Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Derek Andersen, who is the founder of StartupGrindand Vaporware Labs, and is a former entertainment development manager at Electronic Arts.

Paypal created a cost effective way to safely accept payments 10 years ago, but the web has changed dramatically and accepting payments has not. Enter Stripe, a company that in my opinion is going to get very influential over the next few years. At a recent Startup Grind event I interviewed 24-year old Irish co-founder Patrick Collison who has raised $18MM from Sequoia Capital and others. Patrick is leading a company poised to completely disrupt the online payment industry starting with your website.

Background

Patrick has the most valuable of Valley technology skillsets. He’s a technical prodigy having won numerous prestigious awards including Ireland’s 41st Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005, a national science competition which boasts hundreds of submissions each year from the country’s brightest young scientists. But he also has the personality and presence to be a leader and CEO. His two brothers are equally impressive. John is one of Stripe’s co-founders not to mention a Harvard dropout and one of the first engineers at Auctomatic. His youngest brother, Tommy, is a teenage blogger and writer that probably has more Twitter followers than most of us.

Y Combinator and Paul Graham

Patrick holds the distinction of literally being the face of Y Combinator. He’s the skinny red headed guy you see on the front of their website. While attending MIT at age 18, he and his brother decided to build a better version of eBay. After applying to YC they merged with Kulveer and Harjeet Taggar to build Auctomatic. They moved to an apartment in San Francisco, raised angel funding, and went to work. After launching and getting initial user traction, the company was acquired by Live Current Media and the founders moved to Vancouver to build the product. From start to finish the company’s pre-acquisition life span was just 10-months. Stripe was also eventually funded by YC.

Patrick said that YC’s founder network is one of its most valuable assets. “Having all these other people building startups and having them want to help us because we were a fellow YC company, that was super valuable for us.” He added that perhaps the greatest advantage to YC is that,  “Paul and the (other) partners are just really smart. There is no question that they are very top tier.” Because of the sheer quantity of deals and companies that they interact with combined with those smarts, they’re able to offer both specific and strategic feedback that is second to none.

What makes Paul special? According to Patrick, Paul Graham is able to make surprising ideas and connections that other investors and advisors simply aren’t able to make. What isn’t Paul Graham so good at? Patrick says, “He’s not good at feigning interest.”

Solving Hard Problems

 “The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe’s idea. For over a decade, every hacker who’d ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. Why? Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world’s infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments.
Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking “should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?” and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved.”

- Paul Graham, SchlepBlindness.

John and Patrick first started working on Stripe in early 2010.  The inspiration came when Patrick, who was working on a few side projects, kept complaining about how difficult it was to accept payments on the web.  The two quickly developed a simple solution and within 2-weeks they had processed their first transaction.  Over the next 6-months they showed it to friends, watched people interact with it, and iterated as fast as they could.

In the beginning they weren’t sure how big the market was or whether they could accomplish their goal of addressing issues like fraud and non-US payments in a user-friendly way.  They originally partnered with a payments company, but quickly realized that the only way to control the entire experience was to control all aspects of the process. That’s when they brought everything in house.

By the fall of 2010, Stripe had become their full-time jobs.  They thought about bootstrapping it, as they had to that point, but soon realized that as a payment startup they would need the kind of institutional credibility that only a top-notch investor could provide.

“Even Turkeys Can Fly In A High Wind”

Stripe’s most requested feature is to expand beyond the United States, which is something he assured me they’re working on. The team also recently moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco to accommodate their rapid expansion.

To date the company’s growth has been completely organic. Before they publicly launched last fall they had more than 1,000 developers on a waiting list and have grown almost exclusively by positive word of mouth. For those wondering why they haven’t heard of Stripe, it’s because true to Steve Blank’s Customer Development process, they have planned to turn on the marketing as soon as they were sure the product was right. Quoting from a Kleiner Perkins founder Eugene Kleiner saying, “Even turkeys can fly in a high wind.” Watch the full interview here.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5Qw92uKXeQ8/

This week we recorded live from the show floor at Disrupt NYC. We sat through 24 hours straight of hot-rod hacking at the Hackathon and now we’re preparing for the main show and, most important, the brand new Hardware Alley where we’ll have loads of great hardware start-ups for you guys to check out.

In this episode we talk about Disrupt, the new EVO 4G LTE, and the rumors of the four-inch iPhone. We also talk about the “thumb touches anywhere on the screen” iPhone chestnut, how good the battery life is on some Android phones, the late night Nerf wars at the hackathon, and my horrible sausage fingers.

Tune in today and look for another episode next week from the show floor.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/7pmIVrckbfU/

Disrupt NYC 2012 begins in approximately 12 hours (tickets here).

But it’s been two years since Soluto, the software that will make your computer simply run better, took home the Disrupt Cup at the TC Disrupt NYC Battlefield in 2010. The company entered the competition with a total of $7.8 million, and after walking away with the $50,000 round, secured another $10.2 million in Series B from Index Ventures for a total of $18 million in funding under their belts.

It’s been a wild ride, starting with about 400 users as the then-stealth company stepped on stage, and only a few days later they were dealing with hundreds of thousands of users. In fact, CEO and co-founder Tomer Dvir said that the platform almost had trouble dealing with all the data being sent back by the flood of new users.

But, in his own words, “Disrupt is one of the best ways to release.”

Here’s the interview I had with Mr. Dvir in its entirety:

TechCrunch: What was it like to launch your product on stage at Disrupt?

Soluto: The amazing part was that we had about 400 users when we launched. It took a really long time to develop the product because it’s complicated and hardcore. It’s something that sits deep inside the OS. That 400 users was mostly friends and family and people we asked to install the product.

But just one minute after we came off the stage we turned it on, and suddenly were bombarded with quantities of users we couldn’t imagine before that. It was way beyond anything we were prepared for. It’s not just jumping into deep waters, it’s being pulled down into the deep water.

We weren’t really ready for that. We thought we were, but reality struck and we realized we had never learned to scale before. The challenge with our system is that every user’s machine starts sending us data. We were flooded with way more data than we had imagined. We knew that coming to Disrupt would get us some traction, and we expected maybe tens of thousands of users.

It ended up being around 50 times more than that.

It was a pretty awesome experience, launching on stage at Disrupt. We went from being with less than 1,000 users to several hundreds of thousands in a matter of days or maybe a week. We went from being nameless — no one knew what we were doing — to being known. We felt like stars at the show. People got connected to the idea, to the vision.

TechCrunch: You guys obviously won at Disrupt. It’s been two years, so what’s happened since, and how did Disrupt shape the past two years of your company history?

Soluto: I guess we learned what it means to be a company. Without Disrupt, it would have been the same growth but much, much slower. We might have gotten press here or there, but suddenly Disrupt was like a leap. A shortcut. I can’t even estimate how much time and money it would have taken to get to that state as quickly as we did.

Our biggest challenge since then has been scaling. We had to understand how to grow and not gradually, because on Day One it was already crazy.

We wanted to grow the company and get the right people. We got some amazing support, kept developing, and kept progressing and re-writing stuff.

We also had to learn how to answer reporters. We had to accelerate all processes in a company including growing our talent. We were around 20 people at launch, and now we’re at 50 employees.

Outside of the technical part, it was the first touch of the company with the press and blogosphere. The New York Times approached us. Everyone was suddenly approaching us. On Day One we were swimming with the big fish, and dealing with the press was just another thing we had to learn quickly.

TechCrunch: Do you think that winning Disrupt made it easier for you to get funded and/or bring in new talent?

Soluto: Winning or participating won’t get you funded, but it gets you the exposure you need to get there. If you have a good company you can get funded, but Disrupt works as a good foot in the door because you aren’t so nameless. VC’s meet a thousand companies a year, and after launching or winning at Disrupt you become one of the more interesting hundred or fifty, instead of just one of thousands.

TechCrunch: It seems that launching your product on a stage at a huge conference like Disrupt might be a little intimidating. Were you worried or do you think it served the company well?

Soluto: It may not fit everyone, but it was an awesome experience for us. There are several advantages.

The first is that you have a concrete deadline. It’s a good thing for a company to have something you can’t move. You can always move PR and even a TechCrunch post, but Disrupt is a freaking competition which people are trying to get into and people have bought tickets to. It’s going to happen no matter what, so you need to be ready on time.

In terms of timing, we came close to being able to release a product a few months before Disrupt and then we heard about the conference and it all aligned. It was perfect.

I don’t know if I would postpone a release for three months if it wasn’t the perfect opportunity.

Getting an on-stage launch also sends a company into the extreme. It forces you to be ready for an unexpected amount of users.

There’s also the advice you’re getting. Having Marissa Mayer and Michael Arrington see your product and give feedback, and sometimes tear it apart, it only pushes the entire company to get some awesome results on time.

It’s one of the best ways to release, I can’t think of anything to compare.

TechCrunch: I find the Battlefield to be intensely emotional. Obviously a lot of good came out of it for Soluto, but how did you feel up there on stage?

Soluto: All of us are going to remember it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It took two and a half years to release the product. Working so long and putting it out into the world in a single day is an amazing experience.

TechCrunch: Care to share any user/download numbers with us?

Soluto: Well, currently we have two products. The original product was a local download, and since launch we’ve hit 3 million downloads. We’re not sharing numbers around our web product right now, but it’s been only four and a half months and we’re definitely impressed with the numbers. We’ve really had no paid marketing, ads, or PR, so we’re certainly pleased.

TechCrunch: What advice would you give to people about to present their products at Disrupt NYC 2012?

Soluto: Acknowledge that you’re sitting in front of senior people that see good and bad companies. You have to be humble. You’re listening to people who have a shallow view of the product, but they have instincts and insights, so you must be in listening mode.

Don’t think you have all the answers. It’s fine if you don’t. Try to give your insight but really, really listen and see if there’s something they might say which is smart. Some of the smartest people around are the ones who listen.

We saw many companies present before us and they were looking for fast answers. We thought about that and felt that it wasn’t the way. Listen, be open, and make sure they understand the service and product that you’ve shown and then it’s up to you to think about the different angles.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

• SOLUTO

Soluto is a web service that helps people to make their own PC and other people’s PCs better.

The company was founded by Tomer Dvir and Ishay Green in 2008 with the goal of making PCs easy and fun to use. Tomer and Ishay began by helping people in their hometown with their computer issues and realized that they could make people all over the world happier by helping them enjoy their computers more. A seed was planted and…

Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/KEdeFSH6GVQ/

One of ESPN’s biggest problems is the perception that their coverage is biased and the sense that the network takes care of its partners first and covers the rest of the sports second.

There are also a number of personalities on ESPN that feel the need to constantly remind us that they are “friends” with particular athletes. And one of the worst at name-dropping is Stephen A. Smith, something not lost on the folks at Saturday Night Live.

Here is the Weekend Update from this week’s show…

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/zr56-mCncFE/saturday-night-live-mocks-espns-stephen-a-smith-2012-5

Connectivity in offices, home, cafes, trains, parks, cars and planes — I say bring it on. I have already shifted most of my life to the “cloud,” and it is not much of a surprise that I am a shameless believer in connectivity. That is why I am excited about Aeromobile, which is making it easy to use your phones on planes, including transatlantic flights.

Aeromobile is a UK-based company that is jointly owned by Telenor, a telephone company, and Panasonic Avionics, which recently became a majority share holder. Panasonic has developed the satellite technology that makes the connections work. Aeromobile is working with several airlines such as Emirates to wire their planes for connectivity.

Last week, Virgin Atlantic, part of the Virgin group, announced its intentions to offer a service powered by Aeromobile. For now, the service is restricted to Virgin Atlantic’s new Upper Class cabin, and only flights between New York and London.

AeroMobile allows passengers to use their own mobile phones in the air. Even better, the new entertainment system is smartphone, tablet and USB compatible, giving passengers the choice to read, watch or listen to their own media. The re-designed cabin will also soon be available on the Mumbai service, from October this year. (from WallPaper magazine)

Virgin Atlantic, on its website, adds:

Instead of spending a fortune using satellite phones, this new system’s charges are almost the same as they would be if you were roaming from another country. Plus, the calls and texts will be added to your mobile bill after you’ve flown, so there’s no nasty credit-card bills. As long as your phone is activated for international roaming, you can use it to make calls, receive texts, and, on BlackBerrys, receive email. By the end of 2012, we expect Aeromobile to be available on 13 of our aircraft. (Some countries like the USA don’t allow mobile phone use in their air space. In these cases, the system will automatically switch off.)

They actively encourage you not to use data roaming for Internet access as it is going to result in a cardiac-inducing phone bill.

While I am excited about the ability to send and receive SMS, I don’t much care about the phone calls. What I really want is in-flight Internet access on long transcontinental flights. The nearly 22 hours of flying time to New Delhi without connectivity makes me jittery. As for SMS messages — iMessage, Facebook Messenger and What’s App do just fine for me.

Lufthansa’s Flynet

Whenever flying across borders, I prefer Lufthansa, which is one of the more punctual and efficient airlines in a world dominated by penny-pinching and shoddy service providers such as United, American and Delta. And they fly pretty much everywhere. What makes them even more attractive  – they are promising to wire their entire fleet by the end of 2012 for WiFi access, though I’ve yet to be on a Lufthansa flight departing from San Francisco that has WiFi. But hope springs eternal. Even the APEX’s editor blog assures us that…

Lufthansa is offering in-flight high-speed Internet on about 60% of its long-haul fleet, and expects to complete installations of Panasonic Avionics’ Ku-band satellite-supported system across the remaining 40% by the end of 2012.

A former customer to now defunct Connexion by Boeing, Lufthansa reignited in-flight Internet service – dubbed FlyNet – in late 2010. It started with its Airbus A330s, moved to the A340-300s, and is now fitting A340-600s and Boeing 747s.

Today, I don’t normally get on a domestic flight without WiFi — think Virgin America. I bet soon, we will have similar expectations of international flights as well.

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Check out this from Fox Business:

“I have seen several hedge-fund-type accounts liquidating various positions to make way for Facebook,” says John Glasmann of Precision Securities, a San Diego firm that specializes in IPOs.  “But I have no firsthand knowledge of this to be factual as it relates to Apple.”

Independent trader Doug Monieson has heard about people selling Apple to buy Facebook shares.  But he says it’s more a function of a portfolio balancing issue related to Facebook’s IPO that may be causing some tech fund managers to sell Apple.  

This is interesting because what’s being described here is in, a way, a form of reverse Quantitative Easing.

When the Fed does QE, it buys assets with cash, and then that cash has to be redeployed elsewhere, thus creating a positive effect on markets through portfolio rebalancing.

In the case of Facebook, the entrance of a new must-own megacap (and it is a must own… every mutual fund, tech fund, etc. will have to buy it) prompted liquidation of other stocks.

It’s impossible to prove that this happened, but the fact that the NASDAQ 100 ETF (primarily comprised of big tech) underperformed the broader market does lend credence to it.

stockcharts.com

Worth noting too that even though the ultimate size of the Facebook float was a drop in the bucket compared to the broader market, it’s not unreasonable for the overall impact to be much larger. After all, the total size of the Fed’s QE schemes was tiny compared to the equity market moves seen in their wake. When everyone is rushing in the same direction thanks to an outside event, things get magnified.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/azq-6KB0zrs/the-facebook-ipo-was-reverse-quantitative-easing-2012-5

Want to get freaked out?

Watch the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein on Up with Chris Hayes this morning, wherein he explains how the next debt ceiling fight (that will happen next spring, most likely) make the last one look like cakewalk, since it will be happening in the context of the fiscal tightening (assuming that doesn’t get fixed).

The situation could be another Lehman moment that fundamentally rejiggers the way markets view America.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/nClixeuwBgs/ezra-klein-on-the-debt-ceiling-a-lehman-moment-2012-5

Pakistan has blocked Twitter because someone holding a drawing competition might run images of the Prophet Mohammed on the site, a no-no in the Islamic faith. Facebook apparently has agreed to take down the offending images while Twitter has not, according to a Packistani official quoted by the Associated Press. From the AP story:

[Mohammad Yaseen, chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication’s Authority] said Facebook agreed to address Pakistan’s concerns about the competition, but officials have failed to get Twitter to do the same.

“We have been negotiating with them until last night, but they did not agree to remove the stuff, so we had to block it,” said Yaseen.

Instructions to block the site came from Pakistan’s Ministry of Information Technology, said Yaseen.

Such culture clashes are not uncommon on the web or even as people use the web to share their ideas. While it may seem like a violation of someone’s freedom of expression to remove offensive images from a Twitter account, other countries have laws that might be construed the same way. Several web sites including Yahoo have run afoul of laws in France (and in other European countries) that prohibit denying the Holocaust. Meanwhile, here in the U.S. Facebook regularly has to deal with culture clashes caused by the different values of its users.

The challenge is our morals are running into each other on the web and forcing companies and governments to compromise or get out of Dodge — see Google in China or Iran deciding to build its own Internet. Much like the first year of university is an eye-opening mix of new people and cultures that students have to adapt to, the web forces different people and their ideals together. So Pakistan blocking Twitter is kind of like that guy on your dorm floor who rips down the posters by the elevator that he doesn’t like.

The question is, will he grow out of it by the end of the year or will he retreat further into his dislike of whatever was on those posters to begin with? The Internet provides a venue for argument, but it also provides an opportunity for learning and an eventual resolution. It’s up to users, governments and companies to take that opportunity.

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Even if you haven’t heard of LivePerson, chances are you’ve encountered one of its products while browsing online. It’s the company behind many of the pop-up windows offering real-time chat with a representative, as well as other forms of online customer engagement. It’s also a treasure trove of consumer data that LivePerson uses to decide which visitors are worth what type of attention.

Essentially, LivePerson data scientist Vitaly Gordon told me during a recent conversation, the goal of LivePerson is to provide the same experience as shopping in a brick-and-mortar store — only better. Better for consumers, and better for the store. That means knowing who’s just there to browse, who’s there to buy and who might need a little nudge in order to pull the trigger on a purchase. And that means analyzing a lot of data.

LivePerson has approximately 9,000 customers and, Gordon said, their combined traffic is “roughly the traffic of Facebook.” LivePerson monitors much of that traffic to flavor its secret sauce — real-time models that help it decide what type of service a visitor actually receives. If a site is using the full spectrum of LivePerson services, options range from price reductions to live chat to live video. All told, Gordon said, LivePerson adds about 2 terabytes a day to its Hadoop cluster that helps build those models.

Because LivePerson gets paid for incremental sales (i.e., sales that wouldn’t have happened if not for its intervention), Gordon said one critical model determines who’s likely to buy regardless of whether they’re approached for a chat. But that’s only part of the story, because LivePerson also has to best utilize its customers’ resources, especially when there are potentially hundreds or thousands of consumers on a site at a time. If LivePerson’s models determines someone doesn’t need a personal experience, perhaps it will just offer them a slight discount on what they’re looking for. If it’s a big fish, perhaps an uber-personal, but resource-intensive, video chat is in order.

The models rank visitors on a scale from zero to 100 for every interaction the site might offer, Gordon said, and the right interaction might change by the second “because of something you did, or [because] time just passes by,” Gordon said. For example, if someone has stuff in his shopping cart, fills out his shipping information but then returns to the homepage, that’s a sign he’s probably leaving the site. LivePerson will try to reach him before he leaves, Gordon said, but even if it can’t, the site still might be able to personalize an experience if that shopper returns.

And you didn’t think all the text from those chat transcripts was going to waste, did you? LivePerson also has products for analyzing chat transcripts and doing sentiment analysis, even a dashboard for giving customers real-time information on what consumers are talking about and how they’re feeling, Gordon said. This can inform representatives’ decisions on how to respond, or maybe even help them determine that someone isn’t ready to buy and move onto someone else.

On average, he said, LivePerson ends up increasing retail customers’ incremental revenues by 20 percent by increasing the number of sales and the amount per sale. But it’s always looking to improve, which is why it bought Israel-based predictive analytics specialist Amadesa on Wednesday. At LivePerson’s volume — its customers do billions of dollars a month in transactions — Gordon said “even a 1 percent improvement in our modeling is a big deal.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user alexsalo images.

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Another day, another example of a country making it harder for its people to use the web and some of its most effective channels of communication. There are reports coming in from Pakistan that it has become the latest country to ban the use of Twitter.

According to the blog Dawn, the chairman of Pakistan’s telecommunications authority has today imposed the restriction because of blasphemous content: it reports that Chairman Mohammad Yaseen blocked the site today “because Twitter refused to remove material related to a competition on Facebook to post images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.” Facebook, apparently, has complied with the request, says the blog. Others are now starting to report the same, and below the break we have a screenshot of how accessing the site looks from one of our readers in Lahore who says he “cannot access the site at all.”

Getting blocked in Pakistan is particularly ironic because the two, paired up, played a major role in one of the most important news events to be broken in recent history: the raid and demise of Osama bin Laden, which was tweeted by at least two people watching the raids as they happened in the mountains of the country.

This is a developing (and slightly confusing) story: just yesterday, about 12 hours ago, Senator Rehman Malik, of Pakistan’s People Party, tweeted that nothing was getting blocked: “Dear all, I assure u that Twitter and FB will continue in our country and it will not be blocked. Pl do not believe in rumors,” he wrote. We have contacted Twitter and Facebook for their responses to this story.

Update: more details coming in from Pakistan’s Express Tribune: The request to block the site was made by the Ministry of Information and Technology, it says, citing a drawing competition. The ministry, apparently, made several requests to Twitter, which responded that it “cannot stop any individual doing anything of this nature on the website.”

Directives to block the site were sent to ISPs in several parts of the country, including PTCL Broadband and Wi-Tribe. It also reports that Twitter is still accessible by mobile using secure browsers like Opera, as well as proxies and VPNs like Vtunnel. [original report continues]

This is not the first time that Twitter has been blocked in the country: a similar ban took place in 2010 for the same reason. That lasted for two weeks.

The move underscores how susceptible social networks remain to higher powers in government. And Pakistan is not the only country to pull something like this.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter  are still officially forbidden in China (although millions use it anyway using VPNs — virtual private networks), with the bans often having strong political overtones around people expressing contary opinions. Developing countries with big populations represent some of the biggest potential growth opportunities for scale-oriented social networks — when they can get used.

Even developed countries like the UK have floated ideas about how to restrict the flow of information on social networks — this was something that came up last summer during the London riots and the role that some believed services like BlackBerry Messenger played in gangs getting organized to loot.

Update 2: One of our awesome readers in Lahore, Waqas Ali, sent us this screenshot:

Ali also played a role in a campaign in the country to keep Facebook from getting banned. He says that he cannot access Twitter at all right now but that a friend is able to use the Opera Mini browser to access the site.

[Image: Farooq on Flickr]

• TWITTER
• FACEBOOK

Twitter allows users to post text updates via SMS, instant messaging, email, Twitter’s website and third party applications. Users have their own profile page that displays their latest updates. In addition, users can become “friends” with one another, or simply be a “follower.” Other than reading another person’s profile page, a user can also receive others’ updates through text messages, RSS or third party applications.

Twitter itself is a free service, though users may have to pay text messaging charges…

Learn more

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original idea for the term…

Learn more

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