I signed up for Facebook in the summer of 2004, right before heading to college. The service was only a year-old at the time and you needed a .edu e-mail address from one of the major colleges white-listed by TheFacebook.com at the time. 2004 – 2006, when Facebook launched open registrations to everyone, was a very special time to be on Facebook. It was rowdy and brash, a place where you could meet random friends with mutual interests at your school and share embarrassing drunken pics from last week’s party.
Back in 2005, Mark Zuckerberg was a baby-faced start-up Bro in Silicon Valley who just wanted his company to take over college. The video above features Zuck glowing about his now $315 billion empire in its infancy. Via:
“I think Facebook is an online directory for colleges.
…
Like, a lot of people are focused on, like, taking over the world, or doing the biggest thing, getting the most users. I think, like, part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely. There’s a level of service that we can provide at Harvard that we can’t provide for all of the colleges. And there’s a level of service we can provide when we’re a college network that we wouldn’t be able to provide if we went to other types of things.”
The most important takeaway is how much of a Bro he his. He’s rock gym shorts. He talks with a very colloquial Bro twang, complete with lots of “like”(s) and “ummm”(s). He’s clinging that time-honored holy grail of bro-hood, the red Solo cup:
There’s literally a cut-away in the middle of the video where an employee starts doing a keg stand in the middle of the Facebook office:
11 years later, Facebook has over a billion users, controls how we interact with social news, and has ambitious plan for taking over the world. Zuckerberg’s a dad and a husband and, overall, very dignified when he talks about his company and vision on camera.
But never forget the days when he was an untamed Bro savage who just wanted to make college life a little better.
‘Atta boy, Zuck. ‘Atta boy.