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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.

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.

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.

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.

Dec 2003

Zuck IM shows conflict of interest

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An IM exchange with Zuckerberg’s friend shows he is conflicted about developing HarvardConnections (“that dating site) and thefacebook.

Z: So you know how I’m making that dating site
Z: I wonder how similar that is to the Facebook thing
Z: Because they’re probably going to be released around the same time
Z: Unless I f-ck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I’d have it done.
D: haha
Z: Like I don’t think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating
Z: and I think people are skeptical about joining dating things too.
Z: But the guy doing the dating thing is going to promote it pretty well.
Z: I wonder what the ideal solution is.
Z: I think the Facebook thing by itself would draw many people, unless it were released at the same time as the dating thing.
Z: In which case both things would cancel each other out and nothing would win. Any ideas? Like is there a good way to consolidate the two.
D: We could make it into a whole network like a friendster. haha. Stanford has something like that internally
Z: Well I was thinking of doing that for the facebook. The only thing that’s different about theirs is that you like request dates with people or connections with the facebook you don’t do that via the system.
D: Yeah
Z: I also hate the fact that I’m doing it for other people haha. Like I hate working under other people. I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait until the last day before I’m supposed to have their thing ready and then be like “look yours isn’t as good as this so if you want to join mine you can…otherwise I can help you with yours later.” Or do you think that’s too dick?
D: I think you should just ditch them
Z: The thing is they have a programmer who could finish their thing and they have money to pour into advertising and stuff. Oh wait I have money too. My friend who wants to sponsor this is head of the investment society. [He is talking about Eduardo Saverin] Apparently insider trading isn’t illegal in Brazil so he’s rich lol.
D: lol

8 Jan, 2004

Zuckerberg busy, skeptical

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In emails Zuckerberg says he is too busy to work on the site

Sorry it’s taken a while for me to get back to you. I’m completely swamped with work this week. I have three programming projects and a final paper due by Monday, as well as a couple of problem sets due Friday. I’ll be available to discuss the site again starting Tuesday…I”m still a little skeptical that we have enough functionality in the site to really draw the attention and gain the critical mass necessary to get a site like this to run…Anyhow, we’ll talk about it once I get everything else done.

11 Jan, 2004

Meet with Zuckerberg

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After several weeks of saying he was busy with other work, Zuckerberg meets with the Winklevosses and Narendra in his dorm room, allegedly confirming his interest and assuring them that the site was almost complete. On the whiteboard in his room, Zuckerberg allegedly had scrawled multiple lines of code under the heading “Harvard Connection,” and this would be the only time they saw any of his work.

14 Jan, 2004

Zuckerberg meeting: No mention of the facebook.com

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In a meeting with the team Zuckerberg tells the HarvardConnection team that he will continue to work on the site and would email the group later in the week. Zuckerberg informs them that he is involved with another project. but does not elaborate. He does not mention that he has registered thefacebook.com nor that he is setting up a rival website.

After the meeting, Zukerberg has another IM exchange with his friend. He tells 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.”

6 Feb, 2004

Winklevosses find out about thefacebook.com

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The Winklevosses and Narendra find out about thefacebook.com when they read a press release in The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.

Tyler: None of us knew about it until we picked up the [Crimson]. We read this article that says ‘thefacebook launched by Mark Zuckerberg,’ and we sort of stepped back and were like, ‘Well, that sounds like our idea…’

According to Gao, who looked at the HarvardConnection code afterward, Zuckerberg had left the HarvardConnection code incomplete and non-functional, with a registration that did not connect with the back-end connections.

Jul 2004

Zuckerberg hacks into ConnectU

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Zuckerberg hacks into ConnectU’s site and makes changes to multiple user profiles, including makeing a fake profile for Cameron Winklevoss. The profile lists Cameron’s height as 7’4″, his hair color as “Ayran Blond,” and his eye color as “Sky Blue.” He listed Cameron’s “language” as “WASP-y.” He also logged into the accounts of some ConnectU users and changes their privacy settings so they are invisible to other users.  He also deactivates about 20 ConnectU accounts entirely.

30 Jun, 2008

Joins Facebook board

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After a period of speculation, Andreessen officially joins Facebook’s board of directors alongside Mark Zuckerberg, Jim Breyer, and Peter Thiel. The official press release calls Andreessen’s venture Ning, “a complementary platform to Facebook,” rather than a potential rival. Andressen says:

Facebook is one of the most innovative companies on the Web and it’s an honor to join the board. I’m looking forward to helping the team as Facebook continues to grow.

27 Aug, 2010

Warns startups about Facebook

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Calacanis issues a warning for Y Combinator companies:

If you tell Facebook about your startup before you reach critical mass, if you become involved with Facebook in any way, you are an idiot. They will steal your company’s ideas, and try to get you to take a small price for your company, and take a job at Facebook, which by they way, is going to be a job that sucks.

Jason Calacanis' Warning To Y Combinator Startups

11 Jan, 2012

Psychological study

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Facebook conducts a psychological study of 600,000 users, who are not informed about the test. It tests whether positive or negative posts by people’s friends affect their own emotional response to a topic. The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that it does have an effect:

When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.

12 Sep, 2012

Zuckerberg interview

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Arrington talks with Zuckerberg at Disrupt 2012 in his first interview after the Facebook IPO announcement. They discuss the stock price, ads, Facebook phone, and the mobile version vs the website. Arrington:

The stock has lost roughly half its value…if you could’ve done anything differently with hindsight?

Zuckerberg:

The performance of the stock has obviously been disappointing…We’re going to execute this mission where we’re going to make the world more open and connected

Mark Zuckerberg Interviewed by Michael Arrington - #TCDisrupt TechCrunch Disrupt 2012 Full Video

4 Feb, 2014

On Facebook’s 10-year anniversary

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Zuckerberg reflects on Facebook’s 10-year anniversary on interview with TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie.

I remember really vividly — you know, having pizza with my friends a day or two after — when I opened up the first version of Facebook at my school.