The Mark Zuckerberg of 2016 talks a lot like a politician: He’s taking on Donald Trump! Dreaming of the future of human-computer interaction! Making it … easier to buy flowers? Sure, whatever.
‘Should I Put the Beer Down?’ This Mark Zuckerberg Interview From 2005 Is Super Chill, Bro (Video).
“There doesn’t necessarily have to be more” beyond connecting college students, Zuckerberg predicted.
YouTube / jumboload
This blast-from-the-past video of an interview with the Facebook CEO in 2005 is a good reminder that we all have to start somewhere. This is from the days when Zuck’s company was still called TheFacebook.com, and when it was described as merely “an online directory for colleges.”
(Hat tip to @Semil on Twitter for resurfacing this).
Update: The embed above has been changed to point to the original video.
Both the interviewer and Zuckerberg are drinking beer out of red Solo cups during the interview (“Should I put the beer down?” Zuckerberg asks at the start), and at several points the video cuts away to scenes such as an employee doing a kegstand. But the really interesting meat of the clip is the founder talking about his then-modest goals for Facebook as it expanded to other colleges.
“There doesn’t necessarily have to be more,” Zuckerberg said. “Like, a lot of people are focused on, like, taking over the world, or doing the biggest thing, getting the most users. I think, like, part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely. There’s a level of service that we can provide at Harvard that we can’t provide for all of the colleges. And there’s a level of service 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.”
A decade of expansion into “other types of things” later, Facebook currently has more than one billion daily active users.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
