Ben Mezrich on the founding of Facebook
Dane Golden
Ben Mezrich on the founding of Facebook As movie 'The Social Network' comes out, 'Accidental Billionaires' author talks about the story behind the website
By DANE GOLDEN
"The Social Network," a feature film based on Ben Mezrich's book "The Accidental Billionaires," is being released this Friday (Oct. 1, nationwide). So I posed this seemingly simple question: Did Mark Zuckerberg invent Facebook, or didn't he?
"Mark is definitely the genius behind Facebook," Mezrich told me on my podcast, which is called HEY! "Mark built Facebook. Mark is the guy that really controls that company and brought that company to where it is."
But the book takes a deeper look into the first year or so of Facebook's creation, and while CEO Zuckerberg is today known as the face of Facebook, Mezrich brings to light other names that claimed a role in its beginnings on the Harvard campus.
"There were a lot of people that felt angry and felt betrayed" Mezrich said, "and felt like they had been stolen from."
One previously unheralded name was Eduardo Saverin, who was largely unknown before the publishing of the book.
"He was pretty much erased from the history of Facebook," Mezrich said. "Eduardo was a kid who cofounded the company. He was Mark's best friend."
Saverin had put up $1,000 for a percentage of the company, Mezrich said, when Zuckerberg decided to start a Harvard social site, not his first. The previous website was a prank, when he hacked into Harvard computers to get student names and photos and put them up on a "HotOrNot.com"-styled site called Facemash, where students could rank each other by appearance. The university didn't take kindly to Facemash, and "Thefacebook" was an effort to make a similar social site that was voluntary.
But while Thefacebook quickly grew in popularity, Saverin and Zuckerberg had a split.
"As Facebook took off and Mark moved out to California and Eduardo stayed behind to finish school," Mezrich said, "they kind of fell apart, and Mark essentially moved on without him."
Other Harvard students, the Winklevoss brothers, felt they had been wronged by Zuckerberg. Identical 6'5" twins who went on to become Olympic rowers, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, along with friend Divya Narenda, had asked Zuckerberg to help them with their pre-Facebook website. TheHarvardConnection.com, Mezrich said, was more of a dating website. And the brothers couldn't write code.
But they didn't offer to pay Zuckerberg money.
"They told him 'We'll resuscitate your reputation. You can be part of our company. You'll be the face of our company,'" Mezrich said. "The idea was he'd be part of their group."
But the brothers said that Zuckerberg led them along, but didn't end up helping them, and then started his own site.
"They claimed Mark stole their idea, and they ended up suing Mark." Facebook eventually settled out of court with the Winklevoss twins for $65 million.
To research the book, Mezrich said he spent about six months talking to Saverin, conducted dozens of interviews, and looked through court documents numbering in the thousands of pages. But after about a year of trying, Mark Zuckerberg would not be interviewed for the book.
"This is the story he didn't want told, and so it was his right [not to be interviewed]" Mezrich said. "But it didn't really keep me from writing the story. There are so many sources, and there's so much court documentation, that it was actually very possible to fill in all the blanks without ever having to talk to him."
Mezrich attended the film's premier at last Friday's opening night of the New York Film Festival, where it had an audience of about a thousand people.
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