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Comment by exitloop | Hacker News Reader

I've followed a lot of your posts on HN and Quora and created an account just to ask this question: Why do you think you deserve any credit whatsoever for Facebook's success?

Social networking isn't a unique idea. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg and you both created social networks. Yes, he may have borrowed some ideas from your creation. But the most significant innovations which have driven Facebook's success - newsfeed, platform, open graph, likes - came well afterwards. By your own words though you were ready to sell HouseSYSTEM to Harvard. It's unlikely you would have had the vision to make Facebook what it is today.

I know the movie is dramatized but this quote resonated with me: "Look, a guy who builds a nice chair doesn't owe money to everyone who ever has built a chair, okay? They came to me with an idea, I had a better one."

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Hi.

Unless you think I'm going to hunt you down in the middle of the night, you know me in person but secretly hate me, or you work for Mark, I can't think of any reason why asking me a question would require a new throwaway account.

Your question is leading and based on numerous false assumptions.

I offered to sell Harvard a license. From the beginning I wanted to expand the site to other schools. That's why I spent a ton of time making the photo module on the home page (http://housesystem.thinkcomputer.com) modular: so that users could eventually upload their own photos to the photo album of whatever place they were at. I was inspired by the model of the Daily Jolt, which my cousin at Brown showed me during my sophomore year (2002-2003), but I thought it lacked important features. Your assertion about my lacking vision is therefore incorrect, not to mention a little insulting.

I decided not to keep going with houseSYSTEM because I thought I could come up with a better idea than an integrated network for students. And I did. It's an integrated network for businesses, and as beneficial as houseSYSTEM was to the student population, what I'm working on has far more potential when you think about things on a large scale. That requires a bit of vision, don't you think?

I deserve credit because I worked day and night for months to write code for a product called The Facebook that was part of an integrated environment for students, and every feature I created is available in some form on http://www.facebook.com now, which started as an integrated environment for students with similar or identical integration. It's not about inventing social networking at all, and I've never once claimed that.

But as you argue, maybe that's all just as common as building a chair. Even if Mark had never met me, he was influenced by houseSYSTEM. As Harvard tries to teach you from the minute you get there (because it's common sense), it's proper to acknowledge work that has influenced you (as I have in this post, for example). It's improper to plagiarize or make false claims.

It's true, I never had the vision to make Facebook what it is today because I wholeheartedly disagree that what Facebook is today is a good thing. My Facebook would have been far smaller with fewer users, but far better. That's the vision I still have, but I'll have to call it something else when I get around to it.

You should really let this go. Mark was clearly inspired by you and others, but he did something that you didn't, he made something that people wanted. He out-innovated you. It's all about the execution, your idea is nothing but an idea until people are actually using it.

Release what you're working on and wow us, just don't spend your time posting bitter comments on Hacker News every time Mark Zuckerberg is brought up.

The false dichotomy of idea-versus-execution just doesn't seem to go away. Ideas matter a lot. Regardless, in my opinion, there's a really big difference between innovation and deceitfulness, and being deceitful is not the same as "out-innovating," whatever that means.

If the press did its job by holding people accountable, I wouldn't have to say anything at all, but it generally doesn't.

And I did release what I'm working on (http://www.facecash.com). It's not going very far at the moment because California made it illegal as of July 1, but I'm working on changing the law. Also, you seemed to like it last we spoke, so I'm a bit confused.

It's not the the job of the press to hold people accountable, the law should do that, which I think it has in terms of Facebook.

An idea is something waiting to be executed on. No execution and, in my eyes at least, you can't own that idea because how do you know it's unique to you? Everyone had ideas for a tablet, Microsoft created many that were total failures, it took a visionary like Steve Jobs to create the most useful and popular tablet in the world. See my point?

I do like what you're working on, it just seems that every time Mark Zuckerberg is mentioned, you jump in and mention how wronged you were. Move on and put Facebook behind you, you don't want a reputation like the Winklevosses.

We clearly have different notions of the role of the press, so I don't think that's even worth debating.

On the "put it behind you" argument: I think it's sad, but people talk about Facebook pretty much every minute of every day, and I have no ability to make them stop. I ignore 99.999% of what is said. I certainly don't go looking for it. Yet every now and then the press will write something inexcusably wrong that I cannot ignore and that merits correction because it is part of the public record. I've never heard anyone else with direct knowledge speak up. So even though the events of 2003 and 2004 are well behind me, I'm still involuntarily immersed in their effects, and I value my ability to sleep at night very highly.

(No one seems to ask why TechCrunch is posting a six-year-old video of Mark in the first place. Shouldn't they get over the fact that he started it? It's certainly not news, nor is that fact that his views have changed over time.)

Your statements about idea ownership leave me baffled. This isn't about an idea, it's about a product I actually created and publicized.

I think what might be considered sleazy by Ivy League academia standards (taking ideas without attribution, deliberately misrepresenting things to potential competitors in order to maneuver around them) happens all the time in the business world and would mostly be classified as "hustling" by entrepreneurs. For an idea to have value by itself in the business world, it must have patent protection. Otherwise, it is freely copyable without attribution and most of the value is derived in the execution of it. This is different than academia, which is mostly about the proper attribution of ideas (though universities will patent ideas that they deem commercially valuable). While it's a fair point to argue that since Facebook was started at Harvard, the ethics of academia should have applied at the time, it has long since morphed into something well outside of that where the rules about copying and attribution are different.

I have read a bit of your book. Even if I tend to think that reality must be a lot more balanced. I think that overall you are not making enough tantrum. Let me be clear you should go balistic over this facebook story regarding your role. You owe it not only to you but to all the wannabe developpers out there who will end out on this side of the story more often than not. Programmers tend to think they are in the business of developping software. They are in business, period. And all the tricks, connection pulled , poker face etc ..., are SOP in brick and mortar business. Nothing to blink an eye about. But with web business where idea and execution are so intertwined, you should push capitalism american style to reward you whatever the means (media, judicial system, pick your choice ). It is the action of people like you that determine what is fair and what is not. Random thought: winklevii, done nothing , reward fifty kilo grands. Jack kilby , done everything, reward see an inferior OS lock the market under his watch.

Ironically, FaceCash is the idea that got PayPal it's first round of funding.

Max Levchin and Peter Thiel initially got funded for a mobile payments application. "We hit this idea of, 'Why don't we just store money in the handheld devices?'...what would you rather do, take out $5 and give someone their lunch share, or pull out two Palm Pilots and geek out at the table?" (Max Levchin interview, Founders at Work, by Jessica Livingston). FaceCash, and especially its "Bill Splitting" feature, is the same idea.

PayPal's application was also "something that can store all of your private data on your handheld device. So your credit card information, this and that" (Same interview). FaceCash allows you to do that, too.

Still, it's not the idea. It's the packaging. Paypal's mobile app was created for the Palm Pilot. Yours is for the mobile phone. Facebook and houseSYSTEM may have been borne out of the same idea, but the packaging is very different.

Or maybe I've posted twice total on HN in the past and have never bothered to remember the username/password?

Maybe you should also go after Google+. They are also copying many of features you claim as your own. Larry and Sergey surely owe you just as much attribution.

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