David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Hey, let me see who all the people you know are, so that on this new thing that you want to be connected to all the people you know, you’re connected to all the people you know. Oh by the way, we might also invite all the people that you’ve ever contacted. Yup. Sean and his co-founders at Plaxo raise money for Plaxo from venture capitalists. And not just any venture capitalists. The best venture capitalists from Sequoia Capital. All is going well. Paxos going fine. Sir Michael Moritz is on the board of the company. Anyway, after a couple of years, Sean Parker ends up getting kicked out of the company by the board. Now Sean wasn’t exactly the most reliable employee and definitely was quirky, but the result of this is Sean’s everlasting enmity for Sequoia, paranoid distrust of all venture capitalists and company boards. This is going to become very, very, very important here in a sec. Rewind slightly back to the spring of 2004 when the team is still at Harvard. Sean is living in Palo Alto, and one of his housemate’s girlfriends who’s I believe a student at Stanford pulls up the facebook. com on her laptop. It’s like the scene where this happens in The Social Network movie. Sean is like, holy crap, this is it. This is the winning social network. Sean, I believe had actually been an advisor to Friendster as well. He was between Plaxo and Napster. Friendster really believed social networking was going to become a thing. Totally. It is crazy to think about, unless you had a student show you on their computer this is what Facebook is, there’s no real way for you to know other than the signup page.…

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