Eighteen years ago, five young Harvard students started a small on-campus social experiment called The Facebook. Wanting to create a specialized social media site for Harvard students, Eduardo Luiz Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg worked together to launch Facebook in 2004.
Credit @ Paul Sakuma/AP Photo
Mark Zuckerberg is a computer programmer and the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Facebook (FB), which he founded in 2004 in his dorm room at Harvard University along with Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin. Eduardo Saverin co-founded Facebook along with Mark Zuckerberg back in their Harvard days and put $18,000 into the venture. After Facebook, Eduardo Saverin continued his investment career, making 25 investments in 17 companies so far. Their current equation is disputed, however, he owned 53 million shares of Facebook back in 2012, worth about $2 billion at the time.
Eduardo Saverin has not been in since 2005 when Mark Zuckerberg kicked Saverin out of the company following his diluting stake in Facebook. Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin served as Facebook’s CFO and head of corporate affairs in the company’s early years. Still, he and Zuckerberg parted ways in 2012 due to disputes about Saverin’s founding stock value in Facebook. To relieve Eduardo Saverin of the burden, and to restrict his influence on how Facebook was funded, Mark Zuckerberg reduced Saverin’s share of the company.
By late 2010, Eduardo Saverin had sold at least $250 million of Facebook shares to late-stage investors like Digital Sky Technologies, and through secondary exchanges such as SharesPost. Facebook filed suit against Eduardo Luiz Saverin, alleging that a stock-purchase agreement Saverin signed in October 2005 was void. Saverin later filed suit against a fellow Harvard University student, claiming that Zuckerberg had spent money from Facebook Saverin’s money on personal expenses during the summer.
Dustin Moskovitz has since left Facebook, although some sources say he retains about 3% of the stock. Andrew Mccollum currently acts as Entrepreneur in Residence at New Enterprise Associates and Flybridge Capital Partners.
Eduardo Saverin moved to Singapore, where he now heads up B Capital, a venture capital firm that he founded in 2015. To hear Saverin tell it, he is reconciled with the past as the face of the social media behemoth (and remains one of its biggest individual shareholders, holding 2 percent of the billion-dollar firm). In two interviews, Saverin said that the social media giant is incredibly close to my heart, and shared praise of the leadership of Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.
Back to Zuckerburg, he controls 58% of voting shares on Facebook and has the final say in its algorithms, privacy settings, and community guidelines. Mark Zuckerberg’s shortcomings as CEO are continuing to derail the meta, according to one Harvard expert. Mark Zuckerberg has been mostly responsible for Meta’s meteoric rise to this point, turning the company that he co-founded in 2004 into a technology behemoth that has a $349.41B market capitalization, as of today. The story of Facebook’s first decade is one of unrelenting, ravenous growth, rising from a side project in his college dorm room to a $349.41 billion Facebook.
The social media giant Facebook recently announced plans to more tightly integrate Facebook with the other two apps that it owns, WhatsApp and Instagram. Facebook (FB) has acquired dozens of companies over the years, including Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, WhatsApp for $22 billion in cash and stock in 2014, Oculus VR for $2 billion in 2014, and a host of other companies from artificial intelligence (AI) to identity platforms. The company has so far rebranded itself as Meta, putting its focus on a goal of a fully functional Metaverse. Facebook has come a long way since Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin, and Dustin Moskovitz were undergraduates at Harvard working on a side project at the time called Facebook. Visit at Tech Story for more latest updates.