The Accidental Billionaires

by Ben Mezrich

Mark’s hand felt like a dead fish in his grip. Tyler dropped into a seat across the table from him, and Cameron took the seat to Tyler’s right. Mark didn’t look like he was going to say anything, so Tyler started right in.

  “We’re gonna call it Harvard Connection,” he began, getting right to the point. Then he launched into a full description of the Web site they were trying to build. He tried to keep it simple, at first—explaining the idea behind an online meeting place where Harvard guys and girls could find each other, share information, connect. That the site would have two sections, one for dating, and one for connecting. Students would be able to post pictures of themselves, put in some personal info, and try to find links with one another. Then he got into the ideology behind the site—the thought that there was an inefficiency in the way people met each other, how there were so many obstacles to finding the perfect person, how the Harvard Connection could bring people together based on their personalities—or whatever they put online—rather than on their proximity.

  Although it was hard to read the kid’s face, it seemed like Mark got the idea right away. He liked the concept of a Web site to meet girls, and he was certain that the programming wasn’t going to be too difficult for him. He asked how far along Victor had gotten with the code, and Cameron suggested that he could see for himself—they would give Mark the necessary passwords to go inside Victor’s work, and he could even download the code so he could work on it from his own computer. Cameron guessed they were talking about ten, maybe fifteen hours of programming left to do—no heavy lifting for a guy like Mark. Cameron went into more detail as Tyler leaned back in his chair, watching as the kid listened.

  He could see that Mark was getting more and more excited about the idea as his brother talked. The awkwardness in him seemed less apparent the more into the computer stuff they got, and unlike the other computer science types they’d spoken to, Mark seemed to share the energy and vision that Tyler and his brother had brought to the table. Still, Tyler knew that the kid would want to know what was in it for him if he made the site work, so Tyler jumped into it as soon as his brother quieted down.

  “If this site is successful, we’re all going to make money,” he said. “But more than the money, this is going to be very cool for all of us. And we want you to be the centerpiece of it all. This will get you back in the Crimson—but this time, the paper is going to be praising you, not trashing you.”

  The offer was pretty simple, in Tyler’s view. They’d be partners in the project, so if it made any money, they’d all do well. But until then, Mark could use the launch of the Web site to rehabilitate his image. And he could be the center of attention—something that computer guys never really got, as they were often shoved into the background—and use the site however he wanted to better his social situation.

  Looking at the kid, alone in the back of his dining hall, obviously awkward, as if uncomfortable in his own skin—Tyler knew that it had to be a seductive thought. Get the site going, get a little famous because of it—who knows, maybe it would make this kid a whole different person. Give him a social life, break him out of the geeky mold, get him in with the type of girls you couldn’t get hanging out in a computer lab.

  Tyler didn’t know the kid at all—but who wouldn’t respond to an offer like that?

  By the time the meeting was over, Tyler knew that the kid was hooked. When they shook hands again, it was less dead fish and more lively engineer—and Tyler headed away from the table thrilled to have finally made contact with someone who seemed to really understand what they were trying to do.

  He was so thrilled, in fact, that he decided he and his brother did have time to join the football kids for one drink at the Spi. The Harvard Connection was one step closer to reality, maybe it was time for a little celebrating.

  And what could be more fitting a celebration than a visit from the Fuck Truck?

  On a good day, the fierce aroma of roasted garlic and Parmesan cheese wafting out of the chrome-and-glass open kitchen would have been titillating, if a little overwhelming. But today was anything but a good day. Eduardo’s head was throbbing, and his eyes burned like they’d been dipped in bleach. The aroma was choking him, and he wanted nothing more than to crawl underneath the table in the small booth where he was sitting, curl up into a ball on the floor, and drift off into a coma. Instead, he took deep sips from the glass of ice water he had in front of him and tried to make sense of the blurred words spread across the small menu in his hands. He didn’t blame the restaurant for his physical state; Cambridge, 1. was one of his favorite eateries in Harvard Square, and usually he looked forward to their thick, piled-on pizzas. You could smell Cambridge, 1. from two blocks down Church Street, and there was a good reason every booth in the modern little place was filled, as well as every seat at the small bar that sidled up next to the open kitchen. But at the moment, Eduardo had no interest in pizza. The very thought of food threatened his fragile equilibrium, and he fought the urge to sprint back to his dorm room, cover himself in his blanket, and disappear for the next two days.

  He could have gotten away with it, too. It was only a week into January, and he hadn’t even started classes yet, after the two-week winter break. In fact, he’d only gotten back onto campus from Miami the day before. After landing at Logan, he’d headed directly over to the Phoenix—really, to decompress after so much family time.

  Eduardo had returned to campus needing a mind-cleansing experience—and he’d had no trouble finding one at the Phoenix. He’d also found a few of his fellow new members there, and they’d thrown things right into high gear. It was almost as if they were trying to re-create the damage that had been done the night of their initiation into the club—which had occurred just ten days earlier.

  Eduardo grinned, even through his pain, as he thought back to that night—truly, one of the craziest of his life. It had started innocuously enough; dressed up in a tuxedo, he and the other initiates had been marched like dapper soldiers all over Harvard Square. Then they had been herded back to the mansion on Mt. Auburn Street and brought into the upper living room of the clubhouse.

  The rituals had kicked off with an old-fashioned boat race; the initiates had been divided into two groups, lined up in front of the pool table—and the first kid in each group had been handed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. One of the club members had blown a whistle, and the race had begun. Each initiate had been told to drink as much as he could—then pass the bottle back to the next kid in line.

  Sadly, Eduardo’s team hadn’t won the race—and as punishment, they’d had to reenact the damn thing with an even bigger bottle of vodka.

  After that, Eduardo’s memory of the night was kind of blurry—but he did remember being marched out to the river, still wearing his tux. He remembered how fucking cold it was, standing there in his thin little jacket, the December wind whipping through his expensive white shirt. Then he remembered the brothers telling him and the other initiates that they were going to race again—except this time, it was going to be a swimming race. Across the Charles and back.

  Eduardo had nearly fainted at the idea. The Charles was notoriously polluted—and even worse, in the middle of December, it was already starting to ice in some places. Trying to swim across sober was terrifying enough—but drunk?

  Still, Eduardo hadn’t had a choice. The Phoenix meant too much to him to turn back then—so like the other initiates, he’d gone to work on his shoes and socks. Then he’d lined up right at the water’s edge, leaned forward—

  And, thank God, that’s when the brothers had all come out of the darkness, laughing and cheering. There wasn’t going to be any swimming that night—just more drinking, more rituals, and congratulations all around. Within a few hours, the initiation was complete, and Eduardo became an official member of the Phoenix.

  He was now free to wander the upstairs halls and private rooms of the club, free to get acquainted with the nooks and crannies of the mansion where he’d be spending so much of his soci
al life going forward. To his surprise, last night he’d discovered that there were even bedrooms upstairs in the club—even though nobody actually lived there. He could guess what the bedrooms were for—and the thought had led to many more toasts with his club mates—which had led to the terrifying state he was in now.

  So bad, in fact, that he was halfway out of the booth and heading for the door when he finally spotted Mark winding past the crowded bar, his hoody up over his head, a strange, determined glow in his eyes. Eduardo immediately decided he could fight the pain for a few minutes, at least; it wasn’t often he’d seen that look in Mark’s eyes, and it could only mean something “interesting” was about to go down. Something, at the very least, that would explain why they were meeting in an Italian restaurant instead of in the dining hall, where they usually ate lunch.

  Mark slid into the booth across from Eduardo just as Eduardo repositioned himself back behind his ice water and his menu. But from the look on Mark’s face, he didn’t think they’d be ordering anything soon. Mark seemed to be bursting at the seams.

  “I think I’ve come up with something,” he started, and then he launched right into it.

  Over the past month—beginning right after the Facemash incident—Mark had been developing an idea. It had really started with Facemash itself—not the Web site per se, but the frenzied interest that Mark had witnessed, firsthand. Simply put, people had reacted to the site—in droves. It wasn’t just that Mark had put up pictures of hot girls onto the Internet—there were a million places people could go to see pictures of hot girls—but Facemash had offered up pictures of girls whom the kids at Harvard knew, sometimes personally. The fact that so many people had clicked onto the site, and voted, showed that there was real interest in checking out classmates in an informal, online setting.

  Well, Mark wondered, if people wanted to go online and check out their friends—couldn’t they build a Web site that offered exactly that? An online community of friends—of pictures, profiles, whatever—that you could click into, visit, browse around. A sort of social network—but one that was exclusive, in that you had to know the people on the site to get into it. Kind of like in the real world—real social circles—but put online, by the people in the social circles themselves.

  Unlike Facemash, he wanted to create a Web site where people put their own pictures up—and not just pictures, but also profiles. Where they’d grown up, how old they were, what they were interested in. Maybe the classes they were taking. What they were looking for online—friendship, love interests, whatever. And then he wanted to give people the ability to invite their friends to join. Punch them, in a way, and invite them into your online social circle.

  “I’m thinking we keep it simple and call it the Facebook,” Mark said, and his eyes were positively on fire.

  Eduardo blinked, his hangover suddenly forgotten. Right away he thought it was a pretty amazing idea. It felt big—even though aspects of it certainly sounded familiar. There was a Web site called Friendster that seemed similar, but it was pretty clunky and nobody used it, at least not at Harvard. And some kid named Aaron Greenspan on campus had gotten in trouble a few months before for getting kids to join an info-sharing bbs that had used their Harvard e-mails and IDs as passwords. Then the Greenspan kid had gone on to develop something called house SYSTEM that had some social elements involved in it. Grossman had even added a Universal House Facebook into his site, which Mark had checked out; hardly anyone had paid any attention to it, as far as Eduardo knew.

  Friendster wasn’t exclusive, the way Mark was describing his idea. And Grossman’s site wasn’t particularly slick, and wasn’t about pictures and profiles. Mark’s idea was really different. It was about moving your real social network onto the Web.

  “Isn’t the school working on some sort of online facebook?”

  Eduardo also remembered reading in the Crimson article on Facemash that the university actually did have plans in place to make some sort of universal online student picture site; other schools already had them, a sort of repository for school photos and such.

  “Yeah, but what they’re doing isn’t interactive or anything. It’s not what I’m talking about at all. And the Facebook is a pretty generic name. I don’t think it matters where else it’s being used.”

  Interactive—an interactive social network. It sounded pretty compelling. It also sounded like a lot of work—but Eduardo wasn’t a computer expert. That was Mark’s department. If Mark felt he could build such a site—well, then he could.

  And it seemed like Mark had already done a lot of thinking about the idea—it was pretty developed, at least in his mind. Eduardo realized it was more than just Facemash—it also incorporated some of the stuff Mark had done with Course Match—where kids could see what classes other kids had taken. Friendster, of course, must have fed into it as well; certainly Mark had checked out the site, hadn’t everybody?

  Mark must have taken all those things, combined them in his head—and then taken it all a step further. Eduardo wondered when the genius moment had struck—while Mark was home, in Dobbs Ferry, over the holidays? While he was sitting alone in his dorm room, staring at his computer screen? In class?

  The one place he was pretty sure Mark didn’t have the stroke of genius was while hanging out with the Winklevoss twins. Mark had described the dinner meeting in full detail, as well as the site the Winklevosses thought Mark was working on for them. The way Mark had described it, it was little more than a dating Web site, a place for guys to try to get laid. A sort of highbrow Match.com.

  As far as Eduardo knew, Mark hadn’t actually done any work for the twins. He’d looked at their site, thought it through—and decided it wasn’t worth his time. In fact, he’d scoffed at it, saying that even his most pathetic friends knew more about getting people interested in a Web site than Divya and the Winklevosses. Anyway, he was too busy with classes to spend time playing with a dating site just to impress a couple of Porc jocks. Though Eduardo was pretty sure Mark had continued to converse with them via e-mail and even phone calls, for God knows what reasons. Probably, because they were who they were—and Mark was who he was.

  Eduardo was certain the Winklevoss twins had completely misread his friend. They’d probably looked at him and seen a geek who would jump at the chance to “rehabilitate” his image by building their Web site for them. But Mark didn’t want to rehabilitate anything. Facemash had gotten him in trouble—but it had also shown the world exactly what Mark had wanted to show—that he was smarter than everyone else. He’d beaten Harvard’s computers, then he’d beaten the ad board.

  Certainly, Mark saw himself as leagues beyond the Winklevoss twins. Who were they to try to harness his abilities? Just a couple of jocks who thought they ruled the world. Maybe they did rule the social world, but in the land of Web sites and computers—Mark was king.

  “I think it sounds great,” Eduardo said. The restaurant had receded into the background, now, and all he could see was Mark’s passion for this new project. Eduardo wanted to be involved. Obviously, Mark wanted his involvement as well. Otherwise, he would have gone to his roommates. One of them, Dustin Moskovitz, was a computer genius, maybe as good at coding as Mark. Why hadn’t Mark gone to him first? There had to be a reason.

  “It is great. But we’re going to need a little start-up cash to rent the servers and get it online.”

  And there it was. Mark needed money to get his site going. Eduardo’s family was wealthy—and more than that, Eduardo himself had money, the three hundred thousand dollars he’d made trading oil futures. The profits that had come from his obsession with meteorology, and the algorithms that had enabled him to predict hurricane patterns. Eduardo had money, Mark needed money—maybe it was as simple as that. But Eduardo wanted to believe there was even more to it.

  What Mark was talking about was a social site. Mark had no social skills to speak of, and really no social life either. Eduardo had just become a member of the Phoenix. He was starting to
branch out, meet girls. Sooner or later, he was probably even going to get laid. Of Mark’s friends, who else could Mark have turned to? Eduardo was certainly the most social of the bunch.

  “I’m in,” Eduardo said, shaking Mark’s hand across the table. He could provide money, and advice. He could help guide this project in a way that even Mark probably couldn’t. Mark wasn’t a business-minded kid. Hell, he’d turned down seven figures from Microsoft in high school!

  Eduardo had grown up in a world of business. With this idea, perhaps he could show his father how much he had already learned. The head of the Harvard Investment Association was one thing; creating a popular Web site would be another entirely.

  “How much do you think we’ll need?” Eduardo asked.

  “I think a thousand dollars to start. The thing is, I don’t really have a thousand dollars at the moment, but if you put up what you can right now, we can get this thing off the ground.”

  Eduardo nodded. He knew that Mark wasn’t rich; but Eduardo could have a thousand bucks ready in less than twenty minutes. All it would take was a short trip over to the nearest bank.

  “We’ll split the company seventy-thirty,” Mark suddenly volunteered. “Seventy percent for me, thirty percent for you. You can be the company’s CFO.”

  Eduardo nodded again. It sounded fair. It was Mark’s idea, after all. Eduardo would finance it, and make the business decisions. Maybe they’d never make any money off the thing—but Eduardo had a feeling it was too good an idea to just fizzle away.

  Kids all over campus were trying to build Web sites. Not just the Winklevosses and that Greenspan kid. Eduardo personally knew about a dozen other students who were trying to launch online businesses from their dorm rooms. Lots of them had social aspects like the Winklevosses’ site—but none of the ones that Eduardo had heard of were anything as cool-sounding as Mark’s idea. Simple, sexy, and exclusive.

  The Facebook had all the elements of a successful Web site. A simple idea, a sexy function—and an exclusive feel. Like a Final Club, except online. It was the Phoenix, but you could join from the privacy of your own dorm room. And this time, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going to just get punched. He was going to be made president.