Watch a 21-Year-Old Zuckerberg Give a Harvard Lecture Shortly After Dropping Out

May 13, 2015

Today, most of us know Mark Zuckerberg as the billionaire founder of Facebook, so it’s always a treat to take a short stroll down memory lane and see how he was during his beginnings.

Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard in 2002 and studied computer science and psychology. In February of 2004, he launched Facebook and dropped out shortly thereafter. In December of 2005, he was invited back as a guest lecturer for CS50, Harvard’s Introduction to Computer Science course.

Wearing nothing but his sweater, baggy jeans and sandals, Zuckerberg talked about building Facebook and the early issues he dealt with. ITWorld outlined some of the more interesting facts, including:

Zuckerberg claims that Facebook, at the time, was already getting 400 million page views per day, compared to 250 million for Google.
Back then, Zuckerberg used to hold “CEO office hours,” where employees would go into his office and ask him questions and/or receive feedback on their work. When I visited the Facebook offices in 2010, he still did something like this, but on a larger scale — the entire company would meet weekly, and Zuckerberg would answer people’s questions on stage.
One student asked about privacy issues, and Zuckerberg said Facebook was thinking about it and that it was a concern for the company. “We care about it, because if people feel like their information isn’t private, then that screws us in the long term, too,” he said.

Interestingly, even though it was a computer science course, most of the questions were about the business side of Facebook rather than the technical. Check out the video above.

Feature image via Adina B. Pomerantz

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