The Accidental Billionaires

by Ben Mezrich

  He was lying on a bed pushed right up against a blandly colored wall of a little bedroom, his head sunk deep into that pillow. His hair was a mess, a tangle of brown-blond curls mushrooming out against the soft material of the pillowcase. He was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants, but that was only because it was six in the morning; his Armani jacket, skinny-legged pitch-black DKNY jeans, and tailored Prada shirt were hanging from a hook on the back of the door to the bathroom.

  What a long strange trip it’s been. His grin turned Cheshire, stretching out the edges of his lips so far it almost hurt. Yes, he knew exactly where he was—and it was a fucking awesome place to be.

  He looked around his little bedroom, taking in the little wooden dresser, the bookshelf full of computer textbooks, the lamp in the corner, the sleeping laptop on the miniature side table by the bed. There were clothes strewn all over the place, on the floor, the bookshelf, even hanging from the lamp, but Sean didn’t mind because most of them were his clothes, and the ones that weren’t were pretty damn sexy. He saw a frilly bra and too short skirt, a tank top and tight, stylish belt—the kind of clothes that college girls wore on campuses all over California; even here, up north, where the palm trees were more often draped in fog than in sunlight. Thankfully, at Stanford, girls still dressed California, despite the school’s elite status. And of course, they were all blond. Let the angry brunettes have the Ivies, blond and pretty ruled the West.

  Sean pushed himself up on one elbow. He wasn’t sure whose bra, skirt, tank top, and belt were in his room—he assumed it was either a guest of one of his roommates, or someone who had been there visiting him. He wasn’t certain why the clothes were in his room, either. He might have known the girl, he might not have. Either way, she probably knew him—or at least, she thought she did. It seemed like everybody at Stanford knew Sean Parker. Which was kind of funny, considering that he wasn’t a student there. This house that he was living in was full of Stanford kids—it was really just an extension of the dorms, right next to campus. But Sean wasn’t a Stanford student; he hadn’t even gone to college. But he was still a campus hero.

  Not quite as famous as his original business partner—Shawn Fanning—but those who knew the story, knew the story. The two teenagers who’d changed the record industry by creating a file-sharing Web site called Napster—a site that let college kids everywhere get whatever music they wanted for free, in the privacy of their dorm rooms, by sharing with one another over the Internet. Napster was a massive success, a world-changing creation—well, okay, it had also kind of imploded—but it had been a beautiful implosion.

  Napster—which Sean had cofounded after meeting Fanning in an Internet chat room while they were both still in high school—was less a company than a revolution. Napster had made music free, had made it downloadable—had given every kid with a computer real power to get what they wanted. Freedom—wasn’t that what rock and roll had been all about? Wasn’t that what the Internet was supposed to be about?

  Of course, the record companies hadn’t seen it that way. The fucking record companies had descended on the two Seans like Vengeful Harpies. They’d battled back, but the end was really a foregone conclusion. Some people thought it was Sean Parker’s fault, when it all finally tumbled and fell; according to some printed reports, he’d written some e-mails that had ended up helping out the record companies in their legal battle, a foolish, youthful indiscretion that had cost Napster the endgame—but see, that had always been Sean’s problem, and also his strength. He was out there, he didn’t keep anything inside.

  And he didn’t regret anything. No fucking way, that wasn’t his style.

  Sure, he could have curled up into a ball after Napster had collapsed. Or run home to his parents. But instead, he’d gotten right back on that Silicon horse. Just a couple short years later, he and two of his closest friends had come up with an idea that built on the notion of sharing—but this time, they’d focused on e-mails and contact information. It started as a free system, just a little program that would send out requests for updated info—and it turned into a sort of constant, self-renovating online business card system. They’d called the company Plaxo.

  And then, well, in Sean’s view that had kind of imploded as well. Not the company—Plaxo was still doing great, the business was probably now worth millions—but Sean’s participation in it was over, finished, kaput. In his view, he’d been kicked out of his own company—and it had been even uglier than it sounded.

  Ugly, because in Sean’s mind, there had been a real villain involved—a James Bond kind of villain, a bizarre, secretive Welshman with a megalomaniacal streak almost as big as his bank account. It had been Sean’s idea to bring in the VC monster in the beginning—because he’d thought that Plaxo needed the money, and he’d thought that he knew how to deal with VCs. But Michael Moritz wasn’t just any VC, he was one of the partners at Sequoia Capital and a deity among the Silicon Valley moneymen. He’d invested in both Yahoo and Google, made such a fortune that nobody would ever question his methods again.

  In Sean’s view, Moritz was reclusive, mysterious, and also maniacal. From the start, he and Sean were butting heads on almost every issue. Sean was a freethinker, a young and wild entrepreneur; Moritz seemed to be about money, pure and simple. Barely a year after Seqouia funded the company, Sean believed that Moritz decided that Sean had to go—leave the company he’d founded!—and of course he’d refused. It became a pitched battle, a VC coup—and eventually, Sean had begun to realize that he was going to end up on the losing end of the situation. His two closest friends, whom he’d started the company with—in Sean’s eyes, they’d succumbed to the pressure of Moritz and the board; and according to reported accounts, when Sean tried fighting back by saying that the only way he’d leave was if he could sell a chunk of his ownership in the company for money up front—it pushed Sequoia into war mode. Sean believed that Moritz had done the kind of thing that one would expect a James Bond villain to do; Sean was certain he’d hired a private eye to follow Sean around, to try to get the ammunition necessary to force him to leave.

  Sean had started to notice cars with dark windows following him when he left his apartment. He’d noticed strange clicks when he was on the phone, and even bizarre callbacks on his cell phone, from unlisted numbers. It had started to get terrifying.

  And maybe they really had been getting dirt. Like any kid his age—with the fame he’d acquired through Napster and Plaxo—Sean liked to party. He liked girls. He certainly wasn’t a saint. He was in his early twenties, a kind of Silicon Valley rock star; and he talked really fast, thought really fast. There was a certain jerky, frenetic quality to him—a quality that could be easily misinterpreted.

  So maybe they had something on him—maybe they didn’t. In any event, in Sean’s view Moritz locked him out. Made him resign from his own company. Made him hand over the keys to his own fucking creation. At the same time, Sean believed he had lost both a company and his two former best friends. It had been ugly, and it had been pathetic, and in Sean’s view it had been unfair. But, well, it had happened. Not just to him—in Silicon Valley, it happened all the time.

  That was the thing about VC money. It was awesome—until it wasn’t.

  Plaxo had ended badly, but that hadn’t meant it was over for Sean Parker. Not even close. The Silicon Valley gossip rags had gotten even more excited about him after the twofer of Napster and Plaxo, and they began to paint him as this bad boy around town. The girls. The designer clothes. And of course, unsubstantiated stories about drugs. Coke. Pills. God knew what else. Sean was half expecting to open up Gawker one day and read about himself mainlining baby seal blood.

  The idea that he was a bad boy was kind of funny to him. He guessed it was utterly hilarious to anyone who’d known him growing up in Chantilly, Virginia. He was a skinny kid, allergic to peanuts, bees, and shellfish, and carried an EpiPen filled with adrenaline with him wherever he went. He had asthma, and also carried an inhaler. He had hair that
was so unruly it sometimes veered toward an Afro. And okay, skinny was kind of an understatement; he wasn’t exactly intimidating, physically. The twin bed was big enough for him to do a gymnastics floor routine. Bad boy of Silicon Valley? The idea was almost ludicrous.

  He looked at the frilly bra on the floor of his room, and smiled again.

  Okay, maybe he did have his moments. A slight hedonistic streak. As the private eyes probably discovered, he liked girls. Sometimes lots of girls. He liked to go out late and he liked to drink. He’d been kicked out of a few nightclubs. And, well, he hadn’t gone to college. He’d left high school when Napster took off and hadn’t looked back.

  But he wasn’t a bad guy. He was the good guy. In his view, even a superhero, kind of. Although his last name was Parker, he thought of himself more as a Batman. Bruce Wayne during the day, hanging with the CEOs and the entrepreneurs. The Caped Crusader at night, trying to change the world one liberated college kid at a time.

  Except, unlike Bruce Wayne, Sean didn’t have any money yet. He had created two of the biggest Internet companies in history, and he didn’t have a dime. Sure, Plaxo was going to be worth something, someday. He’d get a big chunk of that, maybe even tens of millions. Maybe hundreds of millions. And Napster, if it hadn’t made him rich, had certainly put him on the map. Some people even already compared him to Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, who had been responsible for both Netscape and Healtheon. Sean had already hit two of them out of the ballpark; he only needed a third to make the analogy fair.

  And in that regard, he was constantly on the lookout for his next home run. This time, he was looking for something really life changing. Sure, everyone was looking for the next big thing. The difference was, Sean knew what the next big thing was. He knew with a complete, and almost religious certainty:

  Social Networks.

  Just a few months ago, he’d made some connections at the social network site Friendster. He’d brought them some series D VC funding, introduced them to his buddies around town—most notably, Peter Thiel, the guy behind PayPal, a colleague who’d also experienced some run-ins with the gang at Sequoia.

  But Friendster wasn’t going to be Sean Parker’s next home run; it was already too far along, and Sean wasn’t getting in anywhere near the ground floor. And to be honest, Friendster had its limitations. It was really a dating Web site. A good one, more disguised than Match or JDate, but it was about meeting chicks you didn’t know and trying to get their e-mail.

  Then there was MySpace, the ascendant fledgling site that was growing real fast, which Sean had also looked into, and decided against. MySpace was great for what it was, but to Sean, it wasn’t really a social network. You didn’t go on MySpace to communicate, you went there to show yourself off. It was like one big narcissistic playground. Look at me! Look at me! Look at my Garage Band, Comedy Routine, Acting Reel, Modeling Portfolio, and on and on and on. It was throwing your brand out there and hoping someone paid attention to you.

  So if Friendster was a dating sight and MySpace a branding tool, what did that leave? Sean wasn’t sure—but somewhere, out there, he knew there was a Fanning plugging away in some basement, working on the Napster of social networking. Sean just had to keep his eyes open.

  He knew he had set the bar really fucking high. If it wasn’t a billion-dollar company—his own YouTube, his Google—then it wasn’t worth his time. But he’d already had a Plaxo, and the experience had been less than satisfying.

  The next time it would be a billion dollars or bust.

  Sean pushed himself to a sitting position, the energy rising inside of him. It was time to get back to his quest. He glanced at the small table next to the futon, noticing the open laptop resting next to a pink girl’s watch. It wasn’t his laptop, so it was either one of his roommates or one of his or their houseguests’; either way, it was close enough that he could reach it from bed, which made it the default first choice. It was time to check his e-mails, and begin his morning routine.

  He reached for the laptop and placed it gently on his lap. A few seconds later, the computer came out of sleep mode. He saw immediately that it was already hooked up to the Internet, through the Stanford network. He also noticed that there was a Web site open across the screen. Obviously, whoever owned the laptop had been online the night before. Curious, Sean scrolled down, checking the site out.

  It was something Sean had never seen before. Which was weird, because he’d seen pretty much everything.

  There was a soft blue band across the top and bottom of the site. It was obviously a portal of some sort. A girl’s picture was on the left side—Sean took in her beautiful blond hair, her wonderful smile, her incredible blue eyes. Then he saw that beneath her picture, there was some info about her.

  Her sex: female. That she was single. That she was interested in boys. That she was looking for friends. And then a list of the friends that she already had found, her networks. The books she liked. The courses she was taking at Stanford.

  Next to her profile was a personal quote she’d written herself, as well as some comments from her classmates. Everyone seemed to be from Stanford, with Stanford e-mails. They were her real friends, her actual friends—not people just trying to fuck her, like with Friendster. Not people just trying to show off their new rock band or their new fashion line, like MySpace. This was her actual social network, online, connected. Continually connected. Even when the computer had been sleeping, the social network had been awake. It wasn’t static.

  It was fluid.

  It was simple.

  It was beautiful.

  “Mother of God,” Sean murmured to himself.

  It was brilliant. He blinked, hard. A social network—aimed at the college market. It seemed so utterly obvious. The one big gap in the social networking market was college—and college was such a perfect market for a social network. College kids were so incredibly social. You had more friends in college than at any other point in your life. MySpace and Friendster missed the one group of people that had the most use for a social network—but this site? This site seemed to take aim straight at the mother lode.

  Sean’s gaze drifted down to the bottom of the page. There was an odd little line of text.

  A Mark Zuckerberg Production.

  Sean smiled. Oh, he liked that. He liked that a lot. Whoever had made this site had put his name right on the bottom of the page.

  Sean hit some keys, moved over to Google. He started to do a search. To his surprise, he found a lot, much of it culled from a single source—the Harvard Crimson, Harvard university’s school news paper.

  The Web site was called thefacebook, and had been started by a sophomore about six to eight weeks earlier. In four days, most of the Harvard campus had signed up. By the second week, there had been nearly five thousand members. Then they had opened it up to some other schools. Now it was estimated there were close to fifty thousand members. Stanford, Columbia, Yale—

  Christ. This thing was happening fast.

  Sean started mumbling to himself. “Thefacebook.” Why not just “facebook”? That was the kind of thing that would drive Sean crazy. His mind was always doing that, instinctively cleaning things up, smoothing them out. He realized with a start that even as he was thinking it, his fingers were rubbing back and forth against the futon’s sheets, smoothing out the wrinkles. He grinned at himself. Add OCD to the list of neuroses. Get Valleywag on the phone: bad boy, asthmatic, peanut-allergied, obsessive-compulsive Sean Parker is chasing after a new project…

  Because that’s exactly what he was going to do. He was going to find this Mark Zuckerberg, and he was going to see how good this kid really was. And if things were as beautiful as they seemed, he was going to help this kid turn Facebook into something huge.

  Billion-dollar valuation or bust. Pure and simple. Nothing less could be considered a success.

  Sean had already gone two for two, Napster and Plaxo.

  Could Facebook be his number three?


  “Come on, Eduardo. Do you think they’re really going to card us? Here?”

  The girl was rolling her eyes, and that just made it even worse; Eduardo glared at her, but she had already turned back to the cocktail list, and now Mark was scanning the damn thing, too. Maybe Kelly was right, and nobody was going to ask for their ID. But that was beside the point. Neither she nor Mark was taking this seriously, and it was driving Eduardo crazy. And it wasn’t just the restaurant. The whole trip to New York, Mark had been goofing around, pretending this was all just some big joke. Maybe Kelly could get away with it; she was at the dinner only because she happened to be visiting her family in Queens. But Mark was supposed to be in New York on business.

  Though they were staying with friends instead of a hotel, Eduardo had picked up the travel and all the food and taxi bills. More accurately, they were paying for it out of thefacebook’s bankroll, the quickly dwindling thousand dollars that Eduardo had put in back in January, three and a half months ago. That defined the trip as a business expense—so Mark should have been treating the excursion as serious business.

  But he’d done nothing of the sort. For his part, Eduardo had managed to set up a handful of meetings with potential advertisers; none of the meetings had gone particularly well, however, and it hadn’t helped that Mark had slept through about half of them—and had spent the other half sitting silently while Eduardo tried to pick up all the slack. Though everyone they’d met had seemed impressed by the number of people they’d gotten to sign up to thefacebook—over seventy-five thousand at last count—nobody was willing to put any significant money into placing ads on the network. They just didn’t get it, yet, and advertising on the Internet, in general, was such a dicey thing. It was simply hard to get the advertisers to understand how different thefacebook was. The fact that people who went on thefacebook tended to stay online longer than on almost any other site was lost on them. The even more impressive statistic, that most kids who tried out thefacebook once tended to come back—67 percent every day—was completely beyond their comprehension.