Video: Mark Zuckerberg's doubts about Facebook in 2005
In June 2005, Facebook didn't even have 1 percent of the 750 million users it has now, and it was still called The Facebook. At the time, 21-year-old Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was much more relaxed, but also noticeably uncertain about the future and his company's role in it.
Last year, filmmakers Derek Franzese and Ray Hafner uploaded a five-minute excerpt from an unreleased Zuckerberg interview shot for their 2008 documentary "Now Entering: A Millennial Generation." The YouTube video (embedded above) is getting attention this weekend after a The Huffington Post underlined it.
"Should I put the beer down?" Zuckerberg asks at the start of the interview. Towards the end, he explains why he doesn't want to turn Facebook, which was exclusively for college students in 2005, into a massive social network (of course, that's exactly what he ends up doing):
I mean, there doesn't necessarily have to be more. You know? I mean, like a lot of people are focused on taking over the world, or doing, like, the biggest thing — getting the most users. And, I mean, I think, like, part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely. There is a level of service that we could provide when we were just at Harvard that we can't provide for all of the colleges, and there's a level of service that we can provide when we're a college network that we wouldn't be able to provide if we went to other types of things. So I mean, like I really just want see everyone focus on college and create like a really cool college directory product that just like very is very relevant for students and like has a lot information that people care about when they're in college. So, I don't know what that is and it's not everything that's on The Facebook now.
Unfortunately, it's not clear when the full interview will be released, if ever. As a side-note, the guy doing a keg stand is Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.
Zuckerberg's goal at the time was to expand to all 2,000 US colleges, not become the world's largest social network. Today, Facebook is used by something like 11 percent of the world's population, which is estimated at 6.94 billion as of July 1, 2011.