A Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg recalls Facebook's 2004 launch, when user IDs were in the hundreds and the app spread virally across colleges. He saw it becoming massive but couldn't foresee the multibillion-dollar valuation, and was weighing his own startup while watching Zuckerberg's company explode.
You were at Harvard when he launched Facebook at Harvard?
So Mark Zuckerberg went to college undergrad with me. I was his same classmate. And so Facebook definitely existed before I was starting LearnVest. But 2007, 2008, when I was starting the idea, Facebook, I think, was founded in like 2004. So it existed, but it was very much, you know, you weren't building your business on Facebook.
That's right. Hold on. You were at Harvard when he launched Facebook at Harvard?
Yeah. I was his classmate. So 2006.
Do you remember when you heard about Facebook?
Do we remember? Are you kidding? You like could never have forgotten. You know, I remember actually at the end of your username would be the number of Facebook user you were. And I was like in the hundreds. So I was like roughly around 150 and you knew it because it was just the most helpful thing on the planet. It'd be like, "Oh, what's that person's name again? I can look them up." And I always joked with my husband. When my husband asked me out, I like couldn't look up who he was yet. He'd asked me out before Facebook existed and I remember being like, "Oh, I can't remember who he is. Like, is it this guy or that guy?" And it just like, my kids will never know a world where you like can't look somebody up. I mean, it's just—
did you think at that time, what, uh, is it going to be a big deal?
Or were you like, this is useful for Harvard and that's, you know, I mean, like, could you foresee that it was going to be like a $75 billion company? Um, you know, I, I can't take credit for having like something that was that kind of crystal ball-ish, but you knew it was a big deal. Um, really quickly you could just tell. It was like the amount of time you were spending on it, how quickly it was spreading. When it went to other colleges and you could look up your friends at those schools, when you could poke people. I mean, it was, you know, to the credit of Mark, it was an incredibly infectious platform.
Did you know him personally or no?
So I didn't know him when we were in undergrad. I met him a handful of times and I know his family and his siblings pretty well, but no, when he was starting in undergrad, I did not know him.
Did you think about joining when it was, it's like, hey, this thing has kind of taken off. I'm a student at Harvard. You were thinking about drop, you know, you dropped out of business school anyways to start a business.
I actually was thinking at that time of dropping out of Harvard to start LearnVest, basically. So my mom convinced me to graduate. I said to her, I want to go start a company. I know I need to. And my mom was like, can you just graduate, pretty please? I'd gotten into Harvard Business School. My mom was like, you should at least graduate from college. And to my mom's credit, I did. I'm glad I did. But that itch to go start something was like, pretty alive. And I, you know, to the credit of like a Mark Zuckerberg, when you are so close to seeing businesses get built, you know, I think they called it the Facebook effect, which is when you can see how powerful the internet can be, and if you're a, you know, a hard-working person who has skills, you're like, huh, maybe I should go do something. Um, but I, uh, so, so yes, and I will definitely say I think Facebook spawned an entire, uh, you know, set of entrepreneurs.
