6 ms·

Twins’ Facebook Fight Rages On

43 points by donohoe 16y ago

naner 16y ago
http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/business/31twins.html http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/...
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
strlen 16y ago
The fact that this travesty continues (and how it is portrayed in the media) shows what society still thinks of as a proper place for geeks like Zuckerberg[1]: to implement some business guy's vision. The message is loud and clear: "you may be smart, you may go to the same schools as we do, but you are an inferior being." Our skills are thought of as a commodity, that we can implement a site like Craigslist, Amazon or Facebook (in its modern incarnation) in a weekend: it's as if the idea is the hard part. This applies not only to Zuckberg, but also to the employees at Facebook who have been busy working nights and weekends building, scaling out and monetizing the site. Apparently, however, society thinks nothing of a wealth transfer from the workers to the privileged elite (i.e., the twins). I'll be the first to say: even if the allegations are true, fuck these jocks[1]: everybody and their mother had a "social network for X" idea; the idea wasn't unique, turning it into an a product users love was. [1] It's popular to portray Zuck as some PHP script kiddie, but that's not the case. He's written a Winamp plugin in high school, for which Microsoft offered him a $1mm bonus if he signed on as a full time employee (forgoing Harvard). His initial technology choices may be disagreeable, but he's still one of us. [2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10016183-36.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10016183-36.html
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  His initial technology choices may be disagreeable, but he's still one of us. To be completely honest, I have no more affinity for Zuckerberg than I do for the Winklevii. One is new money, one is old money, but they both share a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility.
  - strlen 16y ago
    > One is new money, one is old money, but they both share a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility. Disagree strongly. Old money usually came through parasitic exploitation. New money was earned in fair and honest ways: by building something. We like to talk about how our society it's meritocratic, but extra ordinary wealth earned at a young age is still looked down upon in our society. Witness the hatred of Yuppies and (outside of the Silicon Valley) dislike of startups: you're supposed to join $big_corp and work your way up through the ladder; if you shortcut by getting a high paying job right out of college you're a hated yuppie; if you shortcut by leaving for a startup, you're a traitor and a job hopper. I barely use Facebook: I didn't enjoy high school (I have no desire to learn that the dude who slammed me into a locker just got engaged and is eating a sandwich) and I went to a small university where it's easy to keep in touch with classmates. I find other sites more interesting. Facebook is not just Zuckerberg. It's now a corporation. The only social responsibility of a corporation (thank you Dr. Friedman) is to generate profit for their shareholders: this profit will channel into mutual funds which individuals use to retire, to philanthropic endeavours. The engineering work that goes on at Facebook (they're now endowing research fellowships) will go towards better machine learning algorithms, more efficient data centres, etc... It's almost certain that the work Facebook has put into Hadoop, for example, is helping make protein sequencing an easier task (e.g., HDFS RAID-node means being able to use a smaller replication factor, which means being able to store more data on less physical hardware!). That's the beauty of capitalism. Capitalism is sometimes horribly unfair and inefficient, but it's far better than the other systems (an immigrant from a communist country speaking here...). Would the Winklevii had any interest in building our such a business? Their plan was to use hired help (what they think of you and I) to perhaps build it into a $100mm acquisition target that would rot at Yahoo, Microsoft or Newscorp; their plan wasn't to build a world class technology company.
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      The only social responsibility of a corporation Legally, yes. But that's an ethical black hole if we stop there. My expectations of an institution increase as their resources increase. The greater the resources, the greater my expectations on their social responsibility. I'd rather not simply acquiesce to power just because Milton Friedman (or anyone) considers it a good idea.
- fleaflicker 16y ago
  When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.”
  - strlen 16y ago
    > When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.” Then why didn't they? Oh snap, maybe because they can't code?
    - jrockway 16y ago
      Yeah, but code is the easy part. You can just get a bunch of dudes in India and China to do it for you in one week for $20, right?
      - strlen 16y ago
        Most definitely! If it's easy to use, implies it must be easy to implement. Serious note: I think that it's beautiful that an untrained technical person thinks Amazon or Facebook could be built in a weekend. That's a testimony to the excellence of their respective UI teams. Perhaps if your consumer internet site doesn't look like it could be built in a weekend, it's too complex to use.
        jrockway 16y ago
        I always thought it was more from taking too high-level a view. Amazon is a site where you click a picture of a thing, and they send it to you for a fee. Facebook is a site where you can see a list of your friends and send them messages. Simple! Except that in real life, there are a few more details to work out.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
- alexgartrell 16y ago
  Fuck these jocks So maybe I'm being a little oversensitive here, but attitudes like this toward athletes are total bullshit. I'm going to go out on an egotistical limb here and say that I'm a pretty fucking competent coder, but before I was I was a pretty decent Football player. Don't make this an "us vs. them" thing, because that's a false dichotomy if I've ever heard one.
  - strlen 16y ago
    No, you're not oversensitive here. I am. I regret putting that comment in. It's a visceral, emotional gut reaction. Nonetheless, I'll leave it there: editing it out would be Orwellian. However, there's an interesting point: they spent their time perfecting their rowing skills to an olympic level, that's where their passion lays. It's difficult to be an olympic rower and a top notch hacker at the same time: it's one thing to dabble in both, it's another to master one. I work out for at least an hour 5-6 days a week, but I'm not an athlete. The hours I have to spend to become proficient at programming don't leave time for equal amount of hours (10,000 according to Gladwell) to be spent on sport. Winklevii made their choices, Zuck made his.
    - fingerprinter 16y ago
      Going on a HUGE side tangent here b/c working out, fitness and overall health is a huge passion of mine... people don't know how to workout....and people don't know what an 'athlete' does when they workout. I've been around professional and collegiate athletes for quite some time and I think most people would be amazed to see how little they actually workout. The basic thought the past 20 years was 'more is better' when it comes to the body; more working out is better than less working out. What we are learning and something good trainers and athletes have known for some time is that the amount of working out takes a huge backseat to doing the right kind of working out at the right intensity level. It is more mythos created by the sports industry when we hear that someone is 'in the gym' 10 hours a day. This might be accurate, but the time they are actually working out is minimal (or, rather, it should be if they value their asset aka body). Now, to someone like you working out 5-6 days a week for (guessing) an hour...I guarantee that if I changed your routine and intensity levels you would become an athlete you never dreamed you could be. I could probably do it in literally half the time as well. I'll leave you with this...which do you think is more effective as a workout: 60 minutes on the treadmill or elliptical or 10 minutes of sprinting intervals @ 75 max effort? Did you know you can get one of the best and hardest workouts of your life if you just did 5 minutes of Tabata style kettlebell swings (20 seconds swings, 10 sec break for 5 minutes)? Knowing the body and being able to hack the body are so foreign to most folks they literally have no idea what it means to workout like an athlete.
- anmol 16y ago
  And then there are media articles like the Independent[1], which compares the Winklevoss twins the to Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Oprah Winfrey, and suggest they're modern American heroes. This whole saga is an media circus. They already made $140MM (current value of previous settlement in escrow), fu money for anyone. 80% of that $140MM (post lawyer fees) is straight up $$, without payouts to VCs, seed investors, or employee options. If they are serious about being entrepreneurial, maybe they could start an angel fund with $20MM? [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/is-there-anything-the-winklevoss-twins-cant-do-1915005.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/is-there-anyth... [2] They are probably making more straight up $$ than the Mint or Heroku founders. Who deserves it more?
- geebee 16y ago
  I think a big part of the problem is that the general public doesn't really understand how good software is written. It's a confusing issue, of course, and there's hardly any agreement among developers either. But the notion of a clean separation between "idea" and "execution" seems less prevalent among people who actually write the code. In my experience, the idea and execution are almost indistinguishable by the time a meaningful program has been created. Certain types of app development, I think, are a creative act more akin to writing a book than developing a very specific, patentable technology. Sorry to torture an analogy, but this has helped shape my thinking lately... imagine two writers are at a dinner party, and one tells the other "hey, I've been writing a book about Beowulf - except this time, I'm telling the story from the point of view of the beast." The other writer thinks it's a cool idea, and (unbeknownst to writer #1) goes off and codes (er, writes) it up. Clearly, writer #2 has done a crappy thing, but would you call it theft? The reason I like thinking of it this way is that the idea was worth something, but really just as a starting point. The two books produced by the two writers will be dramatically different, even starting from this identical premise. Furthermore, I think that the creative process of actually taking a one sentence idea and turning it into a 300+ page novel will produce an outcome that removes the separation of idea and execution - they will be two different products, two related but ultimately different ideas. Unless someone went through another writer's book or screenplay and paraphrased sentence by sentence, or perhaps deconstructed the plot to an extreme level of detail and rewrote it changing names and locations only, I'd be disinclined to give much credence to a claim "he stole my idea for a novel", mainly because I'm not sure an idea, in a general sense, is worth all that much, and by the time it has been turned into an actual novel, it will always have been transformed into something different. Of course, I don't really know the truth about what happened between the winklevosses and zuckerberg, and of course the movie is an entertaining work of fiction and should be treat "stole". He evidenty used none of the code. Did he go through screen by screen and implement all the mock-ups? If so, that would seem like theft to me. Or did he just run with a very general idea and produce something ultimately very different from what anyone else would have produced - different because two creative types will always produce different products, and better because zuck is far more creative than the winks, and capable of executing on his vision as well. Ultimately, I suspect that the winks got the best outcome they could possibly have hoped for. Hard to believe their "social network idea" would have been worth $65 million. These ideas were a dime a dozen.
kylelibra 16y ago
This is getting to the point of embarrassing. It is time to give it a rest.
narrator 16y ago
Moral of the story folks. Be very careful about people you go into business with. If you smell a hint of "douche" or especially narcissism, just walk away.
bl4k 16y ago
It seems you can't be successful, especially in tech/web, without a dozen people hanging onto your coattails claiming that you stole the idea or that you were lucky. MySpace were written off as lucky spammers, Zuck a theif, Bill Gates stole MS-DOS, etc. etc.
- pyre 16y ago
  Bill Gates stole MS-DOS? So far as I know, he bought DOS to license to IBM. There's a difference between being a skillful hacker and being a shrewd businessman. Claiming that someone isn't a skillful hacker doesn't mean they are completely without brains/skills/etc. MySpace were 'lucky' in that people latched on to their horrible interface because it had features that they wanted (to put music, videos, media on their 'homepage'). People could have easily rejected the interface despite yearning for the features. Zuckerberg isn't necessarily a thief, but he certainly should have covered his ass a lot better with contracts and such. Though, with the amount of money that's on the line, there would be people coming out of the woodwork no matter how airtight of a contract they had. > It seems you can't be successful, especially in tech/web, It's the "I thought of that too, so where's my money" syndrome. "I thought of The Clapper first! I should be the one making money!"
  - bl4k 16y ago
    I didn't say I agree with it - I said that is what you hear a lot of. Zuck and Bill deserve absolute credit for their successes.
  - Luc 16y ago
    Better yet, Bill Gates was a great hacker too, having written portions of Basic for several CPUs. I like how he shows up to comment on this pagetable post - I would like to believe it's really him, anyway, still with geeky interests... http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43 http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43
- p_nathan 16y ago
  Bill Gates is, in my mind, a phenomenal businessman who also evidently was a pretty hotshot coder before MS got rolling. I see Gate's/Microsoft's genius as being able to bring a usable computer into every household. Of course there are other factors, but, man, it's impressive what Microsoft helped bring about. Think of it! We live in a SF world today, and Microsoft, for all their flaws, helped it come to pass.
smokey221 16y ago
If Zuckerberg was a more likable guy like Leo Laporte or Kevin Rose I'd feel sympathy for him. The Winklewosses might be tools but Zuckerberg is hardly more sympathetic.
- younata 16y ago
  Never met Zuck, but, I have far more respect for him than I do for the Winklewosses.
blantonl 16y ago
It is pretty clear what is driving this - attorney's fees. The attorneys can conjure up all kinds of (remote) scenarios for additional, potential, settlements now that they had the taste of the previous settlement.
- edanm 16y ago
  Their original attorneys were fired, not paid, and had to go to court to force the Winkelvosses to pay them their attorney fees. The Winkelvosses withheld the money due to their claims of their lawyer's incompetence.
snprbob86 16y ago
Now that I'm working on a proper startup -- raising money, building a product, hiring a team, making deals, acquiring customers... I feel a renewed deep respect for people who actually make things. No amount of hearing "the idea isn't as important as the execution", no amount of startup culture indoctrination can really prepare you for doing it yourself. Building something that people want is just so much harder than anyone could possibly imagine until they try it. I don't think any typical judge could possibly understand. If they did, a case about "he stole the idea" would be instantly thrown out with prejudice. The idea is so unbelievably inconsequential in the scope of skill, determination, and heart needed to succeed. Even if Zuck mislead these guys into thinking he was building this exact product for them and on their time, I don't think they are entitled to anything. Even if the Harvard Connection was the most popular social network and Zuckerberg was hired as a 10th engineer and left and build Facebook to compete. I don't think they'd be entitled to a dime. Love him or hate him, Zuckerberg built an incredible business with a stellar team in a remarkably short time period. Luck was involved, but this was no accident.
edanm 16y ago
It still amazes me how different my perception is on starting successful businesses, versus most other people. I mean, there's the whole "the idea is not the important part" slogan, which is true to at least some degree, which seems completely lost on the twins. And take this quote: When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.” Seriously, have you ever heard anyone who would say that they could absolutely succeed with any startup? The optimistic chances of success for any startup aren't huge, what makes them think they would absolutely succeed? Moreover, they're not talking about the kind of success that YC is happy with, or even the kind of success that VCs are happy with. They're talking about the kind of success of a once-in-a-decade company. Lastly, I've worked on my own startup for almost the past year. It's been a year of attempts, false starts, "pivots", eventually throwing out some ideas altogether and starting from new. From what I understand, after the Winkelvoss twins approached Zuck, less than 2 months passed before he went and released Facebook. 2 months, to me, seems like such a tiny, inconsequential amount of time when you're talking about starting a startup. Any way you look at it, from the facts as I understand them, this just seems like 3 people who have no idea what they're talking about, trying to squeeze money out of someone successful just because they can.

43 points by donohoe 16y ago

naner 16y ago

http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/business/31twins.html http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/...

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

strlen 16y ago

The fact that this travesty continues (and how it is portrayed in the media) shows what society still thinks of as a proper place for geeks like Zuckerberg[1]: to implement some business guy's vision. The message is loud and clear: "you may be smart, you may go to the same schools as we do, but you are an inferior being." Our skills are thought of as a commodity, that we can implement a site like Craigslist, Amazon or Facebook (in its modern incarnation) in a weekend: it's as if the idea is the hard part. This applies not only to Zuckberg, but also to the employees at Facebook who have been busy working nights and weekends building, scaling out and monetizing the site. Apparently, however, society thinks nothing of a wealth transfer from the workers to the privileged elite (i.e., the twins). I'll be the first to say: even if the allegations are true, fuck these jocks[1]: everybody and their mother had a "social network for X" idea; the idea wasn't unique, turning it into an a product users love was. [1] It's popular to portray Zuck as some PHP script kiddie, but that's not the case. He's written a Winamp plugin in high school, for which Microsoft offered him a $1mm bonus if he signed on as a full time employee (forgoing Harvard). His initial technology choices may be disagreeable, but he's still one of us. [2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10016183-36.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10016183-36.html

michaelchisari 16y ago
His initial technology choices may be disagreeable, but he's still one of us. To be completely honest, I have no more affinity for Zuckerberg than I do for the Winklevii. One is new money, one is old money, but they both share a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility.
- strlen 16y ago
  > One is new money, one is old money, but they both share a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility. Disagree strongly. Old money usually came through parasitic exploitation. New money was earned in fair and honest ways: by building something. We like to talk about how our society it's meritocratic, but extra ordinary wealth earned at a young age is still looked down upon in our society. Witness the hatred of Yuppies and (outside of the Silicon Valley) dislike of startups: you're supposed to join $big_corp and work your way up through the ladder; if you shortcut by getting a high paying job right out of college you're a hated yuppie; if you shortcut by leaving for a startup, you're a traitor and a job hopper. I barely use Facebook: I didn't enjoy high school (I have no desire to learn that the dude who slammed me into a locker just got engaged and is eating a sandwich) and I went to a small university where it's easy to keep in touch with classmates. I find other sites more interesting. Facebook is not just Zuckerberg. It's now a corporation. The only social responsibility of a corporation (thank you Dr. Friedman) is to generate profit for their shareholders: this profit will channel into mutual funds which individuals use to retire, to philanthropic endeavours. The engineering work that goes on at Facebook (they're now endowing research fellowships) will go towards better machine learning algorithms, more efficient data centres, etc... It's almost certain that the work Facebook has put into Hadoop, for example, is helping make protein sequencing an easier task (e.g., HDFS RAID-node means being able to use a smaller replication factor, which means being able to store more data on less physical hardware!). That's the beauty of capitalism. Capitalism is sometimes horribly unfair and inefficient, but it's far better than the other systems (an immigrant from a communist country speaking here...). Would the Winklevii had any interest in building our such a business? Their plan was to use hired help (what they think of you and I) to perhaps build it into a $100mm acquisition target that would rot at Yahoo, Microsoft or Newscorp; their plan wasn't to build a world class technology company.
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    The only social responsibility of a corporation Legally, yes. But that's an ethical black hole if we stop there. My expectations of an institution increase as their resources increase. The greater the resources, the greater my expectations on their social responsibility. I'd rather not simply acquiesce to power just because Milton Friedman (or anyone) considers it a good idea.
fleaflicker 16y ago
When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.”
- strlen 16y ago
  > When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.” Then why didn't they? Oh snap, maybe because they can't code?
  - jrockway 16y ago
    Yeah, but code is the easy part. You can just get a bunch of dudes in India and China to do it for you in one week for $20, right?
    - strlen 16y ago
      Most definitely! If it's easy to use, implies it must be easy to implement. Serious note: I think that it's beautiful that an untrained technical person thinks Amazon or Facebook could be built in a weekend. That's a testimony to the excellence of their respective UI teams. Perhaps if your consumer internet site doesn't look like it could be built in a weekend, it's too complex to use.
      - jrockway 16y ago
        I always thought it was more from taking too high-level a view. Amazon is a site where you click a picture of a thing, and they send it to you for a fee. Facebook is a site where you can see a list of your friends and send them messages. Simple! Except that in real life, there are a few more details to work out.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
alexgartrell 16y ago
Fuck these jocks So maybe I'm being a little oversensitive here, but attitudes like this toward athletes are total bullshit. I'm going to go out on an egotistical limb here and say that I'm a pretty fucking competent coder, but before I was I was a pretty decent Football player. Don't make this an "us vs. them" thing, because that's a false dichotomy if I've ever heard one.
- strlen 16y ago
  No, you're not oversensitive here. I am. I regret putting that comment in. It's a visceral, emotional gut reaction. Nonetheless, I'll leave it there: editing it out would be Orwellian. However, there's an interesting point: they spent their time perfecting their rowing skills to an olympic level, that's where their passion lays. It's difficult to be an olympic rower and a top notch hacker at the same time: it's one thing to dabble in both, it's another to master one. I work out for at least an hour 5-6 days a week, but I'm not an athlete. The hours I have to spend to become proficient at programming don't leave time for equal amount of hours (10,000 according to Gladwell) to be spent on sport. Winklevii made their choices, Zuck made his.
  - fingerprinter 16y ago
    Going on a HUGE side tangent here b/c working out, fitness and overall health is a huge passion of mine... people don't know how to workout....and people don't know what an 'athlete' does when they workout. I've been around professional and collegiate athletes for quite some time and I think most people would be amazed to see how little they actually workout. The basic thought the past 20 years was 'more is better' when it comes to the body; more working out is better than less working out. What we are learning and something good trainers and athletes have known for some time is that the amount of working out takes a huge backseat to doing the right kind of working out at the right intensity level. It is more mythos created by the sports industry when we hear that someone is 'in the gym' 10 hours a day. This might be accurate, but the time they are actually working out is minimal (or, rather, it should be if they value their asset aka body). Now, to someone like you working out 5-6 days a week for (guessing) an hour...I guarantee that if I changed your routine and intensity levels you would become an athlete you never dreamed you could be. I could probably do it in literally half the time as well. I'll leave you with this...which do you think is more effective as a workout: 60 minutes on the treadmill or elliptical or 10 minutes of sprinting intervals @ 75 max effort? Did you know you can get one of the best and hardest workouts of your life if you just did 5 minutes of Tabata style kettlebell swings (20 seconds swings, 10 sec break for 5 minutes)? Knowing the body and being able to hack the body are so foreign to most folks they literally have no idea what it means to workout like an athlete.
anmol 16y ago
And then there are media articles like the Independent[1], which compares the Winklevoss twins the to Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Oprah Winfrey, and suggest they're modern American heroes. This whole saga is an media circus. They already made $140MM (current value of previous settlement in escrow), fu money for anyone. 80% of that $140MM (post lawyer fees) is straight up $$, without payouts to VCs, seed investors, or employee options. If they are serious about being entrepreneurial, maybe they could start an angel fund with $20MM? [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/is-there-anything-the-winklevoss-twins-cant-do-1915005.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/is-there-anyth... [2] They are probably making more straight up $$ than the Mint or Heroku founders. Who deserves it more?
geebee 16y ago
I think a big part of the problem is that the general public doesn't really understand how good software is written. It's a confusing issue, of course, and there's hardly any agreement among developers either. But the notion of a clean separation between "idea" and "execution" seems less prevalent among people who actually write the code. In my experience, the idea and execution are almost indistinguishable by the time a meaningful program has been created. Certain types of app development, I think, are a creative act more akin to writing a book than developing a very specific, patentable technology. Sorry to torture an analogy, but this has helped shape my thinking lately... imagine two writers are at a dinner party, and one tells the other "hey, I've been writing a book about Beowulf - except this time, I'm telling the story from the point of view of the beast." The other writer thinks it's a cool idea, and (unbeknownst to writer #1) goes off and codes (er, writes) it up. Clearly, writer #2 has done a crappy thing, but would you call it theft? The reason I like thinking of it this way is that the idea was worth something, but really just as a starting point. The two books produced by the two writers will be dramatically different, even starting from this identical premise. Furthermore, I think that the creative process of actually taking a one sentence idea and turning it into a 300+ page novel will produce an outcome that removes the separation of idea and execution - they will be two different products, two related but ultimately different ideas. Unless someone went through another writer's book or screenplay and paraphrased sentence by sentence, or perhaps deconstructed the plot to an extreme level of detail and rewrote it changing names and locations only, I'd be disinclined to give much credence to a claim "he stole my idea for a novel", mainly because I'm not sure an idea, in a general sense, is worth all that much, and by the time it has been turned into an actual novel, it will always have been transformed into something different. Of course, I don't really know the truth about what happened between the winklevosses and zuckerberg, and of course the movie is an entertaining work of fiction and should be treat "stole". He evidenty used none of the code. Did he go through screen by screen and implement all the mock-ups? If so, that would seem like theft to me. Or did he just run with a very general idea and produce something ultimately very different from what anyone else would have produced - different because two creative types will always produce different products, and better because zuck is far more creative than the winks, and capable of executing on his vision as well. Ultimately, I suspect that the winks got the best outcome they could possibly have hoped for. Hard to believe their "social network idea" would have been worth $65 million. These ideas were a dime a dozen.

kylelibra 16y ago

This is getting to the point of embarrassing. It is time to give it a rest.

narrator 16y ago

Moral of the story folks. Be very careful about people you go into business with. If you smell a hint of "douche" or especially narcissism, just walk away.

bl4k 16y ago

It seems you can't be successful, especially in tech/web, without a dozen people hanging onto your coattails claiming that you stole the idea or that you were lucky. MySpace were written off as lucky spammers, Zuck a theif, Bill Gates stole MS-DOS, etc. etc.

pyre 16y ago
Bill Gates stole MS-DOS? So far as I know, he bought DOS to license to IBM. There's a difference between being a skillful hacker and being a shrewd businessman. Claiming that someone isn't a skillful hacker doesn't mean they are completely without brains/skills/etc. MySpace were 'lucky' in that people latched on to their horrible interface because it had features that they wanted (to put music, videos, media on their 'homepage'). People could have easily rejected the interface despite yearning for the features. Zuckerberg isn't necessarily a thief, but he certainly should have covered his ass a lot better with contracts and such. Though, with the amount of money that's on the line, there would be people coming out of the woodwork no matter how airtight of a contract they had. > It seems you can't be successful, especially in tech/web, It's the "I thought of that too, so where's my money" syndrome. "I thought of The Clapper first! I should be the one making money!"
- bl4k 16y ago
  I didn't say I agree with it - I said that is what you hear a lot of. Zuck and Bill deserve absolute credit for their successes.
- Luc 16y ago
  Better yet, Bill Gates was a great hacker too, having written portions of Basic for several CPUs. I like how he shows up to comment on this pagetable post - I would like to believe it's really him, anyway, still with geeky interests... http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43 http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43
p_nathan 16y ago
Bill Gates is, in my mind, a phenomenal businessman who also evidently was a pretty hotshot coder before MS got rolling. I see Gate's/Microsoft's genius as being able to bring a usable computer into every household. Of course there are other factors, but, man, it's impressive what Microsoft helped bring about. Think of it! We live in a SF world today, and Microsoft, for all their flaws, helped it come to pass.

smokey221 16y ago

If Zuckerberg was a more likable guy like Leo Laporte or Kevin Rose I'd feel sympathy for him. The Winklewosses might be tools but Zuckerberg is hardly more sympathetic.

younata 16y ago
Never met Zuck, but, I have far more respect for him than I do for the Winklewosses.

blantonl 16y ago

It is pretty clear what is driving this - attorney's fees. The attorneys can conjure up all kinds of (remote) scenarios for additional, potential, settlements now that they had the taste of the previous settlement.

edanm 16y ago
Their original attorneys were fired, not paid, and had to go to court to force the Winkelvosses to pay them their attorney fees. The Winkelvosses withheld the money due to their claims of their lawyer's incompetence.

snprbob86 16y ago

Now that I'm working on a proper startup -- raising money, building a product, hiring a team, making deals, acquiring customers... I feel a renewed deep respect for people who actually make things. No amount of hearing "the idea isn't as important as the execution", no amount of startup culture indoctrination can really prepare you for doing it yourself. Building something that people want is just so much harder than anyone could possibly imagine until they try it. I don't think any typical judge could possibly understand. If they did, a case about "he stole the idea" would be instantly thrown out with prejudice. The idea is so unbelievably inconsequential in the scope of skill, determination, and heart needed to succeed. Even if Zuck mislead these guys into thinking he was building this exact product for them and on their time, I don't think they are entitled to anything. Even if the Harvard Connection was the most popular social network and Zuckerberg was hired as a 10th engineer and left and build Facebook to compete. I don't think they'd be entitled to a dime. Love him or hate him, Zuckerberg built an incredible business with a stellar team in a remarkably short time period. Luck was involved, but this was no accident.

edanm 16y ago

It still amazes me how different my perception is on starting successful businesses, versus most other people. I mean, there's the whole "the idea is not the important part" slogan, which is true to at least some degree, which seems completely lost on the twins. And take this quote: When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.” Seriously, have you ever heard anyone who would say that they could absolutely succeed with any startup? The optimistic chances of success for any startup aren't huge, what makes them think they would absolutely succeed? Moreover, they're not talking about the kind of success that YC is happy with, or even the kind of success that VCs are happy with. They're talking about the kind of success of a once-in-a-decade company. Lastly, I've worked on my own startup for almost the past year. It's been a year of attempts, false starts, "pivots", eventually throwing out some ideas altogether and starting from new. From what I understand, after the Winkelvoss twins approached Zuck, less than 2 months passed before he went and released Facebook. 2 months, to me, seems like such a tiny, inconsequential amount of time when you're talking about starting a startup. Any way you look at it, from the facts as I understand them, this just seems like 3 people who have no idea what they're talking about, trying to squeeze money out of someone successful just because they can.