I'm CEO Bitch - The accidental billionaires
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook, holds a press conference at their headquarters, May 26, 2010 in Palo Alto, California. Zuckerberg outlined Facebook's new privacy control methods. (Getty Images)more pics »
"I'm a CEO, bitch", that is what Mark Zuckerberg had on his business card at the beginning of Facebook's creation. Or at least it is what Ben Mezrich tells in his controversial book, called The accidental bilionaires (The founding of Facebook, a tale of sex, money, genius and betrayal) which was published last October and that I had the pleasure to read last summer during my holidays.
This book is controversial, since Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg refused to take part, directly or indirectly, to the developement of what its author himself described as a "tale". Before diving into the Accidental Billionaires, you have to accept that the facts recounted may be not be fully exact or even fully sincere, since most of the people interviewed here are former Harvard students who bear a grudge against Zuckerberg.
Also on Zimbio:
Ben Mezrich -- New book details the founding of Facebook
Important aspects:
You must put into perspective the "accidental" aspect of Facebook's creation. Above all, Facebook is embodied by a genius. At only 19, he had already declined a 2-million dollar offer from Microsoft after having distinguished himself by creating a program called Synapse which was able to identify the musical preferences of a user and to create special playlist for him.
Mark Zuckerberg was a genius, but he was antisocial, not very talkative, awkward and mistrusted by the students of Harvard, among whom most were wealthy and socially, intellectually and physically brilliant.
It is in this context, and after a party during which a girl had stood him up, that Mark Zuckerberg is said to have come back to his room in the campus and taken comfort from a pack of Beck's beer and to have decided to turn the tables on the fair sex who was obviously not very pleasant with him. Facesmash sprang from this disappointment. It is a kind of Hot or Not, with which Mark Zuckerberg's school-mates could rank the girls's beauty. Facesmash was fueled by the facebooks from the different residence halls from the campus he had previously hacked (it is important to notice that Mark Zuckenberg described his progress in real time in his blog and wrote all the securities devices he had managed to overcome ; Ben Mezrich just quoted some of Mark Zuckerberg's comments ). Facesmash caused Zuckerberg lots of problems.
Mark Zuckerberg had not forecasted how successful his creation would become. He sent some links to his friends to test Facesmash. What a surprise to him when he discovered that more than 20.000 votes had been counted within 20mn. Facesmash had already spread across the campus and unleash the wrath of the feminists'associations and of the administration of Harvard.
Oddly enough, this blunder, which almost had him fired from Harvard, also gives him the opportunity to get a determinative bond. The athletic and wealthy Winklevoss brothers who were the stars of the campus and who were working on HarvardConnect, a project of social network on the Internet (which will later be known as ConnectU), were looking for a geek capable of improving their site's development quickly. They naturally got in touch with the hacker who was making the headlines of Harvard's newspaper, called Harvard Crimson. For a few weeks, Zuckerberg and the two brothers worked together. Mark soon claimed to be very busy and miss several appointments until the publication of thefacebook (which has a proud "a Mark Zuckerberg production"'s note in the bottom), whose concept was too similar to HarvardConnect's one according to the Winklevoss brothers. Upset, humiliated for having been taken for a ride by a guy the brothers used to consider as a little antisocial geek freshman, they began to sue him, and the procedure is not closed for now.
What happened next is well-known. Thefacebook became Facebook and spread surprisingly quickly. The lives of Zuckerberg and his staff proceeds then in harmony with creation the "tag" tool with the photos, the newsfeed, and raising money to hire more and more employees. Facebook soon reached the 50million-member milestone, then the 100million-member milestone.
Is is necessary to stand back when reading The Accidental Billionaires, but the description of student life in the campus of Harvard is interesting. There are quite comical situations al well as a surprising description (but it was relayed by lots of other sources) of the "CEO"'s personality, who was capable of spending days and nights working with his computer without eating or dinking anything, almost not answering when somebody talked to him, and ready for anything to protect his firm, even if it means sacrifice his friends.
The trial of the Winklevoss brothers finally ended up in 2009 with Mark Zuckerbeg condemned to pay almost 69 million dollars in shares of the Facebook Inc. firm to the founders of ConnectU. This verdict can seem quite generous and actually, when we see what www.connectu.com turns out to be, we understand how successful Facebook is.
Here is the criticism of the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/books/20maslin.htm
The Accidental Billionaires (The founding of Facebook, a tale of sex, money, genius and betrayal), Ben Mezrich, Doubleday, 2009.
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