2004 — The Facebook Seed Round
Investing in Facebook, 2004
Step 1 of 4
It's August 2004. A 20-year-old Harvard dropout named Mark Zuckerberg is raising a small round for "TheFacebook," a social network that only a few hundred thousand college students can even access. You're being pitched as an angel investor.
TheFacebook launched in February 2004 out of a Harvard dorm room and spread campus by campus, but it's still tiny and college-only. "Social networking" already has a cautionary tale: Friendster grew explosively in 2003 before stalling out on technical scaling problems and losing users to newer competitors. Several investors you know have already passed on this pitch for exactly that reason.