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CNN 10
Part One of Four Part Series on Facebook
Aired February 20, 2019 - 04:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CARL AZUZ, CNN 10 ANCHOR: Hi, I`m Carl Azuz for CNN 10 and we`ve got something special we`re launching today. It`s a four part series that will
layer through Monday and it`s focus on Facebook. More than a quarter of the entire world`s population is said to log on to Facebook every month and
it`s grown to have 3.2 billion users in just 15 years. In fact, it was 15 years ago this month the social network was launched.
The milestone birthday for the momentous company gives us the chance to discuss it`s huge scale successes and it`s huge scale failures. It`s
founder alone has pledged billions of dollars to charity and been accused of copying the very idea Facebook was built on. As always CNN.com will
have full coverage of breaking and developing world news in the days ahead as we begin our first of four specials on Facebook. We`re starting with a
report on the man behind it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It`s October 19th, 2018 and we are heading to Facebook. This is a really big deal. We`re going to sit down with Mark
Zuckerberg who rarely sits down for interviews. Facebook years are like dog years, a lot happens in a little time. In the months since I first
walked through these doors - -
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Nearly 50 million Facebook users have been targeted by hackers. The largest security breech in Facebook history.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Facebook on the defensive today.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: - - and we`ll get to all that later. But for now, back to Facebook and what you need to know about an interview with Mark
Zuckerberg. It`s (inaudible) cold. First, he likes the room cold, very cold. Turn the cameras around and you`ll see his people on the other side.
They`re taking notes, scribbling furiously, keeping time. They know that the stakes are high these days. The whole world seems to be watching and
that`s Facebook in its current moment.
MARK ZUCKERBERG, FACEBOOK FOUNDER: Thank you for coming - -
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Massively influential - -
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg under fire.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: - - influx - -
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The biggest security breech in the history of Facebook.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: - - and controversial. But to fully understand Facebook of today, you have to go back to the beginning.
MARK ZUCKERBERG: Hi, I`m Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook an online social directory.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That was really good. Just sit on the camera and just give a quirky little smile.
ZUCKERBERG: Quirky little - - thanks.
The early days of Facebook were a very scrappy time. There`ve been some constants through the years here. The mission of the company of connecting
people and bringing people together, that really has informed some of the most important decisions that - - that we`ve made.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You`re going to hear this phrase the mission quite a bit. Mark`s mission is the mahantra at Facebook.
ZUCKERBERG: Our mission has really always been to connect the world.
We`re a mission driven company.
Our mission is to connect everyone in the world. Connect - - connect - - connect - -
We can connect the whole world.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was in the company`s DNA from the beginning.
ZUCKERBERG: And I think the people who have been drawn to this company over the years are people who really care about that.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If you`re an employee, you hear it the moment you walk through the door. You`re almost indoctrinated into it.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He believed in the mission of Facebook to help people share and be more connected and I wanted to follow him. It just felt so
different from anything I`d done before.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mark had this vision that everyone could be connected and that was pretty exciting.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Inside Facebook Headquarters, that message to build out the mission is everywhere. Inspirational quote posters line the walls
with delicate phrases fine tuned to Facebook`s current stay. Some call it almost even like a cult. Is this the cult of Mark Zuckerberg?
(MIKE COFFLINGER): I think a - - a cult or personality is a little bit more kind of a Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Clinton territory.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mike Cofflinger (ph) worked at Facebook for six and a half years.
(COFFLINGER): I think cult of mission is what Facebook is and that is still very much around and that`s why people look to join Facebook.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The mission is clear as is one other thing, to understand Facebook at 15 you have to understand it`s DNA and it`s DNA is
Mark Zuckerberg.
RANDI ZUCKERBERG: After just spending his entire childhood growing up with three sisters he`s like, I just got to connect with other people.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mark`s older sister Randi rarely gives interviews about her brother and Facebook. We were always inventing. We were always
collaborating. We were always, like, looking for any technology we could find and using it to just, you know, create something bigger.
MARK ZUCKERBERG: Yay.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What?
MARK ZUCKERBERG: I got accepted.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you serious?
MARK ZUCKERBERG: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Creating solutions to problems yet to be seen was in the Zuckerberg blood and would eventually morph into the mission when Mark
left home.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are now focusing on one of the newest members of Harvard`s Class of 2006.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Its roots were actually quite trivial and controversial. Mark`s first project at Harvard was Facemash. It was a hot
or not style site he created by hacking pictures of classmates from Harvard`s dormitory ID files.
NICHOLAS CARLSON, BUSINESS INSIDER GLOBAL EDITOR-IN-CHIEF : People could rank, you know, you`d see two pictures of people who are students at
Harvard and vote for which one was more attractive. And then this site then produced the lists of the most attractive people at Harvard ranked.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Business Insider Global Editor-In- Chief Nicholas Carlson.
CARLSON: Obviously very offensive and people got very upset for it and Zuckerberg was hauled in front of the disciplinary board at Harvard and - -
and admonished for this. But at the same time, that project revealed that Zuckerberg completely understood what people wanted to do in social media.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What do you mean?
CARLSON: What I mean is that people - - when they voted they ended up voting on average 44 times. Which means they were addicted to the site.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Programming a platform that played into the best and worst of human impulses, that became familiar later. But in the mean time,
it didn`t take long for Harvard to shutdown the site. Mark actually became a celebrity of sorts on campus.
RANDI ZUCKERBERG: I was like, oh Mark, like, you know, you`ve got to probably put that out there and didn`t really think it through that well.
But, I mean, he always saw a need for something and his gut instinct was always, like, let`s get this out there and then make it perfect.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This idea of creating and breaking in the name of connecting would be a theme that would only amplify a decade later as the
stakes got higher. But 15 years ago at Harvard, it motivated Zuckerberg`s next life changing creation.
HARRY LEWIS, PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE HARVARD: Somewhere along one of these pathways might have been where the idea for Facebook started.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Harry Lewis was Mark`s computer science professor and a dean at Harvard. When Mark and every other student arrived on campus
every Fall, they were handed a Face book.
LEWIS: Literally a book of faces and names and, you know, hometowns basically that`s all it is. There were some computer science students who
were eager to put, you know, the Face book on line. This was not necessarily a simple thing to do and then somebody did it anyway without
our - - without our involvement.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That somebody, Mark Zuckerberg.
RANDI ZUCKERBERG: He walked up to the registrar`s office, can I help you and volunteered as a student to digitize this and they just said, no. And
I think it was almost a little bit of like, well maybe you just don`t get what I mean so let me just go home and do it and show you. I want to meet
that person who said no and give them a hug because if they had, you know, had the business foresight to say yes. None of this would have ever been
created.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: February 4th, 2004, Facebook went live. Within 24 hours an estimated 1,200 students had signed up. Within months, they had
100,000 users, a pretty meteoric rise.
MARK ZUCKERBERG: Who knows where we`re going next?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mark`s mission was born. He was just 19 years old.
MARK ZUCKERBERG: We`re hoping to have many more universities by Fall, hopefully over 100 or 200.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And doing that would require a move to the epicenter of tech, Silicon Valley where Mark found more space, more money and more
controversy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What was the deciding factor for leaving Harvard?
MARK ZUCKERBERG: When I made Facebook.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Summer 2004, Mark and his co-founder Dustin Moskovitz left Cambridge and moved to Palo Alto. At the time, the site was
exploding, a million users and the company had little money in the bank. So the crew was making the Silicon Valley Venture Capital circuit in their
own way.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You hear these famous stories of Zuckerberg and his team going to VC`s in their pajamas and showing up late and being kind of
rude. He was very like, I`m young. Rules are for adults, get to work late. Just do your thing. Code it. Hack it. And over time, they used to
have a sign on the wall which was like move fast and break things and it`s like - - now it says move carefully and don`t break anything.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Now they`re in such a delicate void like - -
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Don`t break things. If you break things, sometimes you break the country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
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