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Comments

Re: Moved from the 2nd thread.

[anonymous]

They were not even that great friends! They were in the same class at Harvard and Eduardo had a reputation of being a rich Brazilian guy, so Mark told Eduardo all about his idea of facebook, and Eduardo decided to invest.

This makes no sense to me. Everyone was doing a website at Harvard back then. And Facebook's concept was never and has never been particularly innovative. And while Zuckerberg had a rep as genius programmer, he hadn't had a rep for coming up with unique and winning innovations. Writing code and having a winning concept are totally separate abilities.

Basically what I am not getting from your argument is why Saverin out of all the crackpot concepts to invest would have chosen Mark's and why Mark, if he was so convinced of the brilliance of his idea (and he must have been if he thought it was worth pissing off the Winklevii by intentionally delaying them), chose Saverin instead of trying for a way to pony up the money all by himself instead of becoming partners with that random rich dude.

The Occam's Razor to this question is that it happened because they must have trusted each other some degree. Must have known each other beyond being in the same classes.

But Zuckerberg will probably deny on his deathbed ever being friends with Saverin. Because that what makes him a shitty person above all. He didn't screw with a partner, he screwed with a friend. And I actually believe that Saverin as well played down the friendship aspect to Mezrich. It makes him look like a trusting fool, makes him less of a shrewd investor (which is still the basis for his entire professional life, his entire rep hangs on him investing in Facebook because it was a great idea and not a favor for a friend) and he was probably not in the mood to look fondly back at that part of his relationship with Zuckerberg anyway.

INO I am unhealthily overthinking this.

Re: Moved from the 2nd thread.

[lynnmathews]

But $19K is not that much money to invest in a start up company, so the money itself doesn't necessarily indicate that they were anything more than casual acquaintances. Eduardo didn't even need to believe that fb was going to be great to invest that much -- just that it had some potential. It could have been him humoring a friend, or it could have been him staking a claim in the company in case it did end up doing well. He probably had other investments in other companies; as long as a few of them did pretty well, he was probably going to make his money back, and if one of them made it big, he'd get a return.

A guy who can make $300K "watching the weather channel" or however the movie phrased it can afford to invest more than $19K. It's not too hard to argue that if he'd really believed fb was going to be successful, he would have invested more -- I mean, their 'angel investment' is only $500K. The very fact that they had to get that money elsewhere shows that Eduardo wasn't just forking over cash whenever Mark asked for it.

Not that I have any clue (or indeed inclination to know) whether they were actually friends -- just saying that the the fact that Eduardo made the investment actually isn't much evidence one way or another.

Re: Moved from the 2nd thread.

[anonymous]

Saverin wasn't all that wealthy. Fandom usually exaggerates his family money. Economically speaking his family is supposed to be closer to Zuckerberg's social sphere than the Winklevii's. I have no idea how he made the 300k but it was probably a high-risk gamble that paid off rather than comfortably betting 250k to get 300. A one-off for all intents and purposes. Saverin had more money to with as he pleased than Mark but he wasn't an ATM who was able to throw out thousands on crackpot projects.

Re: Moved from the 2nd thread.

[anonymous]

Well, in wikipedia it says:

"Eduardo Saverin was born in São Paulo, Brazil, to a wealthy Brazilian Jewish family, and was raised in Miami, Florida. Eduardo's father was a Brazilian industrialist working in export, clothing, shipping and real estate… While an undergraduate at Harvard, Saverin invested $300,000 of his own money in the oil industry."

And in some other article I found:

"He came from a wealthy family, and while at Harvard, was apparently the kind of guy who went to class in a suit."

I also saw that it says he and Mark Zuckerberg were in a Jewish frat together and that is how they knew each other.

Re: Moved from the 2nd thread.

[lenamiriam]

According to Reallife Mark Eduardo made his money because "apparently insider trading isn't illegal in Brazil."
Here are some other IMS that Real Life Mark sent:
About why Saverin invested in facebook:

Zuckerberg: Eduardo is paying for my servers.
Friend: A sucker born every day.
Zuckerberg: Nah, he thinks it will make money.
Friend: What do you think?
Zuckerberg: Well I don't know business stuff
Zuckerberg: I'm content to make something cool.

One of the reasons why their business partnerships went bad:
Zuckerberg to Saverin:
You developed Joboozle knowing that at some point Facebook would probably want to do something with jobs. This was pretty surprising to us, because you basically made something on the side that will end up competing with Facebook and that's pretty bad by itself. But putting ads up on Facebook to advertise it, especially for free, is just mean.

To Dustin Moskovitz why he cut Saverin out:
I maintain that he fucked himself…He was supposed to set up the company, get funding, and make a business model. He failed at all three…Now that I'm not going back to Harvard I don't need to worry about getting beaten by Brazilian thugs.

(The thing about Brazilian thugs? Saverin gave Mark and others the impression that he was connected to the Brazilian Mafia)

Why and how he's going to cut Saverin out:

Confidant: How are you going to get around Eduardo?

Zuckerberg: I'm going to buy the LLC

Zuckerberg: And then give him less shares in the company that bought it

Confidant: I'm not sure it's worth a potential lawsuit just to redistribute shares. You have nothing to gain.

Zuckerberg: No I do because until I do this I need to run everything by Eduardo. After this I have control

And again why and how:
"Eduardo is refusing to co-operate at all…We basically now need to sign over our intellectual property to a new company and just take the lawsuit…I'm just going to cut him out and then settle with him. And he'll get something I'm sure, but he deserves something…He has to sign stuff for investments and he's lagging and I can't take the lag."

All taken from this site: http://www.readaloo.com/mark-zuckerberg-describes-the-dirty-tricks-th

Re: Moved from the 2nd thread.

[anonymous]

"And Facebook's concept was never and has never been particularly innovative."

It's easy to say that once someone else has already made it, isn't it! ;P If facebook was so easy to come up with, then someone other than Mark could have made it. In fact, many people should have been able to come with it. True he used a bunch of other people's ideas, but why was he the only one to take it a step further and create this giant thing the likes of which no one had imagined before? Eduardo obviously saw that it was a great idea and thought, rightly so, that there was a high chance it would do well.

Why Eduardo out of all the people? Why not Eduardo? It had to be someone right? And he wasn't just some "random rich dude" he was a rich dude in Mark's Harvard class who was a business major. If Eduardo had said no, Mark would have asked someone else he thought was rich and would give a listen. It just happened that Eduardo said yes, because he liked the idea of facebook. I doubt that many others came to Eduardo asking for money for their website ideas, so…

Idk, maybe they WERE friends and decided to… cover it up later on. Guess we'll never really know?

Re: Moved from the 2nd thread.

[anonymous]

On paper FB still looks like the next dot-com bubble, albeit one with a large userbase. I still wouldn't know how to pitch FB beyond those 500 million. Beyond those it doesn't have a unique selling proposition. It certainly has a unique perceived benefit, if it didn't we wouldn't have this discussion, but that's hot air.

I doubt that Saverin invested the money because of hot air.

Re: Moved from the 2nd thread.

[anonymous]

It didn't need to have a unique selling proposition. It was obvious it would do well because it was something that was already doing well, albeit at a smaller scale. Mark just wanted to take a step further. Eduardo probably wasn't concerned with how "unique" the website would be, but rather about how well it would do. And given the Yale facebook websites, etc, were doing so well, he obviously saw that there was a high chance TheFacebook would do even better. So that is probably why Saverin invested. It was obvious that there was a big chance Facebook wouldn't be "hot air." And hey, he was right.

Or this could all be complete crap, and Mark and Wardo were actually great friends and Wardo decided to invest based on his friendship with Mark. IDK.