Facebook The Movie: Social Network, Accidental Billionaires, and Fanning Your Business Flame
With the highly anticipated Aaron Zorkin movie about to be released that delves into the creation of Facebook, I thought I’d take the time to give you an in-depth look at not only the movie, but also the background and what the actual creators of Facebook they feel about it. . The film is an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book. The accidental billionairesthe film focuses on the tumultuous early years of Facebook, founded in 2004.
The main plot is as follows: After experiencing heartbreak over being dumped by his girlfriend Erica, Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg decides to create a college version of Hot or Not. Inspired by his technical knowledge, their Harvard classmates, the Winklevoss twins come to him for help in starting what they want to call the “Harvard Connection”. His motivation is basically to create an online community for Harvard students.
Perfecting this idea, Zuckerberg takes his original premise and (in one night over a case of beer) creates “The Facebook,” immediately becoming a huge hit on campus. Enraged at Zuckerberg’s betrayal, his classmates decide to take him to federal court on charges of intellectual property theft. In his quest to create the most popular website on the Internet, Zuckerberg eventually, and some would say inevitably, burns multiple bridges along the way.
So what do the co-founders of Facebook take?
Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moscovitz have gone on record expressing their various disapproving opinions when it comes to the film’s historical accuracy. Moscovitz recently began a fairly frank assessment of the upcoming film by saying that the trailers seemed “much more exciting” than what actually happened during the early days of Facebook.
Zuckerberg, the current CEO of Facebook, chimed in with some negative comments about the film when he took the stage at the D8 conference last month, saying he wished the film hadn’t been made. Moscovitz was not entirely disappointed in the film; however, his more sarcastic comments seemed to drive home the point that the movie is not 100% accurate, at least from his perspective.
“It’s interesting to see my past rewritten in a way that emphasizes things that didn’t matter,” he wrote. For him, the “stuff that didn’t matter” referred to the breach of contract/intellectual property theft lawsuit brought by fellow Harvard students Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss in 2004. Moscovitz called the film a “dramatization of history.” “. Things happened in 2004, but mostly we worked a lot and got stressed about things; the version in the trailer looks much more exciting, so I’m going to choose to remember that we drank ourselves to death and had a lot of sex. with students”.
Well, let me interject that if I were him, that would be exactly how I would choose to remember that period of my life…perhaps because that’s how I remember that same period of my life…without all the money and a much less exciting extracurricular activity. with beauties as a direct result. But I would have had more if he had more money, to buy more beer, of course. But come on, Zuck! You have to boldly reclaim the college mantle of “computer nerd who gets rich and hot girls while still in school” as the hero of all those who are loyal to gaming. world of warcraft and the mandatory weekly viewings of The Lord of the rings trilogy.
Julie O’Dell wrote in her article on Mashable that when it comes to the film’s portrayal of Zuckerberg, Moscovitz is said to be cautiously pessimistic but flattering. “The plot of the book/script blatantly attacks him, but I actually felt a lot of the positive qualities of him come to light in the trailer. At the end of the day, they can’t help but portray him as a driven, forward-thinking genius man.” What is it”.
Moscovitz currently runs Asana, a Silicon Valley startup that has some Facebook and Google heavyweights on staff. When they’re not drinking and partying with female students, they’re building project management software. Sounds like they’re back at Harvard.
Getting real buy-in from The Valley Techies
In Silicon Valley there is a large and growing number who feel that they have lost their identity. Since the two fastest growing companies in the area are Twitter and Facebook, they feel that real technology solutions are not being celebrated. That said, Newsweeks Daniel Lyons echoed that sentiment when he said that one of the challenges in marketing the film was convincing a technologically sophisticated audience that a film about a social networking site, the Internet, and the creation of a new venture could be captivating enough to fill two hours, said Scott Rudin, one of the producers of The social network movie.
He was quoted as saying that “Some people in the tech community were very skeptical about a Facebook movie. They were wondering if it would be a version of ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ but with friend requests.” Interestingly, to overcome that challenge, the studio worked with tech blogs like Masable and organizations like girls in tech to set advance screenings across the country, Rudin said.
Sony Pictures coordinated approximately 350 screenings and a “25-stop blitz” of colleges and universities to build excitement before the film’s national release. “We also showed it to people who would obviously be interested in the topic, entrepreneurship and innovation,” Rudin also said. “We show it in business schools, hedge funds, anyone involved in the financial business.”
Monday night Masable hosted screenings of the film in New York and San Francisco. At the New York event, techies, entrepreneurs and programmers lined up at a midtown Manhattan theater where there was talk of whether a new production about the founders of Twitter or Google would soon follow.
So what about the technologically less godly…like us?
So how will the film work with online sellers like us? My feeling is that it will add fuel to our business flame. My call is that this will serve as what I call a “bridge production.” Which means it’s a movie that will bridge the gap for those on the fringes of the internet and social marketing. Those who have deep-seated but buried entrepreneurial aspirations, but need an exciting motivational boost to breathe new life into their entrepreneurial dreams and take the plunge with both feet.
The social network has the potential to do what top gun did in creating the great influx of naval aviator recruits and as rounders has done to the immense growth of the participants of Texas Hold’em, the World Series of Poker and online games in general. The fact that the co-creators of Facebook believe that it was much more boring in reality than it is portrayed in the movie is pretty petty in my opinion…very close to the facts. Also, the co-founders are billionaires, and to be honest, their perception is pretty skewed in my opinion. It sure was boring for you; You didn’t think you were building a multi-million dollar company overnight over a case of beer with your friends when you were still a teenager. Hell, I wish I had channeled my despair over girl breakups so productively.
As for you and me, let me be honest as we are not complete nerds and we are not pretentious. Come on, you know they’re preaching to the choir! We want what they’re selling because, well, let’s face it; they are selling the american dream and we are nervous, ready to smoke that as their online marketing crack. Of course, maybe it’s just me who loves these things.
