Meta is now one of the most valuable companies in the world, and it its story had started from a single dorm room at Harvard.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had taken a tour of his old dorm room at Harvard in 2017 where he’d coded he first version of Facebook. “Back at Harvard, I am outside of my old dorm room, Kirkland House, H 33,” he says, beaming at the camera showing off his old room. “This desk, uh, minus the poster in the background — that is not my poster, and I would not have had a poster that cool — this is where my desk was, and this is literally where I sat and I had my little laptop here,” he adds. The video shows a regular dorm room with a little desk placed against the wall.
“And this is where I programmed Facebook,” he says. “It took me about two weeks to program the code. The first version of this very simple version that I launched in February of 2004. And this is kind of where it happened,” he adds.
Zuckerberg had come up with the idea for Facebook while at Harvard. Once Facebook had taken off, he’d dropped out of Harvard, and focused on building it full-time. Facebook was a massive success, and turned Zuckerberg into one of the world’s youngest billionaires. Now twenty one years after he’d coded the first version, his company has expanded beyond Facebook to include Instagram, WhatsApp, and a large AI division. Meta is worth nearly $2 trillion, and Zuckerberg is currently the third richest person on the planet with a net worth of $264 billion. And it all started at the desk at the H-33 Kirkland House dorm at Harvard.