Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…Facebook was all PHP. Yeah. It was all PHP. I just kept asking like, how do I do this? He’s like, just to learn MySQL. After the semester, I learned all this different stuff. I'd been able to build this app from scratch. I thought it was amazing. I didn't know anything about this stuff. Now, I can make my own web app. I applied for YC and, of course, got rejected. A really cool thing happened, because there weren't that many Facebook apps and because I think people were just looking for stuff to write about, a bunch of these small tech publications just wrote about it. Crazy MIT genius figures out a way to put Gmail inside of Facebook. We scanned it to look like Facebook. It barely even worked. It was super crappy but it was really easy to get the press to write about you. You can do a really simple thing that takes a semester even for a total beginner. If it’s creative and unique and people haven't seen it before, you’ll get attention. That was a good experience even though I got rejected That was an error, too, where they were so few web products, where when you did one and you made a new website, it could stand out because there just wasn't a lot of noise. I remember you flood back so many memories there. When I was in college, it’s funny, yours was Fmail, mine was called Hacker Follow and it was Twitter for Hacker News. I want to be able to follow people on Hacker News and have a timeline view of when they updated. My buddy and I built Hacker Follow. Similarly, I learned PHP and MySQL to be able to store the stuff in the database. That's what everybody did then. That's even what Facebook was written in. David, as you mentioned, the web felt like a small place.…

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