The Accidental Billionaires Page 9

  Thefacebook.com was ready to roll.

  “Let’s do this.”

  Mark pointed to his laptop, which was open on the desk next to his desktop computer. Eduardo moved beside him, hunching over the laptop keyboard, his sloped shoulders curved inward as he attacked the keys. He quickly opened his e-mail address book and pointed to a bunch of names grouped together near the top.

  “These guys are all members of the Phoenix. If we send it to them, it will get spread around pretty fast.”

  Mark nodded. It had been Eduardo’s idea to go to the Phoenix members first. They were the social stars on campus, after all. And thefacebook was a social network. If these kids liked it, and sent it on to their friends, it would spread pretty fast. And these Phoenix guys knew lots of girls. If Mark had simply tried to send it out to his own e-mail list, it would bounce around the computer science department. And the Jewish fraternity, of course. Certainly it wouldn’t get to many—if any—girls. And that would be a problem.

  The Phoenix was a much better idea. That—along with the Kirk-land House e-mail list, which Mark had legal access to, as a member of the house—would get this thing started right.

  “Okay,” Eduardo said, with a quaver in his voice. “Here we go.”

  He wrote a simple e-mail, just a couple lines of text, introducing the site, and linked in thefacebook.com. Then he took a deep breath, and hit the key—sending out the mass e-mail with a single stroke of his finger.

  It was done. Eduardo closed his eyes, imagining the tiny packets of information ricocheting out into the world, whizzing down copper tubing and bouncing off of orbiting satellites, ripping through the ether, tiny bursts of electric genius leaping from computer to computer like synaptic flashes in a vast, worldwide nervous system. The Web site was out there.

  Live.

  Alive.

  Eduardo put a hand on Mark’s shoulder, startling him.

  “Let’s get a drink! It’s time to celebrate!”

  “No, I’m going to stay here.”

  “You sure? I hear there are some girls coming over to the Phoenix later. They sent the Fuck Truck for ’em.”

  Mark didn’t respond. At the moment, Eduardo could tell from Mark’s expression that he was a distraction, like the sound of the radiators near the wall or the traffic in the street down below his little window.

  “You’re going to just stay here and stare at the computer screen?”

  Again, Mark didn’t answer. He was bobbing a little behind the computer, davening, even.

  It was a strange sight, but Eduardo obviously decided not to judge his awkward friend. And why should he? Mark had been working round the clock to get thefacebook ready for this launch. If he wanted to sit by himself and stare, he’d earned the right.

  Eduardo backed away from him, crossing the small bedroom in near silence. Then he paused at the doorway, tapping the door frame with his outstretched fingers. Mark still didn’t turn around. Eduardo shrugged, turned, and left the kid alone with his computer.

  Mark sat there enveloped in silence, lost in his own reflection as it danced across the screen.

  Tyler was in the zone. Eyes closed, muscles rippling across his back, chest heaving, quads and triceps and forearms burning, fingers white against the oars. The blades sliced in and out of the water without so much as a ripple, mimicked exactly by Cameron’s pair just a few feet behind—utterly in sync, again and again and again. Tyler could almost hear the cheering of the fans who packed the banks of the Charles, he could almost see that bridge coming closer and closer and closer—

  “Tyler! You’ve got to see this!”

  And it all came crashing down. His oars wobbled in his grip and the water splashed upward, soaking his sweatshirt and shorts. His eyes whipped open—and he didn’t see the banks of the Charles flashing by. He saw the interior of the Newell Boathouse, home to Harvard’s crew team since 1900. He saw a cavernous, hall-like room, walls lined with ancient crew memorabilia—oars and hulls and sweatshirts, framed black-and-white photos and shelves full of trophies. And he saw the angry-looking Indian kid standing a few feet in front of him, holding up a copy of the Harvard Crimson.

  Tyler blinked, then let his oars down and wiped water from his cheeks. He glanced back at his brother, who had also stopped rowing. The two of them were sitting in one of Newell’s two state-of-the-art “tanks”—the indoor rowing pools consisting of a concrete-walled eight-man “hull” surrounded on both sides by huge ditches of rowable water. Tyler knew that they probably looked ridiculous, sitting there in the tank, soaking wet—but Divya wasn’t smiling, that was for sure. Tyler looked at the Crimson in his friend’s hands, and rolled his eyes.

  “What is it with you and that newspaper?”

  Divya held it out toward him, so angry that his hands were shaking. Tyler shook his head.

  “You read it. I’m soaking wet. I don’t want to get newsprint all over me.”

  Divya exhaled, exasperated, then opened the paper and started reading:

  “‘When Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06 grew impatient with the creation of an official universal Harvard facebook, he decided to take matters into his own hands’—”

  “Hold on,” interrupted Cameron. “What the hell is that?”

  “Today’s paper,” Divya responded. “Listen to this: ‘After about a week of coding, Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com last Wednesday afternoon. The website combines elements of a standard House face book with extensive profile features that allow students to search for others in their courses, social organizations and Houses.’”

  Tyler coughed. Last Wednesday afternoon? That was four days ago. He hadn’t heard anything about this Web site—but then again, he and his brother had been going at their training like animals. He’d barely checked his e-mail in that time.

  “This is crazy,” he said. “He launched a Web site?”

  “Oh yeah,” Divya said. “Here, they quote him right in the article. ‘“Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard,” Zuckerberg said. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.”’

  He can do it in a week? In Tyler’s view, he had been putting Tyler and the Harvard Connection off for two months, saying that he didn’t have the time to program the site, that he had too much going on with his classes and the holidays. Christ, Tyler thought, Mark had lied straight to their faces! In fact, Cameron had sent him an e-mail barely two weeks before, asking Mark’s advice on some design issues for the Harvard Connection—and he’d never responded. They had assumed he was still too bogged down in schoolwork.

  Tyler thought, he’d had time to make his own fucking Web site—but he hadn’t had time to give them ten hours of coding?

  “It gets worse. ‘As of yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said over 650 students had registered to use thefacebook.com. He said that he anticipated that 900 students would have joined the site by this morning.’”

  Holy shit. That couldn’t be true. Nine hundred students had signed up to his Web site in four days? How was that possible? Zuckerberg didn’t know nine hundred people. He didn’t know four people, as far as Tyler could tell. In Tyler’s view, the kid had no friends. He had no social life. How the hell had he launched a social Web site and gotten that kind of response in four days?

  “I checked the site out as soon as I read this. It’s true, the thing is really exploding. You have to have a Harvard e-mail, and then you get to upload your picture, and personal and academic info. You can search for people according to interests, and then when you find your friends, you make a network out of them.”

  Tyler felt his hands tightening. It wasn’t the same as the Harvard Connection—but in his mind, it wasn’t that different, either. The Harvard Connection was going to be about searching out people based on interests. And it was going to be centered on the domain of Harvard. Had Zuckerberg just taken their idea and run with it? C
ould it be a coincidence—had he been meaning to work on their site, but had just gotten carried away with his own?

  No, it didn’t seem right. To Tyler, it seemed like … theft.

  “From what I hear, he got some financing from one of his buddies, a Brazilian kid named Eduardo Saverin. He’s in the Phoenix, made some money trading stocks over the summer. Now he’s part owner of the site.”

  “Because he paid for it?”

  “I guess.”

  “Why didn’t Mark come to us?”

  Mark assuredly knew that the Winklevosses had money; he must have known they were in the Porc, and everyone knew what that meant. If he’d needed cash to start a site, he could easily have mentioned it to Tyler or Cameron. Unless the thing he needed cash for was something he had stolen from them. Unless the Web site he was working on had to be kept secret from them, because it was too similar to what they had hired him to do. Well, not hired, exactly—they had never talked about paying him, just that he’d benefit if they benefited.

  There had been no contract, no paperwork, nothing but a handshake here and there. Fuck. Tyler lowered his head, staring at the blue-green water in the rowing tank. Why hadn’t they written something up, even just some bullshit one-pager—you do this, we’ll do that—something simple. Instead, they’d just trusted the kid. Now it seemed to Tyler like he’d fucked them over. He’d stalled them, led them on, then launched his own site with similar features.

  “Here’s the best part,” Divya said, back to reading from the Crimson. “‘Zuckerberg said that he hoped the privacy options would help to restore his reputation following student outrage over facemash.com, a website he created in the fall semester.’”

  Tyler slammed one of the oars with his palm, sending a plume of water splashing up out of the tank. Almost the exact words of his pitch to Mark—that the Harvard Connection would restore his reputation—and Mark had used them, right there in the Crimson. It was almost as if Mark was mocking them.

  In Tyler’s view, he’d strung them along for two months, right through the holidays and the winter reading period—all the while, working on his own Web site. Then he’d blown them off, and, barely two weeks later, launched his own site—thefacebook.com, stealing their thunder, and in Tyler’s mind, the essence of their idea.

  “What are we going to do?” Cameron asked.

  Tyler wasn’t sure. But he knew he couldn’t just let it happen. He couldn’t let that fucking weasel get away with it.

  “First, we’re going to make a phone call.”

  Tyler’s mind worked furiously as he held the phone hard against his ear. He was standing in his dorm room in Pforzheimer, still soaking wet from a hasty shower, a towel over his shoulders and a pair of sweatpants loose around his waist. Cameron and Divya were at his desk a few feet away, surfing through Zuckerberg’s site on Tyler’s desktop computer. Every time Tyler glanced toward them, and saw that blue-bordered screen, his cheeks heated up, and fire sparked behind his eyes. This wasn’t right, damn it. This wasn’t fair.

  His dad finally answered on the third ring. There was no one in the world Tyler respected more. His father, a self-made multimillionaire, ran one of the most successful consulting companies on Wall Street. If anyone was going to know how to handle a difficult situation like this, it was him.

  Tyler spoke quickly into the phone, explaining exactly what had happened. His dad knew all about the Harvard Connection; after all, they’d been working on the site since December of 2002. Tyler gave him the background of their relationship with Zuckerberg, then told him what he’d read in the Crimson—and what he, Cameron, and Divya had seen for themselves, logging into thefacebook.com.

  “There are things that seem real similar, Dad.”

  The key, to Tyler, was the setting, the exclusivity of it, that really separated what Mark had made from social network sites like Friendster. You had to have a Harvard e-mail to enter Mark’s site—and that had been their idea, too, to launch a Harvard-centric social Web site. The very idea of making everyone who joined have an .edu e-mail address was completely innovative, and potentially very important to the initial success of the site. It was sort of a screening process that kept the thing exclusive and safe. Maybe a lot of the features Mark had put in thefacebook.com were different—but the overall concept, to Tyler, seemed too similar.

  Mark had met with them three times. They had exchanged fifty-two e-mails—all of which were still on Cameron, Tyler, and Divya’s computers. Mark had looked at their code—which they could prove. He’d seen what Victor had already done, and had talked to them at length about what they planned to do.

  “It isn’t about money,” Tyler concluded. “Who knows if either of our sites are ever going to make any money. But this just isn’t right. It isn’t fair.”

  This wasn’t how the world was supposed to work. Tyler and Cameron had grown up believing that order mattered. Rules mattered. You worked hard, you got what you deserved. Maybe in Mark’s hacker world—his computer-geek worldview—things were different. You just did whatever the hell you wanted, you launched prank sites like Facemash, you hacked into Harvard’s computers, you thumbed your nose at authority and mocked people right in the pages of the Crimson—but that simply wasn’t acceptable.

  That wasn’t Harvard. Harvard was a place of order. Wasn’t it?

  “I’m going to put you on with my in-house counsel,” Tyler’s dad said.

  Tyler nodded, slowing his breathing, forcing calm into his veins. A lawyer, that’s exactly what they needed. They needed to go over their options with a professional, see what could be done.

  Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe, just maybe, they could still make this right.

  From up above, the man looked tiny and hunched behind the podium, his face just a little too close to the microphone, and his lanky shoulders poked out at the corners of his formless beige sweater. His bowl haircut dribbled almost to his eyes, and his oversize glasses covered most of his splotchy face, obscuring any sense of expression or emotion; his voice reverberating through the speakers seemed a little too high and nasal, and sometimes it veered into a monotone drone, a single laryngeal note played over and over again until the words bled right into one another.

  He was not a fantastic speaker. And yet, just his presence, the mere fact that he was standing there in the front of Lowell Lecture Hall with his pale hands flapping against the podium, his turkey neck bobbing up and down as he tossed pearls of monotone wisdom at the crowded room—it was beyond inspiring. The audience—made up mostly of engineering and computer geeks from the CS department and a few econ majors with entrepreneurial aspirations—hung on every nasal word. To the gathered acolytes, this was heaven, and the strange, bowl-cutted man at the podium was god.

  Eduardo sat next to Mark in the back row of the balcony, watching as Bill Gates mesmerized the gathered crowd. Despite Gates’s strange, almost autistic mannerisms, he managed to toss off a few jokes—one about why he’d dropped out of school (“I had a terrible habit of not going to classes”) and certainly some pearls of wisdom—that AI was the future, that the next Bill Gates was out there, possibly in that very room. But Eduardo specifically saw Mark perk up when Gates answered a question from one of the audience members about his decision to leave school and start his own company. After hemming and hawing a bit, Gates told the audience that the great thing about Harvard was that you could always come back and finish. The way Mark seemed to smile when Gates said it made Eduardo a little nervous—especially considering how hard Mark had been working on simply keeping up with the demand of their nascent Web site. Eduardo would never drop out of school—it simply wasn’t a possibility to him. In the first place, his father would throw a fit; to the Saverins, nothing was more important than education, and Harvard meant nothing if you didn’t come out of there with a degree. Second, Eduardo understood that entrepreneurship meant taking risks—but only to a certain degree. You didn’t risk your entire future on something until you figured out how it was goin
g to make you rich.

  Eduardo was so busy watching Mark watch Gates, he almost didn’t hear the giggles coming from the seats right behind him; he might not have turned to look if the whispered voices that followed the laughter hadn’t been decidedly female.

  As Gates droned on, answering more questions from the packed crowd, Eduardo glanced over his shoulder—the seat behind him was empty, but from the row right behind the empty seat, he saw two girls smiling and pointing. The girls were both Asian, pretty, and a little overly made up for a lecture like this. The taller of the two had long sable hair pulled back in a high ponytail and was wearing a short skirt and a white shirt open one button too far down the front; Eduardo could see wisps of her red lace bra, wonderfully offset by her tan, smooth skin. The other girl was in an equally short skirt, with a black leggings combo that showed off some impressively sculpted calves. Both had bright red lipstick and too much eye shadow, but they were damn cute—and they were smiling and pointing right at him.

  Well, at him and Mark. The taller of the girl leaned forward over the empty seat and whispered in his ear.

  “Your friend—isn’t that Mark Zuckerberg?”

  Eduardo raised his eyebrows.

  “You know Mark?” There was a first time for everything.

  “No, but didn’t he make Facebook?”

  Eduardo felt a tingle of excitement move through him, as he felt the warmth of her breath against his ear, as he breathed in her perfume.

  “Yeah. I mean, Facebook, it’s both of ours—mine and his.”