Did Mark Zuckerberg’s Inspiration For Facebook Come Before Harvard?

Note: This article I wrote was originally published on ReadWriteWeb and syndicated to the New York Times on May 10th, 2009. I have posting it here and closed comments, but I have participated heavily in the discussions on the original ReadWriteWeb posting and posted additional thoughts and clarifications on the matter on this blog. Please follow the links to ReadWriteWeb and to my follow up post to view the full discussion.

By now we are all familiar with Mark Zuckerberg’s success story. The explosive international growth of Facebook to over 200 million users continues to land the young Founder and CEO in top news stories worldwide. Recently, Time Magazine named Zuckerberg one of The World’s Most Influential People of 2008, and Fast Company named Facebook number 15 in it’s list of “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies” for 2009. At just 23 years of age, Zuckerberg even briefly made Forbe’s 400 richest Americans list, temporarily giving him the title of World’s Youngest Billionaire.

Interestingly, the stories we hear these days about Mark in popular media tend to follow a common sensationalist pattern: “Supersmart kid invents a tech phenomenon from his Harvard dorm room, drops out, and changes the world”. It’s a classically framed, Bill Gates-esque story of success focusing on intelligence and ambition. What’s most intriguing about the Zuckerberg story we all know, however, isn’t that he dropped out of Harvard and became a billionaire at 23. It’s that prior to February 4th 2004, the day he launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, we hear very little about Mark or the inspiration behind Facebook at all.

It’s likely that the reason we hear so little about Zuckerberg’s pre-launch vision for Facebook (originally called thefacebook.com) is because he has been the target of controversy for the true origins of his business in the past. In 2007, several of Zuckerberg’s classmates came forward and claimed rights to the Facebook idea after reports surfaced that Yahoo had offered Zuckerberg $900 million for Facebook just two years after the founding of the company. Even though the suit against Zuckerberg was settled last year, given the nature of the proceedings, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever get an official answer from Zuckerberg himself about the true origins of his inspiration. But maybe we don’t need one afterall?

It turns out that Zuckerberg’s academic history may offer us a great deal of insight into where the inspiration for Facebook came from, and why it was so wildly successful when it first launched. I’d argue that although February 4th marked a major milestone in Facebook’s history, the story of Mark Zuckerberg’s rise to fame actually starts years before he stepped foot on the Harvard campus, and is much more complex and interesting than it initially appears.

Pre-Zuckerberg: Tracing The Roots of Facebook Culture

It might surprise you to hear that while Harvard may have been fertile ground for the initial launch of Facebook, the seeds for the concept were likely picked up by Zuckerberg in high school. You never hear about Zuckerberg’s alma mater Phillips Exeter Academy in the stories because Harvard was where the intial action took place (and the Harvard name, to some extent, validates Mark’s smarts and makes for a more sensational story). The truth is that the time Zuckerberg spent at Phillips Exeter Academy from 2000 to 2002 likely had more influence on the name and initial concept for Facebook than any of his classmates at Harvard.

Phillips Exeter Academy (also known simply as “Exeter”) is a private boarding school for grades 9-12, located in Exeter, New Hampshire. The prestigious “prep” school is a member of the Ten Schools Admission Organization, that includes famous boarding schools such as Phillips Andover, Deerfield Academy, St. Paul’s, and Choate Rosemary Hall (my alma mater). Like each one of “The Big Ten”, Exeter has a tight-knit boarding community that live on campus full-time. Student’s refer to themselves as “Exonians” and have a strong sense of group identity and community that’s rooted in a rich culture of customs and tradition.

An Exonian himself for two years, Zuckerberg had a unique opportunity to observe and participate in the social culture and rhythms ingrained in Exeter’s boarding lifestyle. Every year, the school says goodbye to a few hundred students, and welcomes a few hundred more. Zuckerberg enrolled as a boarder at Exeter in the fall of his junior year and, like every other new and returning student, along with his dorm room keys and class schedule, received his own copy of Exeter’s student directory “The Photo Address Book”, which the students affectionately referred to as (you guessed it) “The Facebook”.

I had the opportunity to interview several of Zuckerberg’s piers this week, and they all confirmed what David W. Farrant (Class of ‘00) had to say…

“The front cover says “The Photo Address Book”, but we all called it “The Facebook” all the time because  “The Photo Address Book” was such a mouthful. Everybody called it that.”

“Facebook” photo directories were (and still are) a huge part of students’ social experience and culture at prep schools like Exeter. Every school in the big ten has one that they print and distribute to students annually. When students arrive on campus each fall, the rhythm of their social lives are heavily driven by the dormitories they live in, their class year (seniority) and their proximity to friends in other houses. Because students aren’t allowed cell phones on campus, and there’s so much flux in living accommodations each year (houses and phone numbers change annually) these “Facebooks” are an extremely valuable information resource for students.

Of course, not only do students need the directory to find and contact their piers, the books become part of the culture of bonding between classmates and friends as students use it to see where their piers live, who’s hot and who’s not, who lives with who, and who the new kids are. Sounds an awful lot like how people use Facebook online now, right? What I’m describing, of course, is an early, pre-Internet social culture facilitated by a photo directory that was used and enjoyed by students long before Zuckerberg even made it to high school – it was a culture he happened upon and got to participate in by a stroke of pure luck and glorious opportunity.

But the story doesn’t end there. In Zuckerberg’s senior year, the student council, headed by student body president Kris Tillery, successfully lobbied for the administration to have the schools IT Department put the full contents of Exeter’s Photo Address Book online, and before Zuckerberg graduated, it was up under the URL http://student.exeter.edu/facebook, matching the student’s pet name for the directory and effectively shortening the URL to something useful (Tillery was unavailable for comment). During my interviews, some of Zuckerberg’s piers pointed me to this screen shot of the original website that was hosted on the school’s .edu domain that was (and still is) posted in a public Facebook group “Exonians” in 2006.  Some of the Facebook comments attached to the screen shot (dating back to 2007) refer to the screen shot as “the original Facebook” and to The Photo Address Book as “the physical Facebook”.

Of course, the school’s student.exeter.edu/facebook website is no longer online, and none of the interviewees were able to confirm whether Zuckerberg himself was involved in, or responsible for, the student council initiative that got the directory online in the first place. What we can confirm is that students thought that the directory they all used would be useful enough online to get the student council involved in an effort to lobby the administration, that the online directory was created during Zuckerberg’s senior year and that he was likely aware of its existence.

Getting A More Complete View Of The Facebook Success Story…

Now that Facebook.com has graduated from its academic roots and been released to the world for free, its continued growth has many experts saying that it will likely be the dominant social platform for the foreseeable future. At 200 million users (and counting), it’s tough to argue that Facebook won’t have considerable influence in the ways we all connect and communicate in the future, both locally and across borders. While we may never know the true origins of Mark Zuckerberg’s inspiration for Facebook, taking a deeper look at the social culture of the prep school he attended, and his experiences as a boarding student there, may offer us insight into where the explosion of a global Facebook culture may have started, why it was so successful when it was first launched at an Ivy League school and how luck and opportunity may have played a large part in influencing the deep thinking that led one of the world’s youngest visionaries to start coding in his Harvard dorm room.