Really a great book and inspiring for anyone who’s trying to build a website or a company. The book goes through the whole story from Facebook’s creation in a dorm room at Harvard to its world wide growth and expansion.
Excerpt 1: The Early Days
In the first week of his sophomore year at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg cobbled together an internet software program he called Course Match. The idea was to help students pick classes based on who else was taking them. If a cute girl sat next to you in Topology, you could look up next semester’s Differential Geometry course to see if she had enrolled in that as well. Hundreds of students immediately started using it.
His next project, in October, he called Facemash. Its purpose: figure out who was the hottest person on campus. He invited users to compare two different faces of the same sex and say which one was hotter. A journal he kept at the time, which for some reason he posted along with the software, suggests Zuckerberg got into this jag while upset about a girl. “______ is a bitch. I need to think of something to take my mind off her,” he wrote, adding, “I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie.” By the time the program launched, he had dropped the idea of also comparing students to farm animals. “Another Beck’s is in order,” Zuckerberg wrote as he continued his Facemash chronicles. By the time he returned to his room from a meeting the next day, his laptop was so bogged down with Facemash users that it was freezing up.
When he launched Facebook the following February (initially called thefacebook.com), it was a rudimentary site, but flirting on Facebook quickly became a sort of art form. One feature — the poke — made doing so absurdly easy. Poking was a particular fascination in those days, even among the supposedly sophisticated students of Harvard. What did a poke mean? Its indeterminate message was one of its appeals. Zuckerberg posted an insouciant answer on the site: “We thought it would be fun to make a feature that has no specific purpose… So mess around with it, because you’re not getting an explanation from us.”
At the end of the school year, Zuckerberg and his cohort moved their fledgling operation to a four-bedroom sublet house in Palo Alto, Calif., which became a combination home and office. Zuckerberg slept later than most — he seldom got to work in the equipment-jammed dining room before afternoon. His typical garb in the office was pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. When the software code-writing got intense, he was a taskmaster. If someone got hungry and wanted to go out for fast food, recalls a frequent visitor, “Mark would, like, pound the table and just say, ‘No! We’re in lockdown! No one leaves the table until we’re done with this thing.” Zuckerberg was determined to keep this ship moving forward, and he was more than happy to be the captain.