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The part that really hit home for me was the whole Winkelvoss plot-line. I got sucked into web development because of a deep desire to create something that will take off and become a hit - it's the best place to be if you're a modern entrepreneur, and I wanted to be a part of it. It's become an addiction for me, one that I fund by doing contracting work on the side. I don't have the money to pay someone else to do it, and even if I did I'd still build it myself. I've met and been approached by countless Winkelvosses since I've started doing this, and I've always had the same question in my mind: if you want to create something for the web, why the hell don't you figure out how to create it yourself? I started out with ZERO development experience and figured out how to do it - pretty quickly too, in fact. I don't understand how you could stand not being able to act on your ideas yourself if you were truly excited about the prospect of building them out - especially when the barrier of entry to entrepreneurialism has never been lower in the history of business. That the twins believed they should be compensated for having supposedly given Mark the idea for Facebook cuts right at the heart of what bothers me. The Twins were busy training to be Olympic rowers, besides being gorgeous Harvard supermen and screwing God-only-knows-how-many gorgeous women in the process. Mark was busy coding Facebook. Every waking hour. Obsessively. It's true the Twins had great insight about Facebook's (or ConnectU's) potential. But so did I back in 2002. So did every internet generation college-aged computer geek who'd seen Friendster and MySpace and hotornot.com. The point, that I know has (rightfully) been beaten to death on HN, is that it's not about the idea. It's about the blood, sweat, and execution of the idea. If you're only coming up with ideas, you're not throwing your hat into the ring as far as I'm concerned. You're playing with monopoly money. By far the best line in the movie was "If you were the inventors of Facebook, you've had invented Facebook." It was a fist pumping moment for me. |
An alternate quote could easily be "If Zuckerberg had come up with the idea of Facebook on his own, then he would have come up with the idea of Facebook on his own" and the Winkelvosses wouldn't have had even a weak argument to put forth. Zuckerberg's original execution was more along hot or not, correct? And it wasn't until he had input from the Winkelvosses that he solidified something closer to the current Facebook. That's an important contribution. Whether it deserves any legal or financial reward is another story, but you can't just ignore the importance of an idea.
And I am confident in assuming that Zuckerberg also did not come up with his modern mission of Facebook all by himself, for it to be a social, informal version of Google search (for lack of a better description). Without that pivotal idea, Facebook would die or be dead already, just as MySpace has died.
Not everyone can figure out how to code so easily. That's why you have contract work.