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Facebook and the luck of the valley
By Dan | April 11, 2007
Today’s FastCompany has a cover story profile of Facebook and the tale of how Mark Zuckerberg took a small college project to the masses.
Notably, his stroke of luck while spending the summer after his sophomore year in California. Subletting in a house near the Stanford Campus, Zuckerberg and a few friends were able to leverage a prior relationship after bumping into Napster founder Sean Parker, who ‘crashed’ at Zuckerberg’s place in Palo Alto.
The team worked together with ideas and coding on Facebook…From the story:
Within a few weeks, Parker introduced Zuckerberg to his first major investor, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal (NASDAQ:EBAY), president of hedge fund Clarium Capital, and managing partner of the Founders Fund. After Zuckerberg’s 15-minute pitch on Facebook, Thiel was clearly interested. “Peter is a fast-talking, sort of intimidating guy,” says Matt Cohler, then a colleague of Thiel’s who was in the room. “But Mark stayed calm and got the information he needed.” By the end of the talk, he also got a commitment for $500,000 in seed money and an entrée into the exclusive social network of Silicon Valley.
And the rest is history…Facebook today is the second largest social network on the internet, and Zuckerberg is still at the helm after taking a leave of absence from Harvard.
Was it the valley that pushed Facebook forward, securing seed money and the contacts necessary to grow? Or was the originally Boston-based social network golden from the start?
Read the full story on Fast Company here: Link
Topics: Startups |
April 12th, 2007 at 12:16 am
Very interesting post. Having been at Harvard when facebook got its start, I was able to see first hand how quickly facebook exploded within Harvard and then quickly in other ivy league schools. I think in this case, the valley(/Thiel) was lucky that Zuck was @ Stanford! At the time they met, facebook wasn’t just a train leaving the station. it was a rocket about to take off.
April 12th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Sarah,
Do you know if Facebook was launched in a way to take on Ivy League schools or was it launched to the general public and Ivy Leaguers adopted it?
The reason I ask is some beta attempts now are limited only to a select number of schools. I was just wondering how it compared with Facebook.
Jason
April 12th, 2007 at 10:53 am
I think they manually had to open it up to a new school each time at the start, so they only targeted the Ivy’s at first…Also, they sort of created a ‘demand’ from what i remember by opening up to some new schools every week, and so everyone would get psyched for when FB opened at their school.
April 12th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Yes - Dan is right. They had to manually open it.
When it started, it was meant to be a better version of Harvard’s facebook (that’s where the name comes from). Then they opened it up school by school in the Ivies, and before we knew it, it was everywhere.
April 12th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
That is amazing. Come to think about it, I remember a little bit of the process. At the time I wasn’t quite as submerged as I am now though.
Thanks for the info. It seems that Zuck created a fair amount of buzz marketing just through exclusivity.. Kind of a Starbucks model for web 2.0..