The story:
The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook.

Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends–outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women.

Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance–and sexual success–was getting invited to join one of the university’s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order.

Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university's computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus–and subsequently crashing the university's servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.

What followed–a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers–makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo’s and Mark’s different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart.

The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost–and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.

Ben Mezrich, a Harvard graduate, has published ten books, including the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House. He is a columnist for Boston Common and a contributor for Flush magazine. Ben lives in Boston with his wife, Tonya.


Excerpt from the book:
The fourth kid, standing directly across from Eduardo, had also fenced—at Exeter—but he wasn’t built anything like the tall kid to his left. He was a bit on the gawky side, like Eduardo, though his legs and arms were more proportionate to his slim, not entirely unathletic frame. He was wearing cargo shorts instead of slacks, sandals with no socks. He had a prominent nose, a mop of curly blondish brown hair, and light blue eyes. There was something playful about those eyes—but that was where any sense of natural emotion or readability ended. His narrow face was otherwise devoid of any expression at all. And his posture, his general aura—the way he seemed closed in on himself, even while engaged in a group dynamic, even here, in the safety of his own fraternity—was almost painfully awkward.

His name was Mark Zuckerberg, he was a sophomore, and although Eduardo had spent a fair amount of time at various Epsilon Pi events with him, along with at least one prepunch Phoenix event that Eduardo could remember, he still barely knew the kid. Mark’s reputation, however, definitely preceded him: a computer science major who lived in Eliot House, Mark had grown up in the upper-middle-class town of Dobbs Ferry, New York, the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist. In high school, he’d supposedly been some sort of master hacker— so good at breaking into computer systems that he’d ended up on some random FBI list somewhere, or so the story went. Whether or not that was true, Mark was certainly a computer genius. He had also made a name for himself at Exeter when, after he had honed his coding skills creating a computerized version of the game Risk, he and a buddy had created a software program called Synapse, a plug-in for MP3 players that allowed the players to “learn” a user’s preferences and create tailored playlists based on that information. Mark had posted Synapse as a free download on the Web—and almost immediately, major companies came calling, trying to buy Mark’s creation. Rumor was, Microsoft had offered Mark between one and two million dollars to go work for them—and amazingly, Mark had turned them down.


About the author:
Ben Mezrich (born 1969) is an American author from Princeton, New Jersey. He graduated magna-cum-laude with a degree in Social Studies from Harvard University in 1991. Some of his books have been written under the pseudonym Holden Scott. Mezrich attended Princeton Day School, in Princeton, New Jersey. He is known for his non-fiction books. He currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts












Buchdaten:
Taschenbuch: 272 Seiten
Verlag: Anchor; Auflage: Trade Paperback. (28. September 2010)
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN-10: 0307740986
ISBN-13: 978-0307740984
ISBN: 0307740986
Preis: € 7,90