Would there be a Facebook without Mark Zuckerberg? Nine years later, his Harvard classmates weigh in.
It was the winter of 2003, and I was a pre-frosh. On my high school guidance counselor's list of prospective colleges, Harvard was so high a reach as to be omitted from consideration. Nonetheless, visiting Cambridge one weekend with my family, I dialed up a friend there to say hello. He suggested I tag along that night to a student party. Much as I'd like to say that the undergrads were huddled around monitors, scribbling furiously on whiteboards, in fact there was loud music and a spiked punch. No one was "wired in."
A few months later, and nine years ago today, Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg flipped the switch on the service that would, in short order, upend his alma mater, higher education, the nation, and, ultimately, the world. And so by that summer, I was eagerly awaiting an .edu email address from Cornell — the fifth campus opened to the online directory — where I planned to matriculate in the fall. On June 4, 2004, I cropped my date from our senior prom photo and established a profile of my own on the Thefacebook.com.
I was user 409,520, which I knew at the time because it said so in my profile. In 2009, User IDs were replaced with usernames. It's still possible to find your own number — or anyone's — through a standard browser. Type graph.facebook.com/[yourname] into the address bar, and check out the first field that comes up, called "id." My page, for instance, is graph.facebook.com/rbfishman, and my number remains unchanged.
Two years later, as a staff writer for the Cornell Daily Sun, I was assigned a story about Facebook's expansion to high schools. The spokesman who fielded my interview request said email would be the fastest and that he promised to get back to me in a day or two. His name was Chris Hughes. Reaching out to Hughes again, some seven years later, the billionaire Facebook cofounder and publisher of The New Republic was splitting his time between three cities, as per an assistant, and unable to reply.
It's easy to forget that, back then, Zuckerberg, Hughes, and cofounder Dustin Moskovitz were still kids themselves, teenage fathers to an unwieldy toddler that, in the near-decade since, has done very well by them.
More than a billion users later, Facebook is still very much a Mark Zuckerberg production. The initial public offering, in one view, only cemented the company as a "corporate dictatorship." Then, now, and for the foreseeable future, Zuck's CEO, bitch. Of all the smart people I met (and didn't meet) at Harvard that night, only one had the vision or tenacity to engineer a sprawling technological empire, over which the sun truly never sets. Even Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter who skewered the boy king, concedes that "there is no question that Mark Zuckerberg is a genius. He doesn't just have brains. He created something."
And so, as News Feed begets Timeline begets Graph Search, the counterfactual — If not Mark, then who? If not Facebook, then what? — tumbles deeper down the Wayback Machine. It's hard to imagine another hoodie-clad substitute, a different anti-hero scowling through Sorkin's movie. But in an alternate universe, it's the closest eyewitnesses to Facebook's inception who might have been its likeliest founders: the kids down the hall, who logged in instead of starting up. Among them, yes, are a few billionaires. But nine years after graduation, Facebook reveals they are lawyers, doctors, financiers, activists, and athletes. In the parlance of Silicon Valley, they're the earliest adopters.
Meet the first 25 people on Facebook.
Harvard's Class of 2006 was the university's first to open its acceptance letters in their electronic inboxes. Thick emails awaited only one in ten of the 19,605 hopefuls who applied that year. The ritual frenzy of Friending your new classmates was, of course, unavailable to generation zero, so they met the old-fashioned way. Arie Hasit, later the fourth user, came from Philadelphia, and hoped to move to Israel after college. Number 14, Colin Jackson, hailed from the Bay Area. "My brother was at Harvard when I applied," Jackson remembered, "so the East Coast didn't seem like such a faraway place." Sarah Goodin, who would become Facebook's first woman, was from nearby Berkeley, with plans to study psychology.
Harvard's housing lottery divides freshmen into so-called "blocking groups," placed together in one of the university's residential houses. Goodin was assigned to Straus Hall, a red-bricked Georgian Revival off Old Harvard Yard, where the writer William S. Burroughs and David Souter, the Supreme Court Justice, had both lived. One of her hallmates was Samyr Laine, a high school track-and-field star, born to Haitian immigrants. A government major "with a little bit of French on the side," he said, Laine ran in a different social circle than one of his roommates, a curly-haired computer programmer named Mark Zuckerberg.
Along with Hughes, another student from his blocking group, Zuckerberg moved into Kirkland House the following year. As he had with Laine, Zuckerberg unbunked the beds, leaving little room to walk. On a whiteboard he kept in the suite, Zuckerberg took two first stabs at connecting the campus. Course Match helped his peers select classes, and Facemash — which landed him in some trouble with the university — brought the concept of "hot or not?" to the elite university. A junior named Joe Green (#20), who helped with Facemash, was forbidden by his father from working with Zuckerberg again.
After a winter spent coding, Zuckerberg was ready to unveil his latest project, registered at thefacebook.com. He had preemptively given up a third of the business to Eduardo Saverin — user #19 — a suave Brazilian charged with monetizing the site. After signing up themselves, the founders fired off notes to friends in Kirkland House. Goodin received an email from Zuckerberg, and even though Facemash had been accused of misogyny, logged on straightaway. "It never crossed my mind to have any trepidation about joining Facebook," she said. "I was friends with Mark, and I knew the quality of his character."
The site spread quickly through Zuckerberg's social spheres, among fraternity brothers in Alpha Epsilon Pi and to computer science classmates. The seventh to sign up, Mark Kaganovich, had taken math classes with Zuckerberg and hung out in his dorm room. "I remember him urging me to put up a profile picture, because I was slow to do so," Kaganovich said of Zuckerberg. It took Kaganovich "a few minutes of mockery," said his roommate, Tono Aguilar (#9), to convince his friend. User 16, David Hammer, was another computer science major who took classes with Zuckerberg and Andrew McCollum, the fifth user and designer of Facebook's original logo. When an email went out to the AEPi listserve, members like Colin Jackson and Zach Bercu, user 10, gave it a try.
Four days after launch, 650 students had registered, according to Kirkpatrick, and by the end of the first week, half of all Harvard undergrads were on Facebook. "It wasn't long before it seemed as though everyone was on it," said Zach Seward, a freshman at the time who worked on The Harvard Crimson, the student paper. Moskovitz and Hughes came on board officially, and they opened the network to Columbia, Stanford ,and Yale. By the end of the month, Thefacebook claimed 10,000 active users.
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