Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06: The whiz behind thefacebook.com (2004)

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=502875#

by jasonlbaptiste • 17 years ago

34 28 17 years ago

“I don’t really know what the next big thing is because I don’t spend my time making big things,” he says. “I spend time making small things and then when the time comes I put them together.”

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

I'm not too impressed with Mark Zuckerberg, there has been way too much smoke around the origins of Facebook.

The settlement (65 million) regarding the ConnectU case is prett much an admission of guilt. So, to take this 'whiz' as a role model basically glorifies the personality of a character that started his meteoric career by stealing designs and businessplans.

See here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/12/facebook-ma...

for a lot more info about that.

TriinT5• 17 years ago

He's a Harvard College alumnus, what did you expect? ;-)

Though the origins of FB are shady, Zuckerberg still deserves some credit IMHO. I will be blunt: building a social networking website is piece of cake. Designing it so that the users like it enough to use it on a regular basis, maintain it, and scale it are much harder.

History is full of stories of people taking advantage of other people's ideas. It sucks, I know. Let's face it: scientists, engineers, hackers are the tip of the spear, the guys taking all the bullets and all the risks. Business people are the smart ones coming in the 2nd wave, when the beach has already been secured, to reap most (if not all) the rewards. Some people, myself included, actually enjoy being in the trenches... and cannot imagine being a rear echelon pussy. To each his own. I probably won't ever be rich, but hopefully I will spend my life working on interesting projects...

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

> Designing it so that the users like it enough to use it on a regular basis, maintain it

Apparently those components had nothing to do with him

> scale it

That seems to be one of his contributions, the second is to have some staying power.

I've been on the receiving end of a character like mr. Zuckerberg at some point and I think that by glorifying him the people that monitor this sort of stuff might get the idea that this sort of behaviour is ok.

gr82• 17 years ago

I'm sorry, but to me the notion that an idea for a website site is something you can steal sounds absolutely ridiculous. Did Larry & Sergey steal the idea of a search engine? Did Hacker News steal the idea of a news site where stories are rated by recency + popularity? Did Etsy steal the idea of an online marketplace? I can't believe that on a site like hacker news, where virtually everybody is trying to do what somebody else has done only a bit better, people would be whining about the notion that one can own idea that others could steal through better execution.

californiaguy2• 17 years ago

> Let's face it: scientists, engineers, hackers are the tip of the spear, the guys taking all the bullets and all the risks

I used to think this until I started running a business. Business people take the risks. There's nothing stopping a hacker from being a business person and often times there is great overlap, but let's be clear about the semantics here: someone puts up the money for an engineer to do his job, and that's the business person.

Business people fail constantly and with no fanfare. You may not realize this because you're a hacker that's only worked for successful businesses where the management has tricked you into thinking you are responsible for the success of the business, but I assure you that is naive and you are being manipulated successfully because your business people are smarter than you.

gwern• 17 years ago

Some of the quotes are interesting in that light:

> “I do stuff like this all the time,” Zuckerberg says in his relaxed tone. “The facebook literally took me a week to make.”

hyperbovine• 17 years ago

Let's face it: in this (capitalist) world, cutthroat assholes get ahead. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer, Rupert Murdoch--the same story could have been written about any of them. I'm not saying it's necessary to lie, cheat, and stab one's friends in the back in order to become filthy rich, because there do seem to be some very principled billionaires (I'm thinking of Larry & Sergey, Warren Buffet, Pierre Omidyar). But it certainly seems to help.

gojomo3• 17 years ago

Whereas in the noncapitalist world, cutthroat assholes get ahead -- often by imprisoning or slaughtering their political opposition.

gojomo3• 17 years ago

HarvardConnection (later renamed 'ConnectU') looked a lot like the classic "3 business guys hire a part-time coder to implement their 'vision'" startup antipattern.

That Zuckerberg, who was already creating social web apps before the 'oral contract' and engagement with HarvardConnection, concluded he didn't need that overhead was his own independent discovery of the YC gospel.

I'm sure the ConnectU crew thinks their special snowflake vision of a social-networking utility that starts on college campuses was a uniquely world-beating idea, but that sort of delusion is common. There are thousands with similar delusions who didn't luck into a brief collaboration with someone who'd eventually make the vision happen, and the accompanying lucrative settlement.

(And a settlement is not an admission of guilt, but a calculation that the costs of fighting exceed the costs of settling. For Facebook, the costs of uncertainty in their fundraising far dominate the potential legal costs/risks, so a settlement says more about the peace of mind wanted by investors than the facts of the case.)

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

Sorry, I don't buy the 'he didn't need that overhead'.

When you are hired as a programmer to make something that does not give you license to make off with the business plans and designs of your employers.

Imagine a contractor making off with the architectural drawings and other details of a building he's supposed to put up because he 'doesn't need that kind of overhead'.

It is absolutely without honour. The settlement was likely because there was a fair chance of it sticking in court, the other party decided that 65 million / 3 is good enough for them to not risk losing in court.

The costs of fighting were probably a lesser consideration than the cost of losing.

leelin• 17 years ago

Wow, the article's author is Michael M. Grynbaum, the same guy who first wrote about our startup!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/realestate/08rent.html

I hope that's a good sign. :P

(Don't bother reading the article; our idea has morphed a lot.)

utsmokingaces• 17 years ago

“Some companies offered us right off the bat up to one million, and then we got another offer that was like two million,” he says.

He and D’Angelo at first decided not to sell.

“I don’t really like putting a price-tag on the stuff I do. That’s just like not the point,” Zuckerberg says.

Really?? Is this a joke? How can a journalist even write that?

kareemm• 17 years ago

the journalist was an aspiring one, writing for the crimson - harvard's college newspaper.

ghost11• 17 years ago

"Meet Anakin Skywalker, promising pod racing whiz."

Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06: The whiz behind thefacebook.com (2004)

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