Fifteen years ago, the campus social networking site "Renren" blew a wave of online dating in Chinese universities, and the greeting of everyone changed from "Have you eaten" to "Renren number plus", this form of real-name dating suddenly broke through the wall of strangers' online world and connected the network of real-world acquaintances.
On the other side of the Pacific, Facebook, the originator of this real-name social game, has launched its global strategic layout, with more than 2 billion users in the next decade, sending its founder Mark Zuckerberg to the top 10 list of the world's technology rich every year. Who would have thought that this young man with a natural baby-face, wearing a gray T-shirt and blue jeans all year round, with a pair of slippers on his feet, and the company he created, became a pioneer of the social networking revolution.
Looking back at Facebook's early days, we can see the coincidence of the birth of a great company, and we can also glimpse the gray line of this social empire falling into privacy scandals.
Harvard Kid's "Lovelorn Prank"
Mark was dating the girl at the bar, originally planning to show himself well in front of the object of his heart, but he didn't expect that this straight-hearted man offended each other by self-defeating, and the two of them scolded each other with a word, and the quarreling Mark humiliated the girl without hindrance, completely infuriating the other party, "You're such a bastard!" ”
A good date ended in displeasure, Mark who returned to the dormitory was still angry, he couldn't stand the Harvard computer genius being looked down upon by Boston University chicks, took a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, vented his love on the blog site, "Erica Albright is a slut", "In fact, she is very beautiful, I have to work hard to forget her"... The consequences of a nerdy tech guy being dumped, in addition to complaining online, will also cause large-scale incidents with the code he wrote. The Harvard girls just happened to be that punching bag.
At the instigation of his roommate, Mark started the idea of mischievous: put Harvard girls on the Internet for appearance review, and voted for the hottest girl through PK; In order to increase the bad taste, pictures of livestock are inserted from time to time in PK. He hacked into each dormitory website, downloading student photos in bulk and uploading them to the developed Facemash website. The moment you press the "submit" button, the spoof of this computer technology nerd goes viral to every corner of the Harvard campus. But Mark had no idea what kind of impact it would have on him.
The website received more than 20,000 hits in just 2 hours after it was launched, and the popularity of beauty pageant spoof games was surprisingly high. The influx of traffic at the same time greatly exceeded the carrying capacity of the school's servers, and suddenly the network crashed! Compared with the panic of the other "accomplices", Mark showed a satisfied expression on his face, as if he had done something very big.
About psychology sophomore Mark M. The Harvard Board of Governors was alarmed by the Harvard Board of Governors, who investigated the hoax and concluded that Mark hacked into the communications system, violated copyright protection, and violated students' personal privacy. The management committee imposed a six-month probation penalty on Mark.
Mark's "Lost Love Prank" caused a sensation throughout the school and caught the attention of the Winklevoss brothers. They're looking for a tech geek to kick themselves on.
The Wenk brothers are working on a "Harvard Connect" campus community project, where students create personal profiles, upload photos, set up self-introductions, hobbies, send links to their homepages to familiar people to add as friends, and move offline social relationships online. Most importantly, only Harvard students can enter this community, which reflects the identity and superiority of Ivy League top universities.
After listening to the introduction, Mark agreed without the slightest hesitation. At that time, social networking services were exploding, and the traditional form of social interaction between people was changed dramatically, and unicorn companies in the social field such as Friengster and Myspace were emerging on the wind. Mark, who has a keen sense of the Internet, immediately saw the potential to revolutionize the social experience.
While the Winklevoss brothers were still happy that they had found a skilled helper without much effort, they did not know that Mark already had a "different heart". Over the next two months, Mark prevaricated and delayed development for various reasons, and the progress of the Harvard Connect project was as slow as a snail's climb. Funny, the Wink brothers allowed this extension and didn't suspect him at all.
It wasn't until Mark'thefacebook.com self-developed campus social networking site went live that the Winklevoss brothers realized something was wrong. The site was almost based on their idea of "Harvard Connect" and went live earlier than theirs. Mark S. Zuckerberg stole their website!
The Wenk brothers, who find themselves "betrayed", are angry and must stop Mark and reclaim their scientific and technological achievements! They complained to the president of Harvard on the grounds that Mark had violated the Harvard Student Handbook rule of "stealing student property" and asked the school to stop Mark Zuckerberg's theft and shut down his social networking site.
But to the brothers' surprise, Harvard didn't take the complaint too seriously, dismissing it as just a "kid-to-kids fight" and even asked them to build another project. The old way Harvard didn't help the Winklevoss brothers "defend" their million-dollar innovative idea, which made Mark glad that The Facebook startup germ was not killed in Harvard's dormitory. The dispute over creative attribution isn't over, but it's not worth Mark's effort, and he has a more urgent goal.
Young people who do not hide their ambitions
Mark's campus social networking site quickly spread in Ivy League schools, Columbia University, Stanford University, Yale University, Boston University... The brightest college students are hooked on The Facebook, which has 29 colleges and universities and 75,000 users signed up for the service. The popularity of this social networking site is far beyond imagination.
Eduardo Safrin felt it was time to harvest users and earn The Facebook's first pot of gold. When the Jewish site went online and needed start-up capital, he generously donated $1,000 to become a co-founder of the company. There is no doubt about the business prowess of Huaduo, he is the chairman of the Harvard Investment Association, and once made $300,000 in one summer, which is why Mark made him the company's chief financial officer.
But this time, their opinions diverged. Huaduo believes that "the purpose of doing business is to make money", The Facebook already has a lot of users, and adding ads to the website is the best and fastest way to make money. Mark believes that advertising will destroy the atmosphere of social networking sites and affect the user's dating experience, their products should not be messed up by advertisers so quickly, and now is not the best time to make money.
Although there are problems with the tacit understanding between the two founders, Huaduo is already promoting its own advertising investment plan, and Mark has no choice but to cooperate. At this time, the intrusion of a key person prevented the company from continuing to "go astray".
Sean Parker had just left his free music-sharing company, Napster, but unfortunately declared bankruptcy in a last resort. The music app was once loved by 80 million users, but non-compliant copyright issues led to it being sued by the music industry for claims. He partyed, played hallucinogens, like a hippie in the sixties and seventies. I accidentally noticed The Facebook from the mouths of a party girl, and the entrepreneur's old eye made him sure that this was a platform with great energy.
Mark and Sean saw each other, and they both possessed the traits of a tech geek: a stubborn tech, a user-first, obsessed with creating a great product that changed the world. Sean describes his entrepreneurial experience like a preacher: he describes Napster as a provocateur who shakes the foundation of the industry, even if the defendant infringes; He exaggerates Silicon Valley's innovation, freedom, and wealth—investors' hot money, lively parties, and the private lives of tech upstarts, which are unimaginable fame and fortune for young people who have not yet stepped into the Silicon Valley circle with half a foot. He wanted Mark not only to make million-dollar products, but to be a billion-dollar company!
Clearly, Mark Zuckerberg found resonance in Sean's passionate entrepreneurial story. The summer after they met, Mark moved The Facebook's office to California, on the west coast, to start the road to Silicon Valley. Eduardo Saflin, who scoffed at Sean, chose to stay in East Bank New York to continue selling social networking sites to advertising agencies on Madison Avenue. The two founders, who walked side by side from the Harvard dormitory, drifted apart at the decision-making juncture of the company's rapid development.
Disagreements, betrayals, partners going to court
It's hard to say how deeply Mark was influenced by Sean, or if they were essentially the same kind of people. They met alone at a California bar, and Sean was glad that Mark had taken his advice to come to Silicon Valley to sprint his career, and as for Eduardo, he would be a very successful businessman, but his business logic would not fit into a technology-driven company, so let him go.
It was also after this meeting that Mark officially invited Sean to join the company to start a business together, not only to admire his geeky style, but also because he promised to help Facebook's business expand beyond North America and expand into two new continents. This coincides with Mark's idea of "connecting the world".
Huaduo, who was busy with investment promotion and internship in New York, was completely unaware of Sean's joining, until he once flew from New York to San Francisco across more than half of North America, only to find this "uninvited guest" who broke into the company: he expanded the market for the product, controlled the development rhythm of the R&D department, and helped the company connect with the most famous venture capital in Silicon Valley... In addition to writing the code himself, Sean is involved in all big and small decisions and management matters. The company is growing faster and faster, but Waldo doesn't know anything about it, and Sean is replacing himself as Mark's right-hand man and Facebook's best manager. What makes Huaduo even more sad is that the difference between him and Mark's business philosophy has become wider and wider with the distance.
The moment that really made Eduardo feel betrayed by his friend was when Mark and Sean reorganized the company after introducing venture capital funds, "tricking" him from New York to re-sign the company's restructuring and equity redistribution contracts. After the restructuring, Huaduo's shares in the company were raised from 30% to 34.4%, but he did not further confirm the additional details of the shareholder, which led to his share being diluted to only 0.03% after the company received a new round of financing." I should have shown my lawyer before I signed," and Waldo, who eventually had to go to court with his former good partner, expressed his disappointment during the trial, "To be honest, I didn't think Mark would treat his old friend like this." ”
There are no friends in the business field. Even comrades-in-arms who walk side by side from scratch will stand on the opposite side in order to protect their own interests when they encounter disagreements of ideas and the distribution of interests. Mark unilaterally decided to part ways with Huaduo, and at the important node of Facebook's user base exceeding 1 million, it seems to be demonstrating to him, under his own helm, the technology company has not made the mistake of monetizing prematurely and consuming users, and will continue to build a social network empire under its own leadership.
Looking back from the biographical film about Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, The Social Network, the real-world business battleground will only be more brutal, with no eternal friends, only eternal interests. Behind the glamorous Silicon Valley entrepreneurial genius and wealth creation myth, there are the most bloody stories and the most complex human nature.
So far, Facebook has more than 2 billion daily active users, spread across five continents and four oceans. Although Facebook has been mired in scandals and controversies in recent years such as "user data breaches", "hate speech" and "manipulation of presidential elections", it is undeniable that its existence has upended traditional social methods, and Zuckerberg is still one of the most talented young people of this era.