(YouTube/CS50)
Mark Zuckerberg was a relative nobody in 2005, and a lecture he gave at Harvard was to an almost empty room.
Imagine spending a few days to learn a new programming language that would later turn you into a billionaire.
In 2005, when Facebook was a tiny startup with 50 people, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was invited to give a lecture at his old school, Harvard.
He was such a relative nobody at that time that hardly anybody showed up to hear him.
But the lecture was posted a couple of years ago on YouTube, and it's kind of fun to listen to it now, with 20/20 hindsight.
In 2005, Facebook was making some waves in its world. It was a social network for college students that had spread to 2,000 schools and was generating around 400 million page views a day, Zuckerberg told the audience.
That was, he estimated, more than Google was doing back then. Remember that, in 2005, Yahoo was still a big deal for searching the 'net and was considered one of the huge successful internet companies along with eBay and bookseller Amazon.
The best story he told was about how his roommate and fellow computer-science student, Dustin Moskovitz, got involved with Facebook.
(Asana)
Dustin Moskovitz.
Zuck had built Facebook in his dorm room using a programming language called PHP, and the site was instantly popular.
"I started writing the site, launched it at Harvard in February 2004, so I guess about two years ago now. Within a couple of weeks, a few thousand people had signed up and we started getting some emails from people at other colleges asking for us to launch it at their schools," he said.
He was taking a hard but fun computer-science class, "but it didn't leave me with much time to do anything else with Facebook, so my roommate Dustin was like, 'Hey, I want to help out. I want to help you do the expansion.'"
Zuckerberg told Moskovitz, "That's pretty cool. But you don't know any PHP."
Fortunately, PHP was easy to learn, particularly if you knew the classic programming language C, which Moskovitz had learned.
'PHP, not PERL, dude'
"That weekend he went home, bought the book 'PERL for Dummies,' came back, and was like, 'OK, I'm ready to go,'" Zuck said, and told him, "The site's written in PHP, not PERL, dude."
Undeterred, Moskovitz studied PHP and learned that language, too, in "a couple of days" and "went to work," helping Zuckerberg figure out the technical issues of expanding from one school to many.
(valleywagprime via Flickr)
Moskovitz and Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook.
Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard and moved to Palo Alto, California, to work on Facebook full-time.