The Accidental Billlionaiers The Founding of Facebook (1-49)

SUMMARY

Eduardo Saverin is a sophomore at Harvard University in the beginning of October 2003 and also during this time he is doing his "punching" into one of the most exclusive final clubs for Harvard faculty, alumni and students alike. The club interested in him is called the Phoenix and they are intrigued by Eduardo's potential to be a future businessman. Mark Zuckerberg is also a sophomore at this time. However nobody is interested in him and the only thing he is concentrated on is computers.  The Winklevoss twins, Tyler and Cameron, are seniors and are part of a different final club were the members come from old money and have a certain status about them. Tyler and Cameron were not punched into this club until their senior year because their father made his own money on his own, making it "new money", but since the twins were on their way to being on the Olympic team for crew, the rules were bended for them. Divya Narendra, who was also a senior, and the twins had the idea of creating a website for the percentage of the student body that was too busy to find their own partners. The site would show who was checking you out and from there the two would hook up. It was like a dating service for Harvard students. The only problem is that their computer programing guy dropped from the plan last minute and they needed to find somebody that would be able to create the correct algorithms to get the site running. By the end of October, Eduardo was entering his final days of initiation and with this new found social status a lot more girls were more receptive towards him. He used this to help his new best friend Mark out too. But after a bad date, Mark came home and created a website that compared the female students to each other and to farm animals. He called it  Facemash.

QUOTE

"A website geared toward socializing could fix that problem, could create a fluid environment where girls and guys could meet. The Harvard Connection would fulfill a need in what was mostly a stagnant social scene," (Mezrich 30).

REACTION

When I was reading the book and I came to this part it made me think about something I seen on the news the other day where students at the University of Chicago created his own social network where students go looking for hook ups. I wonder if those students were inspired by the ideas Tyler, Cameron and Divya had or if their social network was being worked on while Mark Zuckerberg worked on his. I watched the movie "The Social Network" so I thought I knew what I was getting into reading the book but the book is boring. The idea that the book is always better than the movie is not the case in this situation.