I have enjoyed all of the books that I’ve read by Ben Mezrich so I was excited to see that he had a new book out. He typically writes about exceptional college students who are able to use their intelligence to beat the system (Vegas, the Nikkei) and become very wealthy at a young age. This book was no exception in that it focused on the founding of Facebook. The difference between this book and others that I have read by him is that Mark Zuckerberg was not the narrator of the story. In Bringing Down the House and Ugly Americans the main character was involved in showing the author around his life and telling his story. In The Accidental Billionaires others who were connected to Mark and with him at Harvard when he started Facebook are the ones telling the story.
There were some little controversies involved with Facebooks creation that I was unaware of. Eduardo Saverin plays a big role in this book. He was one of Mark’s friends at Harvard and eventually was involved with Facebook’s creation as a managing partner when Mark needed money for servers and, as the site grew, to pay other students to help keep up with development. Eduardo put some money in up front and worked one summer to find investors in New York while Mark and the other developers moved to Silicon Valley and concentrated on bulding the huge social networking site. It was during this time when Mark became friends with Sean Parker (Napster) and started connecting with investors on his own. Facebook began growing by leaps and bounds during this time and Eduardo was eventually phased out. My understanding is that he is involved with a lawsuit at the present time to redeem some of the recognition (and I assume monetary rewards) that come with being a cofounder of Facebook.
The other main story line had to do with the Winklevoss twins who had approached Mark during his time at Harvard to be a programmer for a site that they had been working to develop. Their idea was to have it exclusive to Harvard and have it be a dating/social site to help save time for busy college students. From Winklevoss’ side Mark acted as though he was programming their site for weeks before giving reasons why he was not going to do it and then coming out with Facebook, which initially was only open to Harvard students. The Winklevoss twins eventually started a website called ConnectU but felt that their idea had been stolen out from under them. They also became involved in a legal battle with Mark Zuckerberg and according to the book eventually settled for many millions.
While all of this was interesting, what I really would have liked to hear was this story from Mark Zuckerberg’s perspective. He is the one that developed this idea that took off to become the 2nd most visited website on the internet. It’s not that I don’t believe the accounts of others but it would have been much more interesting to hear about how this skyrocketed and his accounts of the problems with Eduardo and the Winklevoss twins. I just didn’t finish the book feeling like a full picture of the true creation of Facebook had been painted.
28/02/2010 at 2:39 am Permalink
I think I’ll still read it even though it’s not as good as you think it could be. Keep up the good suggestions.