Was Facebook an outcome of a stolen idea? PART 2.

What was it about Adam D'Angelo (Founder of Quora) and Mark Zuckerberg's IMs that changed opinions?

PART 2

Whatever the settlement between Mark Zuckerberg and The Winklevoss brothers suggested, the truth always seemed to have been camouflaged.

Do we know for real if the platform where 500,000 new users are added everyday (6 new profiles every second) is ‘HarvardConnections’ (By Divya Narendra and the Winklevoss brothers) only under a different name?

A lot many assumptions were made, only on the basis of the emails that were made public. But what weren’t on the record were the instant messages Mark Zuckerberg sent his friends, family and confidants.

A thorough investigation by Business Insider suggests some unpopular opinions which are unknown to hoi polloi.

For the ones who wouldn’t know, PayPal CEO Peter Theil is known to be Facebook’s first investor. But the real "first investor" claim to fame should actually belong to a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg's named Eduardo Saverin.  During the summer of 2004, when Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time, Eduardo took a high-paying internship at Lehman Brothers in New York.  While Zuckerberg was still at Harvard, however, Eduardo appears to have bankrolled Facebook's earliest capital expenses, thus becoming its initial investor.

In December 2003, while Zuckerberg’s delaying behavior surprised the brothers, he was telling Eduardo, a different story.

“Check this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I'm like delaying it so it won't be ready until after the facebook thing comes out.”

The aforementioned IM was believed to be shared between Zuckerberg and Eduardo. Mark Zuckerberg mentioned the idea of Divya Narendra for the programs of which they had hired him. It assumes that delaying the procedure on Mark’s side was only a part of his strategy for dealing with what he thought would be his competition.

"I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook thing and wait until the last day before I'm supposed to have their thing ready and then be like look yours isn't as good."

Not only did it prove that he only ditched them by delaying the process but also he already had his own idea in mind and that the idea of Facebook was NOT a stolen one.

During the weeks in which Mark was juggling the two projects in tandem, he also had a series of IM exchanges with a friend named Adam D'Angelo (Founder of Quora).

Adam and Mark went to boarding school together at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, the pair became friends and coding partners. Together they built a program called Synapse, a music player that supposedly learned the listener's taste and then adapted to it. Then, in 2002 Mark went to Harvard and Adam went to Cal Tech.  But the pair stayed in close touch, especially through AOL instant messenger. Eventually, Adam became Facebook's CTO.

Through the Harvard Connection-Facebook saga and its aftermath, Mark kept Adam apprised of his plans and thoughts.

Zuck: So you know how I'm making that dating site

Zuck: I wonder how similar that is to the Facebook thing

Zuck: Because they're probably going to be released around the same time

Zuck: Unless I f**k the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I'd have it done.

D'Angelo: haha

Zuck: Like I don't think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating.

Zuck: and I think people are skeptical about joining dating things too.

Zuck: But the guy doing the dating thing is going to promote it pretty well.

Zuck: I wonder what the ideal solution is.

Zuck: I think the Facebook thing by itself would draw many people, unless it were released at the same time as the dating thing.

Zuck: In which case both things would cancel each other out and nothing would win. Any ideas? Like is there a good way to consolidate the two.

D'Angelo: We could make it into a whole network like a friendster. haha. Stanford has something like that internally

Zuck: Well I was thinking of doing that for the facebook. The only thing that's different about theirs is that you like request dates with people or connections with the facebook you don't do that via the system.

D'Angelo: Yeah

Zuck: I also hate the fact that I'm doing it for other people haha. Like I hate working under other people. I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait until the last day before I'm supposed to have their thing ready and then be like "look yours isn't as good as this so if you want to join mine you can…otherwise I can help you with yours later."

D'Angelo: I think you should just ditch them

Zuck: The thing is they have a programmer who could finish their thing and they have money to pour into advertising and stuff. Oh wait I have money too. My friend who wants to sponsor this is head of the investment society. Apparently insider trading isn't illegal in Brazil so he's rich lol.

D'Angelo: lol

In January 2004, Zuckerberg met with the Winklevoss brothers and Divya Narendra for what would be the last time. By this point, Mark's site, thefacebook.com, wasn't complete, but he was working hard on it. He'd arranged for Eduardo Saverin to pay for his servers. He had already told Adam that "the right thing to do" was to not complete Harvard Connection and build TheFacebook.com instead.  He had registered the domain name.

He therefore had a choice to make: Tell the Winklevoss brothers and Divya that he wanted out of their project, or string them along until he was ready to launch thefacebook.com. (The latter was what he obviously decided to go with.)

On January 14, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg met with Cameron, Tyler, and Divya for the last time. Very much as he had strategized, he explained to them about how he had started doubting certain the viability of it thereby delaying the operation. He did not say that he was working on his own project and that he was not planning to complete the HarvardConnection site.

After the meeting, Mark had another IM exchange with the friend. He told her, in effect, that he had wimped out. He hadn't been able to break the news to Cameron and Tyler, in part, he said, because he was "intimidated" by them. 

What next?

On January 11, 2004, Mark had registered the domain THEFACEBOOK.COM.

On February 10, Cameron Winklevoss sent Mark a letter accusing him of breaching their agreement and stealing their idea.

In late May, after going through two more developers, Cameron, Tyler and Divya launched HarvardConnection as ConnectU, a social network for 15 schools.

On June 10, 2004, a commencement speaker mentioned the amazing popularity of Mark's site, thefacebook.com.

In the summer of 2004, Mark moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time and soon received a $500,000 investment from Peter Thiel.

In September 2004, HarvardConnection, now called ConnectU, sued Mark Zuckerberg and the now-incorporated "Facebook" for allegedly breaching their agreement and stealing their idea.

In February 2008, Facebook and ConnectU agreed to settle the lawsuit.

What hasn’t been seen is anything that makes us think that, whatever Mark did to the Harvard Connection folks, it was worth more than the $65 million they received in the lawsuit settlement. In fact, this seems like a huge sum of money considering that the entire dispute took place over two months in 2004 and that, in the six years since, Mark has built Facebook into a massive global enterprise.

Life is not all about the Benjamins; it's about building something that changes the world for the better. When all is said and done, you can't take money with you.So find your gift and share it with the world.

As the creator of Facebook, Zuckerberg has certainly done that.