To Mark Zuckerberg, in its early days, Facebook was an “ice breaker” and an “online directory for colleges,” according to a 2005 video uncovered by TheNextWeb.
In an informal interview with System Seminar TV, Zuckerberg explained just how his site, then called “The Facebook,” developed.
“It’s a lot of different individual communities,” he said, clutching a red plastic cup of beer. “When we originally got started at Harvard it was just me programming what was a facebook really at that time for Harvard...I realized that because I didn’t have people’s information like a school would [have if it were] making a facebook, I needed to make it interesting enough so that people would want to use the site and want to put their information up or else it wouldn’t be useful for other people and therefore it wouldn’t grow.”
He said it only took a few weeks after Facebook launched at Harvard before nearly two-thirds of the school had joined. That semester they added three more schools: Columbia, Yale, and Stanford. By the end of the year they added 29 more and at the start of the following year Facebook launched at 150 additional colleges.
Zuckerberg, who in the interview is probably about 21, gave some insight into how he wanted Facebook to serve its users.
“The goal we went into it with wasn’t to make an online community but sort of like a mirror for the real community,” he said. “So the Facebook for your school isn’t somewhere where people actually go to meet but where you go to see who knows each other and maybe sort of an icebreaker.”
The 27-year-old CEO recently said in an interview at Y Combinator’s Startup School that if he were starting Facebook today, he would have stayed in Boston, but the Zuckerberg of six years ago seemed to be enchanted by what Silicon Valley had to offer.
“Palo Alto is kind of this mythical place where you know, all the startups come from,” he said.
And what did Zuck see coming next for Facebook?
“There doesn’t necessarily have to be more. A lot of people are focused on taking over the world or doing the biggest thing, getting the most users…Part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely.”
Perhaps Zuckerberg has held onto that intense focus, considering Facebook has growth into a behemoth with 800 million users and counting.
You can see the entire interview in the video below.