The Battle For Facebook

Facebook may have been born under disputed circumstances, but there is one uncontested moment in its inception: a Tuesday night at Harvard, where a 19-year-old boy wonder from Dobbs Ferry, New York, sat in front of his computer, dejected, alone and on his way to being trashed. It was the fall of 2003, and the World Wide Web was just beginning its love affair with social networking. That month, Fortune wrote, "There may be a new kind of Internet emerging — one more about connecting people to people than people to Websites." Friendster.com had launched at the beginning of the year and would soon have millions of users and millions from investors.

In moments of need, two things had always pulled Mark Zuckerberg through: an obsessive love of technology and an almost ruthless competitive streak. (Among his personal interests, he once listed "defeating nemeses.") His relationship with computers dates back to the sixth grade, when he got his first machine and promptly bought a copy of the programming guide C++ for Dummies. By ninth grade, throwing himself into his Latin class, Zuckerberg had created a computerized version of the board game Risk, set in the Roman Empire. Zuckerberg was always dreaming up little tools to get things done quicker, "dorky things," as he would call them. In his senior year at Exeter, Zuckerberg and his roommate, Adam D'Angelo, wrote software for an MP3 player that was able to learn a user's listening habits and build a digital library based on previous selections. Several companies showed an interest in the application, including an AOL subsidiary, but D'Angelo and Zuckerberg had no intention of selling. They didn't care about money. They cared about code. "They were the most advanced computer-science students at the school," recalls Kristopher Tillery, a classmate who set up a site with Zuckerberg that allowed Exeter students to order snacks online.

When he wasn't programming computers, Zuckerberg was striving to be the best at everything: the math team, science Olympiad, band, Latin honors society, a summer course in Greek. In 2000 he was voted MVP at the New York regional competition of the U.S. Fencing Association. On his application to Harvard, he wrote that fencing had "proven to be the perfect medium" because "whether I am competing against a rival in a USFA tournament or just clashing foils, or sometimes sabers, with a friend, I rarely find myself doing anything more enjoyable than fencing a good bout." He graduated with academic honors from Exeter and entered Harvard in the fall of 2002, spilling over with ambition.

But at Harvard, Zuckerberg found himself surrounded by hundreds of other freshmen whose résumés were as burnished as his own. He was just another face in the crowd. By his sophomore year, he had retreated into the domain where he was most comfortable, building a Website called Coursematch.com that enabled students to register for courses online and see who else was signing up for the same classes. An early concession to voyeurism, the project came to an abrupt end: Zuckerberg was running it from his laptop, which soon crashed from the demand. But the experience taught him an important lesson: What happened online wasn't just about programming. It was about what made people tick. Despite his virtuoso ability at coding, Zuckerberg didn't choose to study computer science. Instead, he majored in psychology.

The courses didn't help him much with his personal life. Sitting alone in his dorm room that night in 2003, Zuckerberg had just been jilted by a girl. He started drinking and once again sought solace in the realm that never let him down. Logging on to his blog, he created an entry titled "Harvard Face Mash: The Process." His plan was as simple as it was vindictive: create a site called Facemash.com, hack into Harvard's directory, download photographs of his classmates and post them online next to photos of farm animals to rate who was more desirable.

He began like any other hurt schoolboy. "Jessica A— is a bitch," he wrote. "I need to think of something to take my mind off her. I need to think of something to occupy my mind. Easy enough, now I just need an idea."