Billionaires The Founding of Facebook

party, the kind of thing he’d been to a thousand times before. Utterly harmless, 
nothing crazy going on at all. 
Well, okay, maybe there was alcohol in the house. And maybe the music was a 
little bit too loud. And, sure, maybe some of the kids had been doing a little 
coke, smoking a little pot. Sean didn’t really know—he hadn’t spent much time 
in the bathroom since he’d arrived at the house, he’d been busy on the dance 

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floor. Other than the inhaler in his pants pocket and the EpiPen full of 
epinephrine in his shirt, he was as clean as the pope. His chronic asthma and 
ridiculous fucking allergies made certain of that. 
Who cared, anyway? It was a party. There were a lot of college kids present. 
Wasn’t college supposed to be about experimentation? 
Revolution? 
Freedom? 
Shouldn’t the cops have been a little more forgiving, considering the locale? 
But the looks on the cops’ faces were anything but forgiving. No question about 
it, Batman was in for a hell of a fucking night. 
It dawned on him, then, that maybe this wasn’t as much about bad luck—about 
being in the wrong place at the wrong time—as it was about being Sean Parker 
in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t as simple 
as a party that had gotten too loud. Maybe, once again, he’d become a target. 
Facebook wasn’t a little dorm-room company anymore; Sean had seen to that 
himself. It was now a major corporation, on its way to a billion-dollar valuation. 
And he and Mark, they weren’t two kids playing around with a computer 
program, they were executives running a company—a company that neither one 
of them wanted to sell, a company that both of them now believed would one 
day be worth much, much more than a billion dollars. 
The growth that had gone on over the past few months was nothing less than 
spectacular. In Sean’s view, what was going on with Facebook was truly 
transformative, the culmination of a few brilliant ideas played out across an 
exceedingly successful network of eager participants. 
The first, and most recent, transformative development had to be the picture-
sharing application, the idea that Facebook was now a place where you shared 
and viewed pictures that coincided with your social life. It was the true 
digitalization of real life: you didn’t just go to a party anymore, you went to a 

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party with your digital camera so you and your friends could relive that party the 
next day—or at two in the morning—via Facebook. And the tagging, the idea 
that you could tag anyone you wanted in those pictures, so that those people 
could find themselves, see who was there, literally see your social network in its 
digital form—it was utter genius. And it had led to an explosion of users—now 
maybe eight million, ten million, God, Facebook was growing so fast. 
And they weren’t even close to finished: the next transformative step on par with 
pictures would be the newsfeed, an idea that Sean and Mark had been thinking 
about independently. The newsfeed would be a constant updating of 
information among people in a social network, which would link people even 
more through their Facebook pages—a living, digital log of every change in a 
person’s profile broadcast to all his friends instantaneously. When completed, it 
would be a sophisticated feat of computer engineering that Dustin and Mark 
would have to pull off—exponentially complex, a sort of broadcast channel 
limited to groups of friends that had to be constantly updated, moment by 
moment. For Sean, the idea had come about after hours spent watching what 
people did when they logged into Facebook; how they always checked their 
friends’ status updates, checked to see which friends had changed their profiles, 
their photos. The idea of a newsfeed was one of those eureka moments—if 
there was a way this could happen automatically, Sean had realized, it would 
enhance the Facebook experience the same way photos and tagging had. 
These were more than just applications—they were milestones in the making, 
changing what began as a dorm-room idea into a life-changing, billion-dollar 
company. Building the biggest, most successful picture-sharing site on the Web 
on top of the most successful social network? Adding an innovation like a 
newsfeed on top of that? 
Facebook was going to be bigger than anything else on the Web, Sean was sure 
of it. Someday soon they’d open it up to the general public—the next, great 
transformative step, the next milestone—and then they’d go international. And 
after that, well, nothing would ever come close to Facebook again. Sean wasn’t 
thinking Friendster or even MySpace: he was thinking Google and Microsoft. 
Facebook would be that big. 

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And when things got big—well, Sean Parker knew better than anyone else what 
often happened. People began to act differently. Friendships fell apart. 
Problems arose—sometimes seemingly out of nowhere. 
Maybe, just maybe, as Facebook got bigger than big, as the money poured in 
and the VCs started to think in terms of billions—maybe there were people who 
didn’t feel they needed a Sean Parker involved anymore. 
It had happened before—twice. Could it really be happening again? 
Or was he just being paranoid? Maybe things were exactly as they seemed. A