Eduardo Saverin: What I Learned From Watching “The Social Network”
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
EDIT: from his Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Saverin): The Social Network is based on the book The Accidental Billionaires in which Saverin served as the main consultant for author Ben Mezrich.
As nasty as Lawrence Summers comes off in the movie, he's right. The Winklevosses should've been out creating something new, rather than using their privilege to wrangle a meeting with him.
I can't blame them for eventually seeking cash out of Facebook, since their website idea probably helped shape the ideas that would create Facebook in Zuckerberg's head. But there's a limit to that. None of the Harvard Connection's code was used in Facebook; I doubt sincerely that there were any remarkable algorithms or anything like that in their code, either.
I had a Facebook-like idea around the same time that Zuckerberg did, when I was a freshman in college. (We have absolutely nothing to do with each other; I was at Duke University and not much of a coder yet anyway).
Lots of people did. I don't begrudge him for pursuing that idea, while I slept in on Saturday mornings and went to my classes. We both made our choices.
That's a bizarre worldview. You might have come up with this idea. But Zuckerberg never came up with it. The Winklevoss twins did.
Surely you understand that Facebook was sued by the Winklevosses, successfully and multiple times, because Zuckerberg breached a contract with them and stole their intellectual property, and then repeatedly. So after their idea was stolen from them, your response is for them to suck it up and come up with another one? If not ethics, I thought the rule of law was still valid in Massachusetts.
My point was that a lot of people were having similar ideas around the same time. I'm sure there were dozens, if not hundreds, of other aspiring CS students around the US who spent a few days dreaming about websites that would look a lot like Facebook, had they come to fruition.
Having the idea of a dating website that focuses on a specific community, like Harvard, does not entitle you to exact payment from every other person who implements a dating website -- let alone Facebook, which was not primarily a dating website.
If you care to debate that point in a more general sense, I'd like to know your opinion on business method patents before proceeding.
The question of Zuckerberg's motive in not shutting out the Winklevoss twins as soon as he began work on the Facebook project is debatable. If you take the idea presented in the film that Zuckerberg is not primarily motivated by money, I can understand why he didn't really think about the consequences of what he was doing. By not ending their relationship immediately, he could have seen himself as keeping doors open for himself, rather than shutting them out of competition. It seems unlikely that the Winklevoss twins could have successfully created a competitor website, considering how long it had taken them to develop what they had.
This is especially plausible because we're talking about undergraduates messing around in their dorm rooms here. Business takes on a different meaning. Was Facebook started because it seemed like a cool idea, or to make billions by exploiting nature? I don't know, but the former seems more likely.
For example, lots of people I went with felt he was a hapless guy that made the wrong decisions & got screwed, but wasn't really hero/protagonist. Zuckerberg clearly was the hero, for all his faults.
Other people wound up interpreting it as a hatchet piece on Zuckerberg.
Though I doubt the average movie-goer felt this way, I felt the movie had a bit of a Rashomon feel, in how different viewpoints (in the court affadavits) paint a skewed picture of reality. No one can know what really happened, we can only absorb the different narratives.
I know the guy is probably well off enough to just do nothing, but a smart kid like that? He must be working on something. I'd love to know.