He was the ultimate college bro! A video of twenty-something Mark Zuckerberg has recently resurfaced, in which the young entrepreneur describes the beginnings of “The Facebook” during an informal interview where he’s barefoot and drinking a beer out of a red solo cup.
Palo Alto–based investor and writer Semil Shah uncovered and tweeted a link to the decade-old clip on Sunday, April 17, bringing back nostalgia for the early days of the groundbreaking social media site.
“Should I put the beer down?” Zuckerberg asks at the start of the interview on a dinghy couch with a Scarface poster behind him in his Silicon Valley headquarters. The clip periodically shows the rest of the office, in which no one seems to be doing any work. His coworkers are doing keg stands and grabbing more cold brews out of a fridge filled with beer and ketchup bottles.
“I think Facebook is an online directory for colleges, and it’s kind of interactive,” he says in the clip. “We launched it at Harvard in early February of 2004, and within a couple of weeks, two thirds of the school had signed up. So at this point, my roommates were like, ‘This is pretty cool, I bet this would work at other schools,’ but we were all busy with classes and stuff so we kinda just wanted to make sure it would work before going any further with it.”
Zuckerberg explains how they expanded the site to Columbia, Yale and Stanford, and within a few weeks, all of those schools had thousands of users as well. They closed out 2004 with 29 schools, and ventured out to Palo Alto for the summer to “hang out because Palo Alto’s kind of this mythical place where all the start-ups come from,” he said.
The CEO — whose journey was dramatized in the 2010 Oscar-winning film The Social Network — talks about some of their early measures of success, like seeing a Facebook window open at a dorm room party or when one of his roommates saw two people using the site at an Internet café in London.
Surprisingly, the now-billionaire didn’t think the social networking site should try to expand beyond colleges. “There doesn’t necessarily have to be more,” he says when asked what’s next for the company. “A lot of people are focused on taking over the world or doing the biggest thing, getting the most users … I just really just want to see everyone focused on college, and create a cool college directory product that is very relevant for students and has a lot of information that people care about when they’re in college.”
Now one of the most popular websites in the world and a publicly traded company worth over $300 billion, Facebook has over 1.04 billion daily active users on average and 12,691 employee as of December 2015, according to the website.