Facebook Timeline

• Wednesday 29th Oct 2003 "Were we let in for our looks? No. Will we be judged on them? Yes," proclaimed the Harvard based web site.

  Between 1am and 4am, over three hours very early that morning, Mark copied all the .jpg photos from 9 residential Harvard houses, then sets up a "Facemash" web site which brings up two images at a time and allows users to specify the more "attractive" image, left or right.
  The Web site goes live Friday night, with its URL www.fashmash.com written on his dormroom window. By Sunday night, with so much traffic hitting that site from Harvard students that Mark is unable to log on, Mark shuts it down. On 18th November, he is censured by Harvard's admin board for his activity.

• Early December 2003 With Mark's sudden notoriety, the Winklevoss twins, senior students at Harvard, and their friend Divya Narendra, approach Mark with their idea of a "dating site" as Mark later called it, exclusive to Harvard, called Harvard Connection with users required to have "@harvard.edu" as part of their email / username, thus making it superior to MySpace and other social web sites which had no such option.
  They had been working with other programmers on it for a year, and they hand over to Mark all their ideas and software code. One idea they had had was adapting it to other University Colleges, and because they were using their own software and web servers and they weren't needing approval from the University administrations, news of it would spread by word of mouth. Mark sent an email back, saying he should be finished with the code inside a week, though he later wrote emails in December and January saying he had been delayed.
  Later Mark insisted "he didn't use one line of their software code". Regarding the ideas themselves, he said he, Mark, had "better" ideas.
• January 11, 2004 With his Brazilian Jewish friend Eduardo Saverin, who was named CFO – Chief Financial Officer, Mark registers "thefacebook.com" as a domain name for $35. They invest $1000 each to rent the web servers that they would be needing.
• February 4, 2004 www.thefacebook.com web site goes live. Hundreds of students at Harvard immediately start registering their names and uploading their profiles, classes, relationship status, etc, etc, and photo (just one photo per student) at that time
• Columbia followed three weeks later (February 25th), Stanford (February 26th) and Yale (February 29th). They were next because they all had their own social networks – it was a test of sorts. According to Zuckerberg, "If TheFacebook still took off at those schools and displaced those [other networks] then I would know it would go really well at all the other ones."
• About March, Sean Parker entered the picture. He had co-founded Napster, a world-famous music download site set up back in the late 1990s. Sean had seen thefacebook.com web site on his roommate's girlfriend's computer, a student at Stanford in California. He flies to New York to meet up with Mark and Eduardo.
• May 2004 Winklevoss twins launch ConnectU sharing many of Facebook's features, such as profiles, messaging and groups. The sites are so similar that ConnectU began a service called Social Butterfly that allowed Facebook users to upload their profiles straight to ConnectU in just one minute, via Wayne Chang's I2hub.
• By now Mark had invested another $10,000 or so, and Eduardo another $18,000 in the enterprise. From the start Eduardo had been pushing for the site to be "making money", with Mark loathe to use advertising "pop ups", as it would diminish the site's attractiveness.
• In June 2004 Mark went to Palo Alto in California for the summer break, moving into rented accommodation with other programmers (who were mostly being paid with ownership shares). There he met up with Sean.
  • Sean now introduces Mark to Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel had co-founded Paypal in 1999, and after Elon Musk got involved in 2000 Peter sold Paypal to eBay in 2002 at a $55 million profit. Peter was now a wealthy man and a potential angel investor.
  • Mark is encouraged by Sean to drop out of college so he can devote his whole time to the project.
  • Eduardo, in a somewhat hissy fit at the use of his investment on personal expenses – he was during the summer break working in New York and trying to find advertisers – shuts down the Facebook bank account. Mark has to get an immediate loan from his family to keep the servers online, about $100,000. About now he makes plans to dilute Eduardo's voting share as well as his ownership share, at the time it was 30% plus of the company.
  • Peter Thiel makes an angel investment of $500,000, valued at a 7% share of Facebook. The company undergoes a restructure. Eduardo's share is now apparently 24%.
  • In July 2004, following the restructure, Sean is appointed president.
• September 2004 The Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra appoint lawyers to sue Mark for copyright theft in federal court. That November, Facebook filed a countersuit, charging their web site with defamation.
• May 2005 On May 26, $12.7 million received in venture capital from Accel Partners, and then $27.5 million more from Greylock Partners. A leaked cash flow statement showed that during the 2005 fiscal year, Facebook had a net loss of $3.63 million.
• August 2005 On August 23 Facebook purchases the domain facebook.com for $200,000 from its registered owner. Subsequently drops the "The" from its name.
  Later that same week Sean was at a house party in North Carolina, the house being rented by Sean, and a police raid discovered cocaine to be present. Although Mark apparently put no pressure on Sean to step down, other directors did, and Sean resigned as president.
• September 2005 High school version of Facebook launched.
• December 2005 On December 11, launched at universities in Australia and New Zealand.
• During the year Eduardo Saverin, whose name was no longer on the masthead of Facebook, and whose ownership share was by then diluted down below 10%, appoints his lawyer to sue Mark.
• September 2006 On September 26 open to everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address.
• July 2007 First court hearing called for July 25, with the judge requested to shut down Facebook and transfer all its assets to the Winklevoss twins, plus damages.
• October 2007 Microsoft purchase a 1.6% share in Facebook for $240 million, which attributes to Facebook a $15 billion valuation. Eduardo starts telling his whole story to Ben Mezrich, which becomes the book "The Accidental Billionaires".
• June 2008 Winklevoss twins apparently settle for $65 million in stock and cash. Eduardo Saverin also settles (apparently he walked away with 4% or 5% of the company. That stake is now worth close to $5 billion). Eduardo immediately stops speaking to Ben Mezrich, and in 2009 moves to Singapore where he settles down.
  The book however is published in 2009, followed by the movie "The Social Network" in 2010.
  Comment from Eduardo "And I would never throw a laptop at someone, like it appears in the movie. Not even at Mark."
• In October 2008, Facebook announced that it was to set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.
• In 2012 Facebook has its IPO launch.
• In November 2018 Facebook Market Capitalization is $US377.1 billion using a Stock Price of $US131.23 and the assumption there are 2,873,580,736 shares outstanding.
  In 2020, Facebook shares have increased on the open market to about $170 each.

  Mark holds over 400 million shares, which includes 57.9% of the total voting shares, giving him effective control of the company.

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