Sex, Beer, and Coding: Inside Facebook’s Wild Early Days in Palo Alto

When the young Mark Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto in 2004, he and his buddies built a corporate proto-culture that continues to influence the company today.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO appears at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View Calif. for a 2 hour talk with The Facebook Effect, Author David Kirkpatrick and NPR’s Guy Raz. Zuckerberg announced earlier in the day that Facebook surpassed the 500 million active users milestone — Kim Kulish/Corbis via Getty Images

By Adam Fisher

Everyone who has seen The Social Network knows the story of Facebook’s founding. It was at Harvard in the spring semester of 2004. What people tend to forget, however, is that Facebook was only based in Cambridge for a few short months. Back then it was called TheFacebook.com, and it was a college-specific carbon copy of Friendster, a pioneering social network based in Silicon Valley.

Mark Zuckerberg’s knockoff site was a hit on campus, and so he and a few school chums decided to move to Silicon Valley after finals and spend the summer there rolling Facebook out to other colleges, nationwide. The Valley was where the internet action was. Or so they thought.

In Silicon Valley during the mid-aughts the conventional wisdom was that the internet gold rush was largely over. The land had been grabbed. The frontier had been settled. The web had been won. Hell, the boom had gone bust three years earlier. Yet nobody ever bothered to send the memo to Mark Zuckerberg — because at the time…