Brogramming with Zuck at the Facebook Bungalow

In early September 2004, Northwestern University student Ryan Bradley drove to Palo Alto to hang out with Zuckerberg and co. at their brogrammer bungalow to write a profile about them for The Passenger, a magazine his friends had started. Thefacebook was an obvious topic: another college-friend project that was already spreading like a virus across America’s campuses; by then, fewer than 200 colleges had been invited to join.

After a back-and-forth with Dustin Moskovitz, a roommate of Zuckerberg’s at Harvard who had also moved out to Palo Alto, Bradley arrived at the house, during what Moskovitz said would be “the most intense week of Thefacebook’s existence (a reporter’s dream),” an unending hack-a-thon in advance of the new school year. It was a year that the Facebook guys had already decided to skip, forever. There were beer cans and fast food wrappers and the detritus of a party all over, and at the center of the maelstrom there were four young men, plugging away on their laptops. Neither Moscowitz nor Zuckerberg were yet old enough to legally drink. Below's a bit of Bradley’s account. —Alex Pasternack

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Zuck himself was an indication of things to come. A kid who, friends say, gets so absorbed in his little ideas that he forgets to eat or sleep and rarely leaves his slouched, edge-of-seat position in front of his laptop until his little idea is manifested or dropped. Most are dropped, or passed around through his group of friends and never released to the public.

A kid who, in an interview with the Harvard Crimson, said of his little facebook idea: “I do stuff like this all the time. Thefacebook literally took me a week to make.”

A kid who’s too low-key to appear arrogant and arrogant enough to appear genius.

Zuck was quiet, almost nervous in my presence. He joked about how every college publication does at least one story on Thefacebook. How I’m not with Time, but hey, it’s press. How, um guys, do you want to take this picture? How he doesn’t really have time to talk now, or tomorrow, or in the next few days or weeks. How they do get paid a marginal amount, like all software engineers, but couldn’t disclose how much and wouldn’t let me photograph his newest scheme, scribbled on a large whiteboard, standing on end near his table of trash and his laptop. Everything in the bungalow is near a table and trash and a laptop.

I asked them why. What makes them work seven-, eight-hour days for a little cash from the ads on the site? Why don’t they just cash out? Buy an island or something?

“I don’t know,” Moskovitz says, “what kept us going through all this Zuck?”

“Your mom.”

“No, she wasn’t a part of this yet.”

But, really, the bungalow could be filled with bottles of Cristal, not Corona. These kids could be living like rockstars, not hunched and red-eyed and weary. Forget the pay, forget the pool and the cul-de-sac and the mild climate. Why are they still there, working to bring Thefacebook to every damn college kid in the nation?

“I think… well, I mean, everyone on Harvard’s campus knows Zuck by name. I think he’s kind of into that,” Moskovitz says.

Milan Kundera, in his novel Immortality, speaks not of a religious immortality of the soul, but of a different, earthly immortality. A kind everyone can achieve in his or her own life. “Greater immortality,” Kundera writes, “means the memory of a person in the minds of people who never knew him personally.”

And there it is, plainly spelled out on the bottom of our screens—thousands of screens, everyone’s screen—

a Mark Zuckerberg production
Thefacebook © 2005

And when the empty boxes of chicken nuggets, the half-eaten candy bars and the squalor of a pool without lights fades away, what we will remember in 10, 20, 30 years is Thefacebook. And wasn’t that a funny part of college? Wasn’t it silly how much time we spent on it? Wasn’t it strange that I name dropped and networked and cared so much about something so intangible? And maybe, just maybe, we’ll remember Zuck. Not so much the name, really, but the idea of Zuck. A kid, like us, whose little idea took off and took over. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll tell our kids about It.

I left soon after snapping some photos and trying in vain to pry more team members away from their glowing computer screens. Zuck, nervous still, asked that I take a picture that didn’t show any of the beer bottles, as he and Moskovitz are underage. They quickly jumped on the couch and joked around—posing for a mock embrace.

When I was finished the pair returned to their computers. Business as usual. I checked my watch. 10:53 p.m. Still unseasonably warm. Thefacebook guys showed no signs of stopping.

Read the entire fly on the Facebook wall account at Fortune, where Bradley is now an editor, or in the Passenger, where it originally appeared.