Mark Zuckerberg, these days, isn't just known as one of the world's youngest billionaires, or as the CEO of a company that just filed Silicon Valley's biggest-ever IPO. He has also become, through his leadership of Facebook, a kind of PR person for publicity itself, working to connect the world of the web one friend at a time.
It wasn't always that way, though. For Zuckerberg, it's been a slow, and sometimes painful, evolution from an entrepreneur of the social web to an evangelist for it.
Phase 1: The Fickle Founder
Business Insider reported this week on a series of IM chats between the 19-year-old Zuckerberg and Adam D'Angelo, his best friend from high school (and the guy who would later become Facebook's CTO). In the chat below, Zuckerberg and D'Angelo discuss a dating site Zuck is developing for fellow Harvard students -- and consider how it'll fit in with "the Facebook thing."
Zuckerberg: I ... hate the fact that I'm doing it for other people haha. Like I hate working under other people. I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait until the last day before I'm supposed to have their thing ready and then be like "look yours isn't as good as this so if you want to join mine you can...otherwise I can help you with yours later." Or do you think that's too dick?
D'Angelo: I think you should just ditch them
Zuckerberg: The thing is they have a programmer who could finish their thing and they have money to pour into advertising and stuff. Oh wait I have money too. My friend who wants to sponsor this is head of the investment society. Apparently insider trading isn't illegal in Brazil so he's rich lol.
D'Angelo: lol
Later, Zuckerberg would go on to suggest that he was interested in Facebook in part for its ability to be sold and in part for its ability to drive another product he'd been building: the file-sharing service Wirehog. In an IM chat with an unnamed confidant about the lawsuit heard round the world, Zuckerberg declared: "I won't pay
the legal fees. The company that buys us will haha."
"Cool hopefully that'll be soon so you can move on and just work on what you want to," the confidant replied.
To which Zuckerberg responded, "Well it just needs to propel Wirehog."
by Megan Garber, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Reuters
