Book Review: The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich
Stuart Nachbar
July 21, 2009
I read The Accidental Billionaires because I was curious, not only about learning the history of Facebook, but also how college incubated start-ups have changed from one generation, Generation X to the next, called Generation Y or the Millennials. What I learned was that technology may change, but the origins and development of a start-up to a more far-flung enterprise remain very much the same.
When I worked in the Internet world during the late 1990's and early 2000's, I used to go to career services conferences to exhibit Web-based software. A little less than two years in business and I went to my first national conference.
It was in Dallas, boiling hot outside just after Memorial Day weekend. Exhibitors did not have much mobility at this event--we could not even eat lunch with attendees unless we wanted to pay exorbitant hotel/convention center prices--so all you could do was make the most of your time by checking out the competition. I stumbled across a company comprised of four recent Harvard graduates. They had designed Harvard's undergraduate job posting and on-campus recruitment system, and now, Harvard had hooked them up with a small amount of seed capital and was helping them expand their market into other schools.
The founders of this company were in their early twenties, I was in my late thirties. But I was impressed by their confidence. They had gotten some good schools--Boston College was an early client--from the get-go and they had a good design. As the years passed, this company was acquired and merged into another one. The founders moved on and today, updated versions of that software are sold as part of a suite of career development and employment-related products.
The longer I remained in the software business, the more that I realized such start-up situations were not uncommon. However, many of those early start-ups that incubated from a college dorm room, such as Napster, TheGlobe.com and Tripod have either folded or abandoned their original purpose. Tripod, for example, is merely a Web page building site as opposed to an online community it once was.
The latest generation of online communities, including Facebook and MySpace, have the page building features of the earlier generation, and it appears that they have more staying power because they have become more open to adults as well as college students.
But the evolution of social networking sites leaves a history with a big question: which model can become profitable and survive for the long haul? Social networking sites are essentially closed portals. Their owners need to consistently add new applications to keep users interested and inside; advertising and applications licenses are the bread and button for these businesses.
In The Accidental Billionaires, you read about the evolution of Facebook from a deviously conceived "date-rate" site exclusively for Harvard students into a college-focued social networking platform. There were a lot of high-jinx, and quite possibly highjacks, as one storyline for the history of Facebook is based on theft.
You also see what happens when an over-ambitious investor steps in and leads a founder to drop out of Harvard, move to northern California and work for the company full-time, only to lose his stake. In addition, you learn why Harvard might, and might not, be the right place for a student with similar ambitions.
The author, Ben Mezrich, is a Harvard graduate who has written four other books: Rigged, Busting Vegas, Ugly Americans and Bringing Down the House, all around a similar theme as this one: an Ivy League student hits the high-risk business world with aplomb and comes out barely alive.
Bringing Down the House became the basis for a movie, 21, that starred Kevin Spacey as a MIT professor who teaches brilliant math students to count cards and conquer the blackjack tables in Las Vegas. That story had far more drama, and originality, than The Accidental Billionaires, quite possibly because the main characters were not famous.
But here, we read about a famous founder, who became the youngest billionaire in U.S. history and presumably screwed his friends to get to where he is. If the corporate subject of this story had not been Facebook, which has become a global (but still unprofitable) phenomenon, we might not be reading it. There is a lot of resentment, but not much drama, in this short business history.
Stuart Nachbar blogs on education and politics at www.EducatedQuest.com. Read more about his new novel, Defending College Heights, at www.DefendingCollegeHeights.com
When I worked in the Internet world during the late 1990's and early 2000's, I used to go to career services conferences to exhibit Web-based software. A little less than two years in business and I went to my first national conference.
It was in Dallas, boiling hot outside just after Memorial Day weekend. Exhibitors did not have much mobility at this event--we could not even eat lunch with attendees unless we wanted to pay exorbitant hotel/convention center prices--so all you could do was make the most of your time by checking out the competition. I stumbled across a company comprised of four recent Harvard graduates. They had designed Harvard's undergraduate job posting and on-campus recruitment system, and now, Harvard had hooked them up with a small amount of seed capital and was helping them expand their market into other schools.
The founders of this company were in their early twenties, I was in my late thirties. But I was impressed by their confidence. They had gotten some good schools--Boston College was an early client--from the get-go and they had a good design. As the years passed, this company was acquired and merged into another one. The founders moved on and today, updated versions of that software are sold as part of a suite of career development and employment-related products.
The longer I remained in the software business, the more that I realized such start-up situations were not uncommon. However, many of those early start-ups that incubated from a college dorm room, such as Napster, TheGlobe.com and Tripod have either folded or abandoned their original purpose. Tripod, for example, is merely a Web page building site as opposed to an online community it once was.
The latest generation of online communities, including Facebook and MySpace, have the page building features of the earlier generation, and it appears that they have more staying power because they have become more open to adults as well as college students.
But the evolution of social networking sites leaves a history with a big question: which model can become profitable and survive for the long haul? Social networking sites are essentially closed portals. Their owners need to consistently add new applications to keep users interested and inside; advertising and applications licenses are the bread and button for these businesses.
In The Accidental Billionaires, you read about the evolution of Facebook from a deviously conceived "date-rate" site exclusively for Harvard students into a college-focued social networking platform. There were a lot of high-jinx, and quite possibly highjacks, as one storyline for the history of Facebook is based on theft.
You also see what happens when an over-ambitious investor steps in and leads a founder to drop out of Harvard, move to northern California and work for the company full-time, only to lose his stake. In addition, you learn why Harvard might, and might not, be the right place for a student with similar ambitions.
The author, Ben Mezrich, is a Harvard graduate who has written four other books: Rigged, Busting Vegas, Ugly Americans and Bringing Down the House, all around a similar theme as this one: an Ivy League student hits the high-risk business world with aplomb and comes out barely alive.
Bringing Down the House became the basis for a movie, 21, that starred Kevin Spacey as a MIT professor who teaches brilliant math students to count cards and conquer the blackjack tables in Las Vegas. That story had far more drama, and originality, than The Accidental Billionaires, quite possibly because the main characters were not famous.
But here, we read about a famous founder, who became the youngest billionaire in U.S. history and presumably screwed his friends to get to where he is. If the corporate subject of this story had not been Facebook, which has become a global (but still unprofitable) phenomenon, we might not be reading it. There is a lot of resentment, but not much drama, in this short business history.
Stuart Nachbar blogs on education and politics at www.EducatedQuest.com. Read more about his new novel, Defending College Heights, at www.DefendingCollegeHeights.com
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