In Ben Mezrich’s ‘ The Accidental Billionaires’ (www.landmarkonthenet.com), you can catch up with not only ‘the founding of Facebook’ but also ‘sex, money, betrayal.’ For instance, in chapter 10, titled ‘November 25, 2003,’ you’d read about the ‘F*** Truck,’ a Harvard institution – ‘a vanlike bus that travelled between the Harvard campus and a half dozen of the nearby all-girl schools – as well as a few of the more liberal-minded coed party campuses – shuttling kids back and forth, most often on weekends.’
All socially knowledgeable Harvard grads had been on the truck at least once in their college career, the author informs. “Tyler could close his eyes and still remember the wonderfully thick scent of alcohol and perfume that seemed to permeate the bus’s vinyl seats…”
Leaving him in his reverie, let us move to chapter 3 where, on the Charles River, to meet Tyler Winklevoss, along with his ‘mirror identical’ twin brother, Cameron – ‘the result of a single ovarian egg that had flipped open like two pages of a magazine.’ Then, at the breakfast table across, there is Divya Narendra, the son of two Indian doctors from Bayside, Queens, ‘mostly hidden behind a copy of the Crimson, the school newspaper,’ with ‘an untouched bowl of oatmeal beneath the newspaper.’
The author lets you into the ‘somewhat secret project’ that the trio is working on; “a sort of side venture in their lives, one that had slowly begun to take on more import – ironically – the busier their lives became.”
Why do you read that rag, Tyler asks Divya, after tossing an apple to splash the oatmeal upward, ‘soaking the newspaper with globs of thick white goo.’ To know what the fellow students are up to, says Divya. “I think it’s important to keep a finger on the pulse of the student body. One day we’re going to launch this freaking company, and then this ‘rag’ is going to be real important to us, don’t you think?”
Cameron reminds them that any launch would be possible only after they found a programmer, to replace Victor Gua who was out, ‘a great asset – a computer whiz who’d understood what they were trying to build.’ Tyler knew in his soul that the company was going to be a huge success, it was such an amazing idea – something that Divya had initially come up with, then he and Cameron had helped hone into what they all humbly considered pure genius, Mezrich narrates.
“The project was called the Harvard Connection, and it was a Web site that was going to change life on campus… The central idea was simple: put Harvard’s social life online, make a site where guys like Tyler and Cameron – who spent all their time rowing, eating, and sleeping – could meet up with girls – like the ones stealing glances at them from the next table over – without all the inefficient, time-wasting, wandering around campus that real life usually necessitated.”
With two sections, dating and connecting, the site would be simple, perfect, fulfilling a need, they knew; and once it succeeded at Harvard, the site could move to other colleges, maybe throughout the Ivies. Alas, the only flaw in their business plan was the missing real geek to make the social site work…
The story opens with Eduardo Saverin, ‘wincing slightly at the bitter tinge in the air,’ after three drinks in quick succession, at a Phoenix punch event. A budding businessman with a hedge fund focusing mostly on oil futures, who made ‘a few good hurricane predictions that the rest of the market hadn’t quite picked up on.’ Welcoming him to the ‘jungle’ is Mark Zuckerberg, a sophomore whose reputation had preceded him. In high school, he’d supposedly been some sort of master hacker – so good at breaking into computer systems that he’d ended up on some random FBI list somewhere, or so the story went, the author recounts.
“He had also made a name for himself at Exeter when, after he had honed his coding skills creating a computerised version of the game Risk, he and a buddy created a software program called Synapse, a plug-in for MP3 players that allowed the players to ‘learn’ a user’s preferences and create tailored playlists based on that information… Rumour was, Microsoft had offered Mark between one and two million dollars to go work for them – and amazingly, Mark had turned them down.”
By the time you finish chapter 5, Mark would have downloaded the Kirkland housing facebook – ‘all of the school’s facebooks, as their databases of student photos were known’ – from the university’s servers into his laptop.
“Sure, in a sense it was stealing – he didn’t have the legal rights to those pictures, and the university certainly didn’t put them up there for someone to download them. But then, if information was gettable, didn’t Mark have the right to do? What sort of evil authority could decide that he wasn’t allowed access to something he so easily could access?”
Once he had all the data, he’d just have to write the algorithms, the complex mathematical programs to make the Web site work, then the program itself, and all that would take a day, maybe two at the most, recounts Mezrich. “He was going to call the site Facemash.com. And it was going to be beautiful…”
Returning to Tyler, in chapter 10, you find him thinking how similar the Truck was to the project he and his brother were working on; “the Harvard Connection would have features that could be described as an electronic F*** Truck – a superslick connection between guys and girls, but instead of a long ride in the back of a bus, you’d just have to click a key on your laptop. One-stop shopping, as it were, for that coed of your dreams.”
Fast-paced.
