This Entrepreneur Stole Zuckerberg's $1.3T Plan?!

Name: This Entrepreneur Stole Zuckerberg's $1.3T Plan?!
Uploaded: 2024-08-28T13:37:59+00:00
Duration: 55 s
Channel: Sam Parr
Description: In a 2024 YouTube interview, Tom Goldberg recounts his 2005 attempt to launch a high‑school‑focused social network called The High List. After trying to…

28 Aug 2024 · 1 min

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In a 2024 YouTube interview, Tom Goldberg recounts his 2005 attempt to launch a high‑school‑focused social network called The High List. After trying to purchase the domain hsfacebook.com, a Columbia student offered it for $20,000, which they declined. On the eve of their launch, the same student informed them that Mark Zuckerberg wanted to buy the domain. Goldberg called Zuckerberg, who spent about 30 minutes outlining Facebook’s three‑phase growth plan: first targeting high schools, then workplaces, and finally expanding into “pods.” Despite hearing this strategy, The High List failed to gain traction and was quickly eclipsed by Facebook. Goldberg and his partner later left the venture and pursued careers in finance.

Chapters

Summer of '05, we're like, Facebook, oh my God, Mark Zuckerberg, he's our age, he's gonna crush it. But he's never gonna go into high school. Somebody should start a high school Facebook. And we're like, why not us? So we start The High List. At the beginning of the summer, we went to go buy hsfacebook.com and some kid at Columbia, he owns it. And he goes, well, I'll sell it to you for like $20,000. And we're college kids. We're like, no thanks, we'll call it The High List. We build the whole product, we launch it. Literally on the eve of the launch, he calls us and he goes, Mark Zuckerberg wants to buy HS Facebook. So I'm giving you a last chance, buddy. Like, you can get it. So I'm like, prove it. So he forwards me the email from Zuck has a cell phone number. I call Zuck and I go, my name is Tom Goldberg. I'm partners with this guy Bob, and we own HS Facebook together. And he goes, yeah, I'm going to buy it from him. I go, well, what are you going to do with it? He spends 30 minutes. He outlines the entire strategy of Facebook. He goes, first we're going to go to high schools, then we're going to go to workplaces, then we're going to go into pods. Needless to say, our high school Facebook plan did not work out. They launched and they crushed us, and we went and got jobs in finance.