David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Or if you’d like a less fabricated version, the David Kirkpatrick book, or there’s a variety of good resources and we would do a much worse job telling that story here than you could get elsewhere. Yes. Much ink has been spilled on that front. But suffice to say, that Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum (the forgotten Facebook founder), Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. A whole bunch of stuff happened, including turning down several acquisition offers along the way. Most notably, a $1 billion acquisition offer by Yahoo in 2006, just when the company was 2 years old, sort of foreshadowing Instagram in years to come. I think Mark has talked about turning down that acquisition being one of the pivotal moments in the history of the company. And that’s the kind of like crisis moment in the bathroom. I think there was a point there where he… I’ll have to check my facts on this and we can do it in followup. But I think this is the one where it was over dinner and he ended up in the bathroom looking at himself in the mirror and having this emotional crisis of “Oh my God, am I actually turning down a billion dollar offer?”…

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