Facebook

TheFacebook.com was created in February of 2004 by 21 year old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and his two roommates, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Facebook is the main rival to MySpace, the social networking site owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.


 * "It is not easy capturing the attention of Jim Breyer, one of Silicon Valley's leading venture capitalists. But Mark Zuckerberg, a 21-year-old Harvard student, managed to do it with a Web site that has attracted 2.8 million registered users on more than 800 campuses since it began in February 2004.


 * "Mr. Breyer was so taken with Mr. Zuckerberg's company, thefacebook.com, which creates online interactive college-student networks, that his firm, Accel Partners, plans to announce a $13 million investment in the start-up today...


 * "But events overtook them. Before heading west, Mr. Zuckerberg arranged a dinner with Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, to talk about his Web site, which had swept through Stanford University in a number of weeks. A few weeks later, the two bumped into each other on a street in Palo Alto, Calif. Before long, Mr. Parker, who is also a co-founder of Plaxo, an online service that updates e-mail address books, began informally advising the company. By the end of the summer he became president. He then introduced Mr. Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and founder of PayPal, the online payment service acquired by eBay in 2002.


 * "Mr. Thiel invested $500,000 as seed money, the first major infusion of cash into thefacebook.com, Mr. Zuckerberg said. More important, his connection gave it the imprimatur of an up-and-coming company. Soon, other investors came calling."

In 2009, Christian Fuchs published a critical review of their work in his paper "Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society. A Critical Case Study of the Usage of studiVZ, Facebook, and MySpace by Students in Salzburg in the Context of Electronic Surveillance" (Salzburg/Vienna: Research Group).

Funding

 * "Round one: $500,000 from Peter Thiel, Summer 2004
 * "Round two: $12.7 million from Accel Partners, April 2005
 * "Round three: $25 million from Greylock Partners leading the round, Meritech Capital Partners participating, and Accel Partners and Peter Thiel increasing their investment in the company."

People

 * Mark Zuckerberg - Founder and CEO
 * Dustin Moskovitz - Co-founder and VP Engineering
 * Owen Van Natta - COO
 * Adam D'Angelo - CTO
 * Mike Sheridan - CFO
 * Matt Cohler - VP Strategy and Business Operations

Directors

 * Members: Mark Zuckerberg, Jim Breyer (Accel Partners), and Peter Thiel
 * Observer: David Sze (Greylock Partners)

Related SourceWatch

 * Fake Your Space
 * Netanel Jacobsson, head of international business development
 * Joanna Shields - former MD