IM SORRY IVE BEEN SO QUIET MY LIFES BEEN SO HECTIC LATELYYY
but oh my god I've read the first two chapters so far and 😭😭😭 Dustin mother hen Moskovitz and Mark being absolutely insane about fencing is sonethwt that can be SO personal to me I swear to GOD I'm trying not to find this adorable but I so am, just a little bit
“Later Moskovitz and the others banned fencing from the house.” ASHSEIBEDUJEHDIEHE THATS SO
Also Mark being distracting while fencing when talking with Sean? Should've been in the movie
Also ““Pretty soon they were naming the servers on which Thefacebook software was running after characters in Tom Cruise movies. “Where is that script running?” “It’s running on Maverick.” “Well, run it instead on Iceman, I need Maverick to test this feature.” THATS SO TO <3 I'm currently majoring in compsci and I find this so adorable
And ““I need servers as much as I need food. I could probably go a while without eating, but if we don't have enough servers then the site is screwed.” Maaaark. Maaaaaaaaaaark. Thats not how that works. Not how any of that works.
I think the part that got me the most was “Interviewed by the Harvard Crimson a few months later, Zuckerberg explained why he'd increased Moskovitz’s stake: “Everyone else was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean? He clearly does a lot of work.’”
FIRST OF ALL OH MY GOD THEYRE SO TO. wow. trying not to cry and cry a lot they make me SO…. the part about Dustin going home to learn PERL in a weekend even though the Facebook was originally written in php makes me so. that was so fucking sweet I'm melting
also mark swearing sends me idk why. it ALWAYS catches me off guard
I CANNOT WAIT TO READ MORE IM SO SORRY FOR RAMBLING work suxs and im actually writing my first tsn!mark/dustin fic so this has been my little treat SHSHSHDHD
I SWEAR the image of Mark just half-ignoring Sean while practicing fencing...and there is So Much that happens in just that one sentence about putting a stop to the fencing inside and I need to know everything lol.
And this book. The perl/php story never fails to get me.
I forget when the Adam D'Angelo story about Dustin comes up, maybe it already has, but that one truly takes me out. The dedication that Dustin shows...Mark does not deserve him and it is very interesting to watch their....everything.
👀👀 I support every mark/dustin fic, and if you want a beta or someone to look over it I am offering my services.
Also no no don't be sorry for rambling!!! I am loving the update, feel free to continue.
I've decided, rather than post my thoughts on The Facebook Effect as I read it, collect all of my ramblings into a post for every chapter or so. Hopefully this will result in less clogging of the dash and also more time for reflection on my part. This is mostly for my own reference anyway.
Let's start off with a quote from Kirkpatrick about Mark Zuckerberg that is truly just, absolutely astounding.
He knows that Facebook's long-term success will probably be defined by how well it protects its users' privacy.
I think it would be an understatement to say that this did not age well. Or perhaps it aged perfectly, because even though Zuckerberg insists (or insisted. I think even he would realize now this statement would ring too false) that he is All For transparency, he consistently contradicts himself if you look at enough of what he's said.
I casually told him I thought he seemed like a natural CEO. In my mind it was a huge compliment, one I did not give lightly. But he acted insulted. His face scrunched up with a look of distaste. "I never wanted to run a company," he said a few minutes later. "To me a business is a good vehicle for getting stuff done." Then for the rest of the interview he continued to say the kinds of things that only focused and visionary business leaders are capable of saying.
It's interesting because I've watched an interview with both Kirkpatrick and Zuckerberg, and Kirkpatrick didn't seem particularly on Zuckerberg's side about anything, even going as far to state that Zuckerberg is scared and paranoid of competition (Mark's reaction to this was interesting because he was very obviously annoyed by this claim but had to act diplomatic, which was an interesting tension to see play out.) But thus far in the book, Kirkpatrick has been presenting Zuckerberg and Facebook in a pretty uncritical light, bar a few throwaway sentences about the potential need for regulation.
In the first chapter, Kirkpatrick talks about Mark's time at Harvard and the events leading up to the creation of Facebook. There's some descriptions of the Kirkland suite, Mark's general behavior, and that of his roommates/early inner circle. I find especially intriguing the description of Dustin, who was new to coding and was essentially learning how to code while working on Facebook.
Moskovotz mimicked Zuckerberg's code wherever he could, and set out to learn. He wasn't always fast but he immediately became known for his amazing capacity for hard work. "Mark would get kind of impatient," says one friend. "But Dustin just trudged through and through and through." Some in Kirkland House started calling the sophomore from Florida "the ox."
I've watched several interviews of Dustin, almost all that YouTube has to offer, and he's mentioned Adam D'Angelo a couple times as a friend and advisor, but I hadn't known just how far back their connection went. D'Angelo was a friend of Mark's from high school who had helped create Mark's first big project, Synapse. D'Angelo went to CalTech, but he ended up literally talking Dustin through coding and expanding Facebook to other colleges. Also I just have to say that Dustin is the favorite to win here, for me, and I think he's much more tolerable and compelling and probably more moral than Zuckerberg.
Fun fact, which I'd heard but was never able to find a source for, the blog posts that Mark makes while making Facemash? Practically word for word accurate, even the "___ is a bitch. I need to think of something to make to take my mind off her" and "I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie."
The fact that Mark and Dustin are so adamant that The Social Network is so inaccurate (Dustin at one point said it's 95% made up) and yet the film holds up both as an accurate depiction of Mark's personality and stays true to the message/moral if not the explicit facts of the early days of Facebook is genuinely so funny to me. I know that they can't and won't ever say anything about it for stock reasons, but it is just so obvious that it's hilarious.
However, The Social Network didn't go far enough in describing the lengths Zuckerberg went to to hack into the Harvard facebooks for Facemash. At one point he literally snuck into one of the houses and accessed it from inside because he couldn't get in without a password and presumably wasn't close enough with anyone in that house to ask for theirs (which he did do with another house). And Kirkpatrick wrote this without any acknowledgement of the implications of a powerful CEO having little regard for rules? Not that it's unusual, of course, but it has at the very least uncomfortable implications. Starting to think that Kirkpatrick isn't as unbiased as he would like me to believe.
The polished and well-liked son of a wealthy Brazilian business magnate, Saverin was an officer in the college Investment Club and a superb chess player who was known by his friends as a math genius.
See, I have a friend who found Eduardo's chess records/rankings from the seasons he was active in Florida, and it looks like he was pretty middling. Maybe he did better once he was in college? Maybe he just gave off this vibe and no one knew well enough to accurately assess his abilities, and now it's been repeated often enough that even Kirkpatrick thinks it's true? The world may never know.
like literally the singular time spotify has ever given me a “here’s what you were listening to last year!” notif and its the day my father died…..i swear theyre programmed to do this
A young woman complained to him that an employee had harassed her in the lunch line. His response was to publicly embarrass the perpetrator in front of everyone. "It has come to my attention," he announced at a company meeting, "that one of you said to a girl, 'I want to put my teeth in your ass.'" He paused. The room was silent. "So, like, what does that even mean?"
- Mark Zuckerberg in "The Facebook Effect", by David Kirkpatrick
Recently, Jimmy told me that Peter Thiel (the co-founder of PayPal & investor in Facebook) is supposed to announce his 20 students of entrepreneurs that are dropping out of college to pursue new business opportunities within the next week. Which in an interview has talked about how higher education is “the next bubble”. You can read that article here:
Today is the most I’ve ever agreed with that statement. I’m here at Torey’s powerlifting meet in Shelton & reading “the Facebook Effect” by David Kirkpatrick and I’m just completely in awe! Their story has captivated me and has completely sucked me into this book. I'm just Highlighting it like crazy. I can’t explain my emotional state I’m currently in. It’s as if I’ve been hypnotized by the story of creating Facebook. Which has left me with without any motivation to think about my huge Philosophy test I have on Monday, nor my Cuban culture project I haven’t started in Spanish, and not even my half week’s worth of math that is also due by Monday.
I just want to learn! I don’t want to be here in school! I want to sit down with a pile of books from people that found success and are sharing their experience and intellect.
This has brought me to ask: what is the sole objective of the professor? I am seriously thinking of going to my teachers and asking them that question. I want to know is their main objective to get me to learn a specific block of information they are teaching? are they a gear to a big motor that in the end of learning all these parts allow me to have the resource to succeed in life? or is it to provide an opportunity to learn in general? Like creating the opportunity to connect with other students that will someday help us succeed, to grab a specific piece of information that inspires us to new discoveries, etc? Because if each teacher’s sole purpose is to help us gain new opportunities with the focus through education then they need to give me some slack. Because I’m on a journey to discovering things about myself, and business. I may be on a road to shining a light on business and economics on a macro size that has been so dark before. We could literally change macro economics like Facebook did.
But I feel my ability to discover these answers is being cut short because of “education” I know that down the road I could use each of these classes I’m in: Spanish, calculus, & philosophy. But right now they are prohibiting me from becoming the best I can be.
I’m in an ever-present state of learning, but it has been divided between the forced education of school & my self education of life through human interaction as well as reading books.
