” Please do your real company a favor and take some media training classes.
*Dustin Moskovitz
Job: General Go-to Guy, “Keeper” “I make sure everything works and is kept clean and good.”
Geography: San Francisco, CA
School: Harvard '06
Status: Dropout
Major: Economics
Birthday: 05.22.84
Political Views: Very Liberal
Favorite Movies: Zoolander, Gladiator, Top Gun, Garden State, Troy, Pulp Fiction, The Godfather
Interests: parks, free music, being secular, top gun, the mafia, reading, art, mountain biking, scuba, snowboarding, flicking matches
About: Moskovitz insists that the he and his fellow founders are not “geeks,” but instead “very well rounded,” and supports that by insisting “none of us were even computer science majors.” Well, Dustin, you don’t have to be a computer science major to be a geek.