Mark Zuckerberg was once just a kid in a dorm making Hot Pockets like the rest of us—a part of his life he gave us a peek at Tuesday evening.
He took to Facebook (META) Live to give a tour of his old dorm at Harvard, where he actually built the first iteration of Facebook. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan (who was also his girlfriend back then in college) walked around his former suite in Kirkland House pointing out what’s changed, narrating classic college stories and describing his time building Facebook.
“This is where my desk was, and this is literally where I sat. I had my little laptop here, and this is where I programmed Facebook,” he said, detailing that it took him about two weeks to build the first version.
Later after meeting students currently residing in the dorm and swapping stories with Chan about an awful roommate and squeezing into a twin XL bed, Zuckerberg recounted how the time he spent building Facebook nearly caused him to fail a class. It was an arts course called “Rome of Augustus,” and he hadn’t attended all semester. For the final, you needed to know the significance of the 200 pieces of art discussed throughout the course. But rather than spending the reading period meant for studying for finals memorizing these, Zuckerberg was building Facebook. A few days before the test, he realized he had no information on these works and was screwed, but he thought of something clever and perhaps a little deceiving. Zuckerberg built a tool that showed all the artworks and enabled people to comment on them with the historical significance.
“And then I emailed this out to the class list and was like, ‘Hey guys, I just built a study tool that’s going to help us all study,'” he said. “And within like an hour, it was populated with just like distilled summaries of what was significant about every single one of the photos in the class. So that is how I passed ‘Rome of Augustus.'”
Zuckerberg is currently back at Harvard to give his much-anticipated commencement address on Thursday. He’ll also be receiving his degree, which he never earned after dropping out after his sophomore year to build Facebook. While concluding the video, he said finally getting the degree is very personally meaningful to him.
“But I promise it means even more to my parents, who really wanted me to graduate,” he said. “This might be the thing they’ll be most proud of me for.”
Check out the full video below.
