Also - if Harvard is a great school - how the F does someone find time to do the work and make a product at the same time?
When I did Engineering, I didn't have time to take a shower.
Looking back at college it was easily 80% worrying about doing work and 20% actually doing it. With something like programming, knowing how to use a debugger, profiler and an IDE give you a huge leg up. Easily 95% of CS students never take the time to learn the tools b/c you have to do it on your own time - but you have other homework to stress out about.
Sure, luck may have played a large role in Facebook's initial success. But that was over 10 years ago. Many companies experience that initial success and then go nowhere, e.g. MySpace. Facebook, on the other hand, has continuously surpassed everyone's expectations. It's not until recently that people have began to accept that Facebook is here to stay. Discounting Facebook's repeated successes as luck is just silly.
Building a $350B company does not happen from luck, it requires a constant stream of good decision making.
I don't want to discount merit or work, but we too often seriously discount luck. Luck plays a large part in every success. That's not to say that people are justified in being unsuccessful; it's just to recognize that we're all involved in something larger than ourselves.
As failure doesn't always correlate to incompetence, success doesn't always correlate to competence.
I am not trying to lessen his feat but just saying that luck is a big part of it.
I spent way too much time worrying about grades. I'm not sure it mattered. It would have been just as good (and probably more enjoyable) to be a B-student with awesome side projects rather than an A-student with none.
(And often, esp. for college, one doesn't even need to make that trade-off when homework is largely immaterial, and your grade only depends on exams.)
I say this as someone who got in (eventually chose to attend a different school for a variety of reasons) and with many friends who went there.
At Harvard, the primary thing you do is the extracurricular in your field of interest - whether that's law, activism or startups - is up to the individual student. Your grades, your education and your brand in society - Harvard takes care of that.
MySpace was limited in features, and a fugly interface.
Neither had talented people.
Zuck started at Harvard. That was his core user base. The Ivy League. Basically marquis 'customers' in social.
Think of how massively that affected recruiting and attention? The network effect of Ivy League x 1000. It would have been trivial for him to get investment.
But in the end - forget culture - the basic features were just better, and for every great feature, there are 'smart things' happening internally that are good. Zuck deserves credit for that.
I used to work a little bit with MySpace. Their culture was 'LA Cool Kid' i.e. 'The Standard' hang-out types.
They reminded me of a Record Label - totally hip - totally useless. I feel sorry for any Engineer that had to work at MySpace.
If you knew the culture at Lycos, Excite etc. - and compare it to Google, it's a little bit of a similar story.
It reminds me of how Google won the search engine war by delivering a more streamlined, less exploitative product.
And then of course there were a couple innovations that neither MySpace or Friendster had: photos with tags of your friends, and the concept of the News feed. It's hard to imagine a social network without those features, but they didn't exist before Facebook introduced them.
Friendfeed was launched October 2, 2007 and acquired 2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed
MySpace started out as a way for bands in LA to post gigs.
So their initial user-base/NDA was musicians, LA culture.
Facebook was a little more academic/ivy league.
It's hard to change one's genes :)