The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [33]
Dustin and his college buddies, roommates and fellow cofounders Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes, famously decided to move out to Palo Alto that summer, 2004, with the intention of going back to Harvard in the fall. “But by the time the end of June rolled around, it was more like a hundred and fifty thousand users, and we thought, ‘OK, this is actually pretty difficult to do, even without having sixty or eighty hours a week of classes, homework and paid work. We started asking ourselves, ‘Is it really feasible to go back next semester, and build this company, and do school?’ Very quickly, we came to the conclusion, ‘No, we’ll probably fail at both if we try that.’ So Mark and I decided not to go back to Harvard.”
At this point in his story, I asked Dustin: “For so many people in the world, getting into Harvard is pretty much the pinnacle of achievement—the thought is, once you’ve graduated from Harvard, you’re pretty much set for life. So here you are, you’ve achieved that pinnacle, and you have this site which is getting incredible traction within six months, but without knowing for sure back then that you weren’t going to get beaten down. How did you decide to take the risk?”
“First of all,” he said, “Harvard allows you to stop out for an indefinite period of time. So I could go back anytime. My friends might not be there anymore, I might have to start over socially. That was a risk. But it was a pretty small risk compared to the opportunity at the time.
“I called my parents and said, ‘We’ll stop out for a semester and see how it goes.’ And my dad was like, ‘Great! I can’t afford the tuition next semester anyway!’ [Laughing.]
“By the summer, it was a big deal. In terms of consumer Internet sites, it was growing really quickly. We had advertising on the site. It was clear we could make some money off of it. We thought there was a real business there. We also knew, however, that it wasn’t a done deal by any means—there were many other entrants for this winner-take-all prize, which definitely could have beaten us in those years.
“But here’s the thing. We knew we were developing skills. These were plenty marketable skills. People knew who Facebook was. And we could go back to Harvard whenever. It just didn’t feel that risky.”
As we’ve seen in this chapter, people often have a sense that if you leave some stable situation, such as school or a comfortable job, in order to try a more meaningful but less certain pursuit, you’ll end up completely forlorn and destitute if the pursuit doesn’t work out.
That’s almost always an exaggeration. The odds of starting one of the most significant social and business phenomena in history and creating a company with a multibillion-dollar valuation are exceedingly minute. There’s no question in my mind that Dustin, Mark, and the rest of the early Facebook team are geniuses, and incredibly hardworking. But I’m confident that they would concede that there was also a great deal of serendipity in just how massively it paid off for them.
Does that mean your only options are either a tiny chance of striking it massively rich or a big chance of going bust? Not at all. As we’ve been discussing this entire chapter, there’s so much in between. In a blog post entitled “One in a Million,” Seth Godin writes, “The ardent or insane pursuit of a particular [risky] goal is a good idea if the steps you take along the way also prep you for other outcomes, each almost as good (or better). If ... bending the market to your will and shipping on time and doing important and