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How Facebook Was Founded !!

Facebook is a social networking website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc., with more than 500 million active users in July 2010.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

In the fall of 2003, Harvard seniors Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra were looking for a web developer for an idea the three say Divya first had in 2002: a social network for Harvard students and alumni. The site was to be called HarvardConnections.com

They hired Victor Gao, another Harvard student, to do coding for the site, but at the beginning of the fall term Victor stepped back from the project. Victor suggested his own replacement: Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard sophomore from, New York.

During those days, Mark was famous at Harvard as the sophomore who had built Facemash, a   Hot Or Not   clone for Harvard. Facemash had already made Mark a bit of a celebrity on campus, for two reasons.

The first is that Mark got in trouble for creating it. The way the site worked was that it pulled photos of Harvard students off of Harvard's Web sites. It rearranged these photos so that when people visited Facemash.com they would see pictures of two Harvard students and be asked to vote on which was more attractive. The site also maintained a list of Harvard students, ranked by attractiveness.

It was for this ability to build a wildly popular site that Victor Gao first recommended Mark to Cameron, Tyler, and Divya. Sold on Mark, the Harvard Connection trio reached out to him. Mark agreed to meet.

They first met in the early evening on November 30 in the dining hall of Harvard College's Kirkland House.  Cameron, Tyler, and Divya brought up their idea for Harvard Connection, and described their plans to A) build the site for Harvard students only, by requiring new users to register with Harvard.edu email addresses, and B) expand Harvard Connection beyond Harvard to schools around the country.  Mark reportedly showed enthusiastic interest in the project.

Later that night, Mark wrote an email to the Winklevoss brothers and Divya:   I read over all the stuff you sent and it seems like it shouldn't take too long to implement, so we can talk about that after I get all the basic functionality up tomorrow night. 

The next day, on December 1, Mark sent another email to the HarvardConnections team.  Part of it read,   I put together one of the two registration pages so I have everything working on my system now. I'll keep you posted as I patch stuff up and it starts to become completely functional. 

These two emails sounded like the words of someone who was eager to be a part of the team and working away on the project.  A few days later, however, Mark's emails to the HarvardConnection team started to change in tone.  Specifically, they went from someone who seemed to be hard at work building the product to someone who was so busy with schoolwork that he had no time to do any coding at al
So what happened to change Mark's tune about HarvardConnection? Was he so swamped with work that he was unable to finish the project?  Or, as the HarvardConnection founders have alleged, was he stalling the development of HarvardConnection so that he could build a competing site and launch it first?

Former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel gets a lot of credit for being the first investor in Facebook, because he led the first formal Facebook round in September of 2004 with a $500,000 investment at a $5 million valuation.  But the real   first investor   claim to fame should actually belong to a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg's named Eduardo Saverin.

To picture Eduardo, what you need to know is that he was the kid at Harvard who would wear a suit to class. He liked to give people the impression that he was rich. 
Eduardo Saverin wasn't directly involved with Facebook for long: During the summer of 2004, when Mark moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time, Eduardo took a high-paying internship at Lehman Brothers in New York.  While Mark was still at Harvard, however, Eduardo appears to have bankrolled Facebook's earliest capital expenses, thus becoming its initial investor.

In January, however, Mark told a friend that   Eduardo is paying for my servers.   Eventually, Eduardo would agree to invest $15,000 in a company that would, in April 2004, be formed as Facebook LLC.  For his money, Eduardo would get 30% of the company.

Eduardo was also involved in Facebook's earliest days, as a confidant of Mark Zuckerberg.

In December, 2003, a week after Mark's first meeting with the HarvardConnection team, when he was telling the Winklevosses that he was too busy with schoolwork to work on or even think about HarvardConnection.com, Mark was telling Eduardo a different story.

In this second meeting, Mark still appeared to be actively engaged in developing Harvard Connection.  But he never showed the HarvardConnection folks any site prototypes or code.  And they didn't insist on seeing them.
In January 2004, Mark met with the Winklevoss brothers and Divya Narendra for what would be the last time. The meeting was on January 14, 2004, and it was held at the same place Mark met with the HarvardConnection team for the first time -- in the dining hall of Mark's residence, Kirkland House.

By this point, Mark's site, thefacebook.com, wasn't complete, but he was working hard on it. He'd arranged for Eduardo Saverin to pay for his servers. He had already told Adam that   the right thing to do   was to not complete Harvard Connection and build TheFacebook.com instead.  He had registered the domain name.

He therefore had a choice to make: Tell Cameron, Tyler and Divya that he wanted out of their project, or string them along until he was ready to launch thefacebook.com.

Mark sought advice on this decision from his confidants. One friend told him, in so many words, you know me. I don't ever think anyone should do anything bad to anybody.


On January 14, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg met with Cameron, Tyler, and Divya for the last time. During the meeting at Kirkland House, Mark expressed doubts about the viability of HarvardConnection.com. He said he was very busy with personal projects and school work and that he wouldn't be able to work on the site for a while. He blamed others for the site's delays.

He did not say that he was working on his own project and that he was not planning to complete the HarvardConnection site.

After the meeting, Mark had another IM exchange with the friend above. He told her, in effect, that he had wimped out. He hadn't been able to break the news to Cameron and Tyler, in part, he said, because he was   intimidated   by them. He called them   poor bastards. 
So then what happened?
Three days earlier, on January 11, 2004, Mark had registered the domain THEFACEBOOK.COM

 
On February 4, he opened the site to Harvard students.
On February 10, Cameron Winklevoss sent Mark a letter accusing him of breaching their agreement and stealing their idea.

In late May, after going through two more developers, Cameron, Tyler and Divya launched HarvardConnection as ConnectU, a social network for 15 schools

On June 10, 2004, a commencement speaker mentioned the amazing popularity of Mark's site, thefacebook.com.
In the summer of 2004, Mark moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time and soon received a $500,000 investment from Peter Thiel.
In September 2004, HarvardConnection, now called ConnectU, sued Mark Zuckerberg and the now-incorporated   Facebook   for allegedly breaching their agreement and stealing their idea.
In February 2008, Facebook and ConnectU agreed to settle the lawsuit.
In June 2008, ConnectU appealed the settlement in California's ninth district, accusing Facebook of trading its stock without disclosing material information. This appeal is on-going.
On the latter point, we agree.  What Mark Zuckerberg has accomplished with Facebook over the past six years has been nothing short of amazing.
So, having revisited the founding of Facebook with additional information, what do we conclude?

There have been no evidence of any formal contract between Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevosses in which Mark agreed to develop Harvard Connection.

Only a week after beginning development of Harvard Connection, which he referred to as   the dating site,   Mark had begun work on a separate project --   the facebook thing.   Mark appears to have considered the products as competing for the attention of the same users, but he also appears to have regarded them as different in some key ways.

And because of this foreseen competition -- Mark does appear to have intentionally strung along the Harvard Connection folks with the goal of making his project, thefacebook.com, have a more successful launch.

Bottom line, whatever Mark did to the Harvard Connection folks, it was worth more than the $65 million they received in the lawsuit settlement.  In fact, this seems like a huge sum of money considering that the entire dispute took place over two months in 2004 and that, in the six years since, Mark has built Facebook into a massive global enterprise.



References: 1)http://www.businessinsider.com/
2)http://en.wikipedia.org