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Winklevoss Twins

Winklevoss Twins49 posts

Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss are American venture capitalists and promoters of the virtual currency, Bitcoin. Born in Southampton, New York, the twins competed in the 2012 Beijing Olympics men’s pair rowing event. They are well known for a series of lawsuits against Mark Zuckerberg, disputing the provenance of Facebook, which they say was copied from their work at Harvard University.

 

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10 Dec, 2003

Tells HarvardConnect he is busy

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The week has been pretty busy thus far, so I haven’t gotten a chance to do much work on the site or even think about it really, so I think it’s probably best to postpone meeting until we have more to discuss. I’m also really busy tomorrow so I don’t think I’d be able to meet then anyway.

7 Dec, 2003

Zuckerberg secretly delays HarvardConnection

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Zuckerberg sends an IM to his friend Severin:

Check this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I’m like delaying it so it won’t be ready until after the facebook thing comes out.

30 Nov, 2003

Zuckerberg works on project

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Zuckerberg tells Cameron that he doesn’t expect completion of the project to be difficult. Over the next few days he sends a series of emails indicating he is working on the site.

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.

And on Dec 1:

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.

25 Nov, 2003

Zuckerberg, Winklevoss’ meet

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The brothers and Narendra meet Zuckerberg in the dining hall of Harvard’s Kirkland House, where they explain the HarvardConnection website, the plan to expand to other schools after launch, the confidential nature of the project, and the importance of getting there first. During the meeting, Zuckerberg allegedly enters into an oral contract with Narendra and the Winklevosses to become a partner in HarvardConnection.

Although his attorneys have denied that any formal discussion about compensation or ownership of Harvard Connection took place, Gao would later tell the court:

I told him that [Narendra and the Winklevosses] would either pay him on a rolling basis or take him on as a partner with the possibility of taking an equal stake. He became visibly excited. He told me that he wanted the latter option … because he thought the Harvard Connection website had the potential to reach out to a very large user base.

He is given the private server location and password for the unfinished HarvardConnection website and code, with the understanding that he will finish the programming necessary for launch. Zuckerberg allegedly chooses to be compensated in the form of sweat equity.

Nov 2003

Zuckerberg contacted to work on project

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The site has front-end pages, a registration system, a database, back-end coding, and a way users can connect with each other, which Gao called a “handshake”. Because Gao is leaving, the Winklevosses and Narendra contact Mark Zuckerberg about joining the team.  Narendra emails Zuckerberg:

We’re very deep into developing a site which we would like you to be a part of and … which we know will make some waves on campus

Zuckerberg is well-known at Harvard for creating Facemash, a “Hot Or Not” clone for Harvard. Zuckerberg had got in trouble because he had pulled photos from Harvard’s webservers. Even so, the site had been an instant hit.

Dec 2002

Start work on HarvardConnection

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Divya NarendraThe brothers, along with their friend, Divya Narendra start work on a social network for Harvard students named HarvardConnection, which was to expand to other schools around the country. They hire Sanjay Mavinkurve, who works on the system until Spring 2003 and then Victor Gao, who is paid $400 for his work on the website code during the second half of 2003.