Currently making the internet rounds is a video interview with a young Mark Zuckerberg speaking about his budding start-up called Facebook.
The video—uploaded to YouTube on March 26, 2013 but recorded in 2005—takes a jocose approach.
In the intro, the host informs his audience that he is in Palo Alto, where Christopher Columbus landed in 1492.
Columbus set the stage for “thousands of other foreign informational workers who would come to Silicon Valley and begin making millions of dollars.”
Wearing a white T-shirt, basketball shorts, and flip-flops, the young Harvard drop-out appears relaxed.
“Should I put the beer down?” Zuckerberg asks the interviewer. “No, actually” replies the interviewer “I’m gonna mention the beer.”
Harvard was the nesting environment of the soon-to-be tech behemoth Facebook, which Zuckerberg described as “an online directory for colleges” in this early interview.
Zuckerberg and his friends launched Facebook at Harvard in February 2004. Within a few weeks, two-thirds of the Harvard student body signed up.
By the end of the year, “the Facebook.com” was being used in 29 colleges across America.
“Palo Alto is this mythical place where all the start-ups come from” says the young Zuckerberg to the interviewer in a voiceover. On screen Dustin Moskovitz, another Facebook founder, can be seen doing a keg stand in the office.
The goal Zuckerberg and his friends had when creating Facebook was “not to create an online community, but a mirror for the real community.”
Perhaps the most astounding revelation from this early interview is what Zuckerberg thought of the future direction of the company. The interviewer asks Zuckerberg where to company is headed to after they expand to the remaining un-Facebooked schools.
Slightly speechless, Zuckerberg replies “I mean, there doesn’t necessarily have to be more.”
While telling the host that he wanted to focus on simply creating “a really cool college directory product.”
A whole lot of beer and a whole lot of graffiti. That is what surrounded Mark Zuckerberg before he became the head honcho of the (free) social media world.
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