by Chris Hughes
I had made it into the country club, faster than my parents had ever imagined, but that did not mean I fit in. A robust financial aid program had catapulted me to the top of the American social hierarchy nearly overnight, and I was still not “one of them.” Instead of trying harder to fit in, I swung hard in the opposite direction, and the rage at anything establishment, authoritarian, or rich that had simmered in Hickory boiled over. I took up smoking—the trashiest kind of cigarettes I could find—and looked for other scholarship kids I could relate to. With few friends and no resources, I fell back on the habits I had brought to the school in the first place and channeled my anger into disciplined study. I wasn’t going to embrace the shame of isolation and go home. I intended to beat every single one of those students who’d arrived with first-class educations, designer clothes, and inborn entitlement. I created a community of one in the silent study room of the wood-paneled library.
In time, I started to get the hang of it. Fancying myself an anthropologist in the making, I dropped in on school dances on Saturday nights for an hour or two and hung around the sidelines watching how they worked. I saw how my dorm mates came by each other’s rooms casually and made plans to meet one another in the dining hall at a certain time. I began to get the drift. I lost my Southern accent and my religion by the end of my sophomore year. Endless hours of study enabled me to go toe-to-toe with the smartest of the bunch, and I joined the leadership of the campus newspaper and made a real friend. A year later, I made a couple more. In the fall of my senior year, I came out of the closet and got into Harvard with another financial aid package, this time, no haggling required.
The summer after I graduated, I backpacked across Europe on a budget of $20 a day with three friends, studying Botticellis in Rome and how to order coffee properly in France. That fall I arrived at Harvard and realized that I was now one of the immaculately prepared students from a best-in-class school. I still lacked the sense that I belonged, but at least now I knew how to “play the role,” as my father had always encouraged me to do. I was only 18 years old that fall, but I knew that friends from Hickory and peers at Harvard saw in me the kind of “up by the bootstraps” success our country supposedly makes possible.
Then, with the success of Facebook, that story was put on steroids. My sophomore year of college, I chose to room with an acquaintance I had met freshman year, Mark Zuckerberg, in order to be placed in the same dorm as many of my female friends. Dustin Moskovitz and Billy Olson were paired with Mark and me by chance, and the four of us lived in a single suite in Kirkland House. We got along well, but we weren’t a tight-knit group. Mark launched multiple projects that fall—a study guide for a class and a now infamous “hot or not” website that compared Harvard students’ faces to one another. He was hauled in front of the disciplinary committee for that one.
Around the first of the year in 2004, Mark started talking about a new project that would enable students to voluntarily list themselves on a website. Mark and I had gone to rival boarding schools, Phillips Exeter and Phillips Andover, that were founded by different branches of the same family. Both produced paper “facebooks,” spiral-bound directories of their students, printed at the same shop located somewhere between the two. All they contained were the students’ names, ID photos, the towns they came from, and their years of enrollment and graduation. As both Mark and I knew, they also provided fodder for endless late-night dorm room conversations: Who was the best-looking? Was this person gay? Would that person make it through the year without getting kicked out? The digital Facebook we launched that winter at Harvard was not specifically built to imitate those spiral-bound relics from high school, but it felt similar because it tapped into the same desire to gaze at others and collectively judge. Most importantly, unlike the paper books where you had no control over how you looked, Facebook gave you the power to choose which profile photo was just right—at least for the self you wanted to be for the next hour or two. That’s how the obsession with Facebook took root in the early days: you had to constantly click around to see who had updated their profiles most recently, sleuth out what they had changed, and speculate as to why.
The initial version of Facebook we launched was bare-bones, similar to the popular open social network Friendster, but open only to Harvard students. Mark was user number four, I was number five, and our roommate Dustin was number six. (Users one through three were test accounts.) We sent a few e-mails to our friends inviting them to join, and within three weeks, 6,000 students signed up. The rocket ship began to take off.
While Mark enlisted Dustin to help build the site and open it up to other colleges, I prepared promotional plans for Harvard and the new schools and helped design core features on the site, like messaging and an early news product. The non-techie of the group, I took responsibility for how the site might be used and how others might perceive it. I pitched in wherever I could to tweak a feature, improve an interface, or make sure a reporter knew the facts. At that stage, Facebook was mostly a fun side project, more something to bond with my roommates over than a way to change the world. Seeing how quickly we could make it grow was almost like a game.
Mark, however, talked about Facebook in near-religious terms from the outset: he saw it as a way to make the whole world more “open and connected.” When reporters described it as a social network for college kids, he chafed at how little they appreciated the scope of his ambition. He exhibited the raw confidence of a natural leader who strikes out on a new path and inspires others to follow, and I joined the army. A few months after the launch, our posse had grown to nearly a dozen, and that summer, we landed in a house in Palo Alto on La Jennifer Way.
Mark and Dustin decided not to return to Harvard that fall, but the idea of dropping out held little allure for me. On scholarship and with no financial cushion or family money to fall back on, I was still in awe that I had made it to a place like Harvard in the first place. My junior year I fit work on Facebook into the rest of my studies, but the time it required grew significantly as the months passed. I returned to Palo Alto the next summer, and eventually commuted back and forth every few weeks during my senior year. After graduating, I joined the company full time, ready to see where it might lead.
As Facebook grew, the area I ran officially became the department of communications and marketing. There were press releases to write, proactive communications and marketing campaigns to plan, and public relations crises to handle. When I joined the crew full time in the summer of 2006, I moved to the product team and worked with engineers to develop new features and upgrade what users saw and did on the site. In less than a year, we launched the running homepage called News Feed that still anchors the site, opened the platform to non-college users, and integrated the first sharing functionality that made it possible for people to exchange, post, and comment on links inside the site. We moved fast and broke things, the classic Facebook maxim that was plastered to the walls in Facebook’s headquarters.
Every day, it seemed, we passed a new milestone. We hit a record number of users nearly every week, and investors responded by pouring more money in. We had such momentum that I failed to notice how often the goalposts kept moving further out. We hadn’t expected it to catch on like wildfire in a matter of days at Harvard, and it seemed insane when a venture capital firm valued the company at an eye-popping $100 million only a year later. Yahoo offered us $1 billion to buy the company a year after that. We were 22 years old, but we passed on the offer.
To my friends at home who were just as addicted to Facebook as everyone else, I was a hero. To my parents, I had become everything they had hoped for—a small-town kid who had made it big. Even before Facebook’s public offering and the wealth that came with it, I felt a sense of pride that I had channeled the restless energy of my teenage years into the opportunity to go to great schools and build a fruitful career, albeit more quickly than I’d imagined. I knew that I had worked hard in school and later
on Facebook, and I was proud of the savvy I’d shown in the projects I’d chosen to become involved in. Despite my lack of engineering skills, I had found a way to make myself valuable to the company as it grew.
In the years after Facebook’s success, the story of its founding and rise became one of the great legends of entrepreneurial America. (Aaron Sorkin’s 2010 film The Social Network only added fuel to the fire.) Long after I left the company, civic groups, companies, and schools invited me to visit and tell the story of Facebook in a way that would inspire and galvanize. Listeners were anxious to believe that their own smarts and elbow grease could earn them similar success; they wanted to know the secret of how we did it so that they might be next. I struggled to give these crowds what they wanted. I knew what it felt like to achieve great things after working hard for them, and Facebook was indeed an incredible success story. But it was a starkly different kind of success than any of my ancestors had lived. Each generation had worked hard and done a little better than the one that came before. But what we’d experienced at Facebook felt more like winning the lottery.
Everyone else was enthralled by the picture of a dorm room success story, but I was unconvinced. I didn’t feel like some kind of genius, and while Mark was smart and talented, so were many of the other people I went to college with. Close confidants wondered if I suffered from the “impostor syndrome” that psychologists talk about, in which successful people can’t accept or acknowledge their own accomplishments. I didn’t think so. It wasn’t a lack of confidence that kept my ego in check, but a sense that unique circumstances had more to do with our success than others realized.
As I grew older, left Facebook, and became wealthy after its public offering, I began to look around at other similarly “successful” rich people, the kind of kids I had gone to Harvard with and other young entrepreneurs who had made money quickly in Palo Alto. I began to question how much they “deserved” their success and what role forces outside their control had played. Was my experience at Facebook unique, or was it just one example of something much bigger going on in our country?
2
The Dismantling of the American Dream
The rain beat steadily on the wooden roof of John Hicks House, a tiny eighteenth-century home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that had been converted into one of Harvard’s libraries. I was working there in a $10-an-hour job where I sat by the entrance and theoretically checked IDs as students came in. I should have been finishing a paper that was due the next day, but instead I was chatting on AOL Instant Messenger, Mark’s preferred method of communication for serious conversations, and the talk we had been having for the past hour was getting serious. “My shift is ending,” I typed. “I’ll come by the room.”
“I have to go to the science center,” Mark wrote back. “Up for a walk?” I closed my laptop and headed out into the rain.
Mark and I had been spending a lot of time together. We had released Facebook a month or two before, and it had exploded in popularity. Mark was struggling to keep the site up and running for the unexpected flood of users, while furiously coding for an imminent expansion to Yale, Stanford, and other schools. As if that wasn’t enough, at the same time he was tutoring our third roommate, Dustin, on the fundamentals of computer programming so he could pitch in. A photo from that period that ran in Harvard’s newspaper, The Crimson, shows Mark at his desk, a half-dozen empty soda bottles at his side, his hair overgrown but freshly combed. I remember the scramble to make him look civilized for the shot, and we were barely successful.
I had spent the frantic weeks since the launch preparing for moments like that, developing a communications plan to explain what Facebook was and what we wanted it to be, answering phone calls from the local press, and laying the groundwork for the expansion to new schools. We wanted students at the next colleges to become as obsessed as Harvard students were with which profile photo to choose (users could only have one) and how to curate the perfect list of “Favorite Movies.”
What Mark and I had been messaging about that night was my ownership stake in Facebook, now that it was becoming a real business. We met under the portico of our dorm and headed out into the rain. I had a single umbrella for both of us. “I want 10 percent,” I said as we walked. I wasn’t sure if he heard me the first time—the rain pounded onto the umbrella I was awkwardly holding over the two of us—so I said it again, but it came out sounding more like a demand. “I want 10 percent!” The number felt a little ambitious, but not entirely unreasonable. I had brushed up on the rudiments of effective bargaining and decided to start high.
“I just don’t think you’ve earned that much,” Mark answered. I paused and took a little time to respond, thinking to myself, This might matter someday. “I appreciate what you are doing,” Mark continued, “and I think you could do a lot more as we grow the site, but I need to keep control. And the others need fair equity too.”
The rain turned into a downpour, and our steps quickened. This was the worst way to have such an important conversation, but our suite wouldn’t have been much better. Mark and I shared a cramped bedroom that barely fit our two twin beds. Dustin shared a similarly small bedroom with our fourth roommate Billy, who had chosen not to participate in anything Facebook-related. Our common room had just enough space for our four desks and a small futon. There was little room for in-person, private conversations, let alone a business conversation that might turn into an argument.
I am conflict-averse by nature, and I found myself in this moment, one of the most important of my life, unprepared and of two minds myself. I felt I deserved a piece of the rapidly growing pie, but I recognized I was a less critical member of the team than Mark or Dustin. The idea for the network had been entirely Mark’s, and Dustin was sleeping three or four hours a night to fit in schoolwork, lessons on how to code, and early engineering work for the site itself. I was actively engaged as our storyteller—Mark dubbed me the “Empath” on the first version of our “About” page—but my role was secondary and I knew it. I wasn’t in a position to make demands, but I was anxious to become more involved. Facebook felt different to me than the other quick-build websites Mark had launched, and I was increasingly excited to be a part of something that could be big, culturally and commercially, at Harvard and beyond.
As Mark and I walked up Holyoke Street and entered Harvard Yard, I argued that carefully communicating the story of Facebook was critical to its virality and to securing our users’ trust. “People are signing up because the site is good, and it’s good because they know us and they know they can trust it,” I said. “We are not an anonymous Internet company—we are their peers.” Mark agreed, but he didn’t move any closer to my number.
By the steps of Widener Library in the center of Harvard Yard, I caved. “Just give me what you think is fair. I know it’s hard to balance all of us.” Frustrated, tired, and late to whatever meeting he was going to, Mark replied with a simple “Okay” and walked off—no umbrella, no hoodie—directly into the pouring rain. A few weeks later I found out that Mark had given me around 2 percent of equity in the company, and that Dustin had gotten several times more. Mark, of course, had retained control for himself. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were children on the precipice of becoming richer than royalty.
A few seemingly small decisions, like that conversation in the rain for me, altered the trajectories of our entire lives. Facebook was reincorporated a few months later, decreasing my percentage slightly, and my share gradually shrank as the company raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the coming years. I did not know to exercise my stock options in the early days, so I had to wait until the public offering, a simple error that resulted in a tax bill several times higher than normal for start-up founders. (I had no tax advisors, investment managers, or wealthy family to give me pointers on how to be “tax efficient.”) But for all my weak negotiating skills, poor financial decisions, and modest role i
n the enterprise, I walked away with nearly half a billion dollars.
Over the next decade, Facebook grew precipitously. After capturing nearly the entirety of the college market and making inroads into high schools, we opened our doors to the whole world in the fall of 2006. Our goal became to create a web of human connection, the pipes people could use to share thoughts and feelings with friends and family around the world. The ambition of the vision—“to make the world more open and connected”—inspired users, employees, and investors alike. By the time Facebook went public eight years after our launch, it had raised over $600 million in venture capital and nearly a billion people used the platform. Today, 2 billion people—two-thirds of all people on the Internet—actively use Facebook, and the company is valued at $500 billion. This kind of growth is extreme, but it is not altogether unusual for a tech company in the era that we live in.
The seeds of Facebook’s success were not planted in 2004 at its founding, but in the late 1970s, before any of us had even been born. In that decade America’s political leaders began to lay the groundwork for the economic forces that made Facebook possible. They’re the same forces that compel us to create a guaranteed income today.