The name Moskovitz might sound familiar to some, particularly since the movie “The Social Network” came out. He is the co-founder of Facebook and the company Asana, and today he was responding some questions.
Earlier today, in an interview with Erick Schonfeld at Disrupt, Moskovitz shared some thoughts on Google+ and discussed the early days at Facebook. Viewers were (not so) surprised to learn that the movie “The Social Network” was greatly exaggerated, and that there was not much partying going on but a lot of programming and sitting down in front of a screen. Guess that’s not so interesting for a Hollywood movie, right?
In Moskovitz words, “Facebook was founded on February 4th, 2004, and around February 5th, we were feeling pretty confident it would be bigger.” The reaction was immediate, and the student body in general embraced the service.” Moskovitz couldn’t get over the surprise after seeing a lot of people using Facebook on their laptops at campus.
The site was only available to students in the beginning, and used them as sort of a private beta, slowly adding more as the capacity of the servers improved. Dustin explained that “the first 12 months were characterized by adding capacity as quickly as possible. As soon as the site was running quicker, people would use it more.” This meant, it was more about having the site running at all times than it being fancy, and making sure the site was quick enough, that users would come back and check on their accounts unlike the MySpace situation, where just registered users weren’t indication of anything because they forgot entirely about the service. Nowadays, people call the early ex-employees of Facebook the “Facebook Mafia”, and they’re starting their own business, like Moskovit has with Asana.
Moskovitz also commented on Google+, and he had some nice things to say about it: “It’s great to see a really well executed product in this space. There have been a lot of competitors, but Google+ is one of the best.” He clarified that he wasn’t a user, and that if he had to improve anything on the service, he’d increase the symmetry of the relationships without necessarily turning the service into a friend-request type of deal, like Facebook is.
And closing, Moskovitz also explained how he felt about the way the Valley has changed since Facebook’s launch: “There’s been a fundamental shift in the culture here”, he said. “There are so many developers. There’s an idolization of entrepreneurship – something which “Mark and I played no small part in creating, There are even some developers who are raising money based on their reputation alone.” It was easy attracting top engineers when Facebook launched, as the competition was smaller.
The complete interview can be seen at TechCrunch.
