Let's assume the worst case in order to answer your question in the most interesting way - namely that Mark Zuckerberg enabled these lawsuits and that they some

Let's assume the worst case in order to answer your question in the most interesting way - namely that Mark Zuckerberg enabled these lawsuits and that they somehow have merit. Back in 2003, Zuckerberg was very smart, a hacker, ambitious, but most importantly - inexperienced. 1. He was desperate for money to fund the infrastructure his startup required. His lack of experience allowed him to give far too much equity to Paul Ceglia - 50% and to Eduardo Saverin 30% - for their non-technical contributions. Friends and family. Mark Zuckerberg has learned greatly from these errors and from the advice of Sean Parker and is today well known as startup founder who has kept control of his company despite several rounds of VC investments. 2. Regarding the Winkelvoss twins, Mark Zuckerberg was too concerned about their possible competition with his idea, and unnecessarily stalled them with misleading information about his progress on their behalf. Inexperience caused this misconduct. Regarding stealing their idea, his inexperience permitted him to inspect their proprietary source code, even though he wrote TheFaceBook.com from scratch using PHP and so forth. Lesson A: I believe the current lean startup methodology adequately covers the financial errors of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook startup: Obtain the minimal funds to develop your startup from your own savings, friends and family and from angel investors using progressive convincing prototypes such that the least amount of equity is given to early stage investors. Lesson B. Use Non-disclosure agreements when inspecting someone else's proprietary code, and when allowing someone to inspect your code or any other proprietary aspect of your startup.