In early 2004, Dustin Moskovitz was working a twenty-hour-per-week job as a computer system administrator, on top of forty or so hours a week of classes and homework as a sophomore at Harvard.
And then there was this little side project he and some of his dorm buddies were working on, called TheFacebook.com.
It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when Facebook was not a sure thing as one of the most significant phenomena in the history of human communication and social life. There was a time when it was a few kids sitting in a dorm doom, and it had sixty or seventy thousand users—far fewer users than many now-folded companies have boasted before.
“The big risk was, there were these big incumbents. We thought, if they could just clean their act up, they would surely beat us. Friendster, MySpace, even LiveJournal at the time was millions of users bigger than us,” Dustin told me.
“A guy called Adam Goldberg started CU Community at Colombia the semester before we started Facebook. He’s a friend of mine now. He had a really well-designed social network. As soon as he saw us go our multi-college strategy, he started to do it too, aggressively. At the time, it did not look like a foregone conclusion. It looked like a good business opportunity, but there were plenty of other players, and it seemed plenty likely that they could beat us. And we were also thinking, Google could just jump in at any moment. They easily could have won in 2004. Now, of course, it’s a different story.”
Dustin and his college buddies, roommates and fellow cofounders Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes, famously decided to move out to Palo Alto that summer, 2004, with the intention of going back to Harvard in the fall. “But by the time the end of June rolled around, it was more like a hundred and fifty thousand users, and we thought, ‘OK, this is actually pretty difficult to do, even without having sixty or eighty hours a week of classes, homework and paid work. We started asking ourselves, ‘Is it really feasible to go back next semester, and build this company, and do school?’ Very quickly, we came to the conclusion, ‘No, we’ll probably fail at both if we try that.’ So Mark and I decided not to go back to Harvard.”
At this point in his story, I asked Dustin: “For so many people in the world, getting into Harvard is pretty much the pinnacle of achievement—the thought is, once you’ve graduated from Harvard, you’re pretty much set for life. So here you are, you’ve achieved that pinnacle, and you have this site which is getting incredible traction within six months, but without knowing for sure back then that you weren’t going to get beaten down. How did you decide to take the risk?”
“First of all,” he said, “Harvard allows you to stop out for an indefinite period of time. So I could go back anytime. My friends might not be there anymore, I might have to start over socially. That was a risk. But it was a pretty small risk compared to the opportunity at the time.
“I called my parents and said, ‘We’ll stop out for a semester and see how it goes.’ And my dad was like, ‘Great! I can’t afford the tuition next semester anyway!’ [Laughing.]
“By the summer, it was a big deal. In terms of consumer Internet sites, it was growing really quickly. We had advertising on the site. It was clear we could make some money off of it. We thought there was a real business there. We also knew, however, that it wasn’t a done deal by any means—there were many other entrants for this winner-take-all prize, which definitely could have beaten us in those years.
“But here’s the thing. We knew we were developing skills. These were plenty marketable skills. People know who Facebook was. And we could go back to Harvard whenever. It just didn’t feel that risky.”
As we’ve seen in this chapter, people often have a sense that if you leave some stable situation, such as school or a comfortable job, in order to try a more meaningful but less certain pursuit, you’ll end up completely forlorn and destitute if the pursuit doesn’t work out.
That’s almost always an exaggeration. The odds of starting one of the most significant social and business phenomena in history and creating a company with a multibillion-dollar valuation are exceedingly minute. There’s no question in my mind that Dustin, Mark, and the rest of the early Facebook team are geniuses, and incredibly hardworking. But I’m confident that they would concede that there was also great deal of serendipity in just how massively it paid off for them.
Does that mean your only options are either a tiny chance of striking it massively rich, or a big chance of going bust? Not at all. As we’ve been discussing this entire chapter, there’s so much in between. In a blog post entitled One in a Million, Seth Godin writes:
The ardent or insane pursuit of a particular [risky] goal is a good idea if the steps you take along the way also prep you for other outcomes, each almost as good (or better). If . . . bending the market to your will and shipping on time and doing important and scary work are all things you need to develop along the way, then it doesn’t really matter so much if you don’t make the goal you set out to reach.
The point is, if you’re learning valuable business skills while you also pursue your dreams, you win either way. You win (obviously) if the venture works out, but less obviously, you also win if it fails—few things provide better real-world education in business skills than a good hard failure.
But this win-win only applies if you’re actually immersing yourself in the business side of what you’re doing as you go for your dreams. Seth continues:
Does spending your teenage years (and your twenties) in a room practicing the violin teach you anything about being a violin teacher or a concert promoter or some other job associated with music? If your happiness depends on your draft pick or a single audition, that’s giving way too much power to someone else.
Learn the business side of your craft, and you’ll come away with applicable, marketable skills no matter what.
For Dustin, of course, going for his dreams paid off. For several years, Mark Zuckerberg was the world’s youngest-ever self-made billionaire. But Dustin is eight days younger than Zuckerberg. When Facebook’s valuation soared in 2010, Dustin’s chunk surged to over two billion, and he took Zuckerberg’s place as the world’s youngest. Dustin has already started his next venture, Asana, which aims to revolutionize workplace collaboration as thoroughly as Facebook has revolutionized the way we socialize.
I don’t normally outdress billionaires, but in this case I did. I was wearing a black Hugo Boss suit (no tie) to my interview with Dustin at a Mission-neighborhood café near Asana’s offices in San Francisco—and he was wearing jeans and plaid. “I don’t really tend to buy expensive things and haven’t changed my lifestyle a great deal since starting Facebook. As such, I don’t have much interest in making my net worth accrue any further. I believe in the ability of capital markets to create positive impact on the world, but I’m also going to give quite a bit of it away.”
Dustin and Zuckerberg have since signed Bill Gates and Warren Buffet’s Giving Pledge—in which they have all vowed to give away at least half of their wealth. In a letter announcing his pledge, Dustin writes, “As a result of Facebook’s success, I’ve earned financial capital beyond my wildest expectations. Today, I view that reward not as personal wealth, but as a tool with which I hope to bring even more benefit to the world. . . . Over the next few years, [my partner Cari and I] will begin to identify the causes to which we can make the most leveraged contributions. We will donate and invest with both urgency and mindfulness, aiming to foster a safer, healthier and more economically empowered global community.”
***
Thanks for reading Chapter 1. If you’re ready for more, then I humbly ask you to please order your copy now. It’s available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, 800-CEO-Read, and IndieBound. I spent two years of very hard work on this book to make it as valuable as possible for you, and if you liked this Chapter, you’ve got the whole rest of the book to enjoy and learn from. You won’t be disappointed, I promise. Thank you!
