An Early Interview With Mark Zuckerberg Back in the autumn of 2004, I had an opportunity to interview Facebook-founder and youngest-billionaire ever, Mark Zuckerberg for Newsweek (while also being featured prominently about its use). So with the release of Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher's The Social Network, and their portrayal of Marky Z. as an obtuse and socially-maligned adolescent, I can't help but chime in and agree that Zuckerberg kind of got a raw deal. Unfortunately what works in real life doesn't necessarily work for Hollywood, and while the movie is brimming with fantastic dialogue and cinematography, (especially the cringe-worthy opening scene and the crew-race montage), don't expect it to be an authoritative bio-pic on Facebook's founder. I previously blogged about my interactions with the proto-billionaire four years ago, my reflective observations (in 2006) being that: I was left with understanding that Zuckerberg was your ordinary high-achieving student. Smart, precocious, a bit nerdy, but self-aware. And certainly nothing like how Jesse Eisenberg portrays him. Still, it's worthwhile to go back to my original interview with Mark, and I've republished it below in all its glory, including some additional quotes for background. I'd like to especially highlight, at the time, that Mark was especially keen on making the site fun, claiming "we’re definitely not in it for the money", and was working exhaustively on a file-sharing site called Wirehog that never got off the ground. Facebook had been a public website (beyond Harvard) for a little over seven months at this point: MPN recently had the privilege to talk with thefacebook.com creator Mark Zuckerberg. When we spoke, Mark was enjoying a leave of absence from his studies at Harvard University; he has rented out a house with some friends in Palo Alto, California, and spends his days working with collaborators on his next project – a peer-based file-sharing program named Wirehog (wirehog.com) that will allow for the seamless sharing of files among friends. Could you briefly discuss thefacebook’s inception? The idea for the website was motivated by a social need at Harvard to be able to identify people in other residential houses – Harvard is a fairly unfriendly place. While each residential house listed directories of their residents, I wanted one online directory where all students could be listed - someplace where I would be able to find all of the people who are the most relevant to my life. The result was thefacebook. And from there you spread the website to other top schools… MIT, Yale, Stanford. Yeah, but the goal was never to be elitist… we had a launch plan to enter into other colleges based on where friends would be most likely to overlap, and so the site spread organically based upon that model, and now we operate at a broad spectrum of campuses. It doesn’t make sense to exclude anybody or any college from the resources that the facebook offers – this is after all a product that is fun and useful for all college students. Your website was one of the first social networking sites to explicitly ground its online community to a physical one, and perhaps more importantly, to demonstrate the linkages that exist between different physical communities. That’s why I think the website has been such a success. We don’t view site as an online community – we bill it as a directory that is reinforcing a physical community. What exists on the site is a mirror image of what exists in real life. But at the same time, can’t thefacebook distort people’s perceptions of the real world? To a certain extent, the website is unfortunate because it oversimplifies things. Everybody’s concept of having a friend is different… it can definitely blur the relationships that exist between people. But in the end, I think that thefacebook.com can only strengthen preexisting communities. We think we have been particularly successful in strengthening those relationships that exist between people who are only “fringe friends.”I basically came away from the conversation with the impression that even though he was obviously shrewd and very on top of his business, he was also a pretty down-to-earth and likeable guy. The only odd take-away I had from the interview was how often Mark seemed to casually mention beer drinking -- either while programming, hanging out with friends, or partying he would always refer to himself as 'drinking a couple of beers'. But then again, he was a college student and perhaps he just wanted to relate to Current's readership.
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