If you want a crash course in the early days of Facebook, you can watch The Social Network, Hollywood's sweeping take on the rise of Mark Zuckerberg and company. Or you can watch the real thing.
In the video above, an online relic from the year 2005, a 21-year-old Zuckerberg lounges on a sofa in the fledgling company's home-office in Palo Alto, California, drinking beer from a red plastic cup as he chats, oh-so-casually, about the social network he still calls "The Facebook." Yes, he's barefoot. And, yes, if you keep watching, you can see company co-founder Dustin Moskovitz do a keg stand. Apparently, the video was shot the day the company celebrated its three millionth user.
You can also catch a glimpse of early employee Steve Chen, before he left the company to build YouTube. And you get a mini-tour of the graffiti-like murals spray-painted on the office walls, the sort of in-your-face art that still decorates company headquarters, which now sit---in much grander fashion---up the road in Menlo Park, California. But, naturally, the highlight is Zuckerberg---and his unabashed idealism.
After founding their social network as students at Harvard, Zuckerberg says, he and his crew came to Palo Alto because "it's this kind of mythical place where, you know, all the startups come from." And when asked about the next step for The Facebook, which was still limited to just college campuses, he balks. "I mean, there doesn't necessarily have to be more," he says. "Lots of people are focused on like taking over the world or doing like the biggest thing, getting the most users...Part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely."
And if that irony doesn't grab you, you can least bask in the opening of this video artifact, where your host oh-so-casually compares Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to Christopher Columbus, the man who "discovered San Francisco in 1492, on his ships the Nina, the San Jose, and the Palo Alto." That deserves its own keg-stand celebration.
