I've met and been approached by countless Winkelvosses since I've started doing this, and I've always had the same question in my mind: if you want to create something for the web, why the hell don't you figure out how to create it yourself? I started out with ZERO development experience and figured out how to do it - pretty quickly too, in fact. I don't understand how you could stand not being able to act on your ideas yourself if you were truly excited about the prospect of building them out - especially when the barrier of entry to entrepreneurialism has never been lower in the history of business.
That the twins believed they should be compensated for having supposedly given Mark the idea for Facebook cuts right at the heart of what bothers me. The Twins were busy training to be Olympic rowers, besides being gorgeous Harvard supermen and screwing God-only-knows-how-many gorgeous women in the process. Mark was busy coding Facebook. Every waking hour. Obsessively. It's true the Twins had great insight about Facebook's (or ConnectU's) potential. But so did I back in 2002. So did every internet generation college-aged computer geek who'd seen Friendster and MySpace and hotornot.com.
The point, that I know has (rightfully) been beaten to death on HN, is that it's not about the idea. It's about the blood, sweat, and execution of the idea. If you're only coming up with ideas, you're not throwing your hat into the ring as far as I'm concerned. You're playing with monopoly money.
By far the best line in the movie was "If you were the inventors of Facebook, you've had invented Facebook." It was a fist pumping moment for me.
An alternate quote could easily be "If Zuckerberg had come up with the idea of Facebook on his own, then he would have come up with the idea of Facebook on his own" and the Winkelvosses wouldn't have had even a weak argument to put forth. Zuckerberg's original execution was more along hot or not, correct? And it wasn't until he had input from the Winkelvosses that he solidified something closer to the current Facebook. That's an important contribution. Whether it deserves any legal or financial reward is another story, but you can't just ignore the importance of an idea.
And I am confident in assuming that Zuckerberg also did not come up with his modern mission of Facebook all by himself, for it to be a social, informal version of Google search (for lack of a better description). Without that pivotal idea, Facebook would die or be dead already, just as MySpace has died.
Not everyone can figure out how to code so easily. That's why you have contract work.
To me it's the latter. Successful startups are built at the junction of motivation, skill, and vision. Zuckerberg, as far as I can tell, had the first two... but the third was certainly influenced (if not outright stolen) by his interaction with ConnectU. The twins made a tremendous contribution to Facebook, and were rewarded by (as far as I can tell) fraud on the part of Zuckerberg.
That's most definitely worthy of compensation. I still think they sold out for far too little really.
It could be summed up in three words: MySpace for Harvard. That's not an idea, that's an obvious conclusion.
I don't argue that you don't need good ideas. I argue that good ideas are a dime a dozen. I argue that no matter how good an idea is, if you can't execute, it's not going to be worth anything.
Also, the Winkelvosses had two prior programmers, whose code Zuckerberg had access to.
This is on Wikipedia about ConnectU:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConnectU#Mark_Zuckerberg
Later that evening, Zuckerberg told Cameron Winklevoss in an email that he didn't expect completion of the project to be difficult. Zuckerberg writes: "I read over all the stuff you sent and it seems like it shouldn't take too long to implement, so we can talk about that after I get all the basic functionality up tomorrow night."[9] The next day, on December 1st, 2003, Zuckerberg sent another email to the HarvardConnection team. "I put together one of the two registration pages so I have everything working on my system now. I'll keep you posted as I patch stuff up and it starts to become completely functional."[6] On December 4th, 2003, Zuckerberg writes: "Sorry I was unreachable tonight. I just got about three of your missed calls. I was working on a problem set."[6] On December 10, 2003: "The week has been pretty busy thus far, so I haven't gotten a chance to do much work on the site or even think about it really, so I think it's probably best to postpone meeting until we have more to discuss. I'm also really busy tomorrow so I don't think I'd be able to meet then anyway."[6] On December 17th, 2004, a week later: "Sorry I have not been reachable for the past few days. I've basically been in the lab the whole time working on a cs problem set which I"m still not finished with."[6] On January 8, 2004, Zuckerberg emailed to say he was "completely swamped with work [that] week" but had "made some of the changes ... and they seem[ed] to e working great" on his computer. He said he could discuss the site starting the following Tuesday, on Jan. 13.[9] On January 11th, 2004, Zuckerberg registered the domain name thefacebook.com.[12] Three days later, on January 14th, 2004, Zuckerberg met again with Tyler Winklevoss, Cameron Winklevoss and Divya Narendra about HarvardConnection, however, he never mentioned registering the domain name thefacebook.com or a competing website, rather he reported progress on HarvardConnection, told them he would continue to work on it, and would email the group later in the week.[9] On February 4th, 2004, Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com.
The Winklevosses and Narendra attempted to force the Harvard administration to act on what they viewed as a violation of the university’s honor code. They took the case to the Harvard Administrative Board and the university president Larry Summers, but it was ruled to be outside of university jurisdiction.[13]
What actually are the rules about that in this situation?
I felt the same thing about the Winklevoss' story-line. Did non-developers/non-HNers get the same thing from the movie?
That is exactly how I felt watching it. It's inspiration to work harder.
Really happy I did — the movie is one of my favorites now. Writing was awesome, soundtrack was fantastic (by Trent Reznor, and $8 to buy: http://www.nullco.com/TSN/), cinematography was enchanting (the tilt-shift part during the crew race was particularly great), and I thought that Jesse Eisenberg in particular did a great job creating both an arrogant but sympathetic character.
Additionally, the movie is pretty inspiring, as other commentators mentioned. Kind of disappointed in myself for being such a 'hater' in the beginning before actually seeing the movie.
THe movie was scored fantastically as well.
tilt-shift w/ Panasonic GH1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FItdVsqGIzw
So cool!
I left the movie quite satisfied. It was such marvelous dialog paired with excellent directing. I love Fincher's style, though at times it felt like he was being held back, such as during the regatta segment, I felt like he couldn't go as crazy as he would like given the soundtrack.
Sorkin is a master of dialogue, and though the story is wildly inaccurate, I suspended disbelief and enjoyed the ride.
Also I felt the whole "I scored 1600 on my SATs" and shooting down his professor with some technobabble about memory management was a little much. I understand there needs to be elements to add dramatic effect, but I can't help but feel there's a whole generation of assholes out there taking notes and thinking that being arrogant all the time = being right all the time
As a geek, I liked how they didn't do a lot of fake flashy computer stuff (looked like he was using KDE3 and it was butt ugly). Though netbooks weren't around yet in 2003. ;)
When I read about this movie, I thought this is something to bring down the image of Mark Zuckerberg.
After watching the movie, it seems, # of sign ups on facebook will sky rocket.
They only referenced emacs and not vim.
Where's the love? ;)
(edited)
Ender's Game is the only book, which isn't too surprising.
Also: I think the screenplay, the directing, and the score (Trent Reznor!) will be nominated for Oscars.
startup.com http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
e-dreams http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262021/
Great movie, though. Amazing to see a popular film come out and do a decent job of portraying a software guy.
The part he talks about Perl is when he's writing utility code to download the pictures he used to build his first hit website at Harvard.
Correct me if I'm wrong though.
"You're not an asshole ... but you're trying really hard to be"
Awesome movie ... I have no doubt any hackernews faithful will love it.
It is kinda funny that Sean Fanning's name in the movie is Sean Parker. Or was that character supposed to be someone else and to protect the identity they claimed he made "napster" instead of whatever he really made? Certainly Timberlake looks nothing like Fanning.
I think the movie is a bit kind to Zuckerberg, but then, it is pretty hard to make a movie focused on a single individual and not have it come out sympathetic. Unless that individual is, say, hitler or idi amin.
I still think Justin Frankel is the real badass programmer/hacker of the generation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Parker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawn_Fanning
Sean Parker was President of Facebook.
