History of Facebook

Facebook was founded by former-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (while at Harvard) who ran it as one of his hobby projects with some financial help from Eduardo Saverin. Within months, Facebook and its core idea spread across the dorm rooms of Harvard where it was very well received. Soon enough, it was extended to Stanford and Yale where, like Harvard, it was widely endorsed.

Before he knew it, Mark Zuckerberg was joined by two other fellow Harvard-students – Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes – to help him grow the site to the next level. Only months later when it was officially a national student network phenomenon, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to pursue their dreams and run Facebook full time.

But Zuckerberg needed help to grow his little social networking site that could. He would not stop until The Facebook had been installed on all university campuses in America. In September 2004, they secured venture capital from PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The $500,000 investment was a start, but Zuckerberg and friends had big plans for The Facebook. Seeing the potential value in The Facebook, Jim Breyer and Accel Partners ponied up $12.7 million to assist Zuckerberg in the expansion of his virtual empire.

So by October 2004, Zuckerberg had the money, the manpower, and the institutional backing to go global. Betatesting continued on within the American University population for the next year, and in August 2005, The Facebook dropped the “The” and Facebook.com was registered for $200,000. The network opened up, and within months anyone with a valid institutional email address from over 30,000 organizations across the planet were eligible for membership, including high school students, government employees and the corporate community.