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.

"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."

External links

• Wikipedia
• Joshua Levy and..., "Did Facebook Play Favorites with Obama?" TechPresident.com, June 4, 2007.