For Mark Zuckerberg, essentially the most vital creation from his two years at Harvard College wasn’t the precursor to a worldwide social community, however a prank web site that almost acquired him expelled.
The Meta CEO mentioned in a 2017 graduation tackle at his alma mater that the controversial website, Facemash, was “the most important thing I built in my time here” for one easy purpose: it led him to his spouse, Priscilla Chan.
“Without Facemash I wouldn’t have met Priscilla, and she’s the most important person in my life,” Zuckerberg mentioned through the speech.
“Everyone thought I was going to get kicked out,” Zuckerberg recalled in his speech. “My parents came to help me pack. My friends threw me a going-away party.”
It was at this get together, thrown by pals who believed his expulsion was imminent, the place he met Chan, one other Harvard undergraduate. “We met in line for the bathroom in the Pfoho Belltower, and in what must be one of the all time romantic lines, I said: ‘I’m going to get kicked out in three days, so we need to go on a date quickly,’” Zuckerberg mentioned.
Chan, who described her now-husband to The New Yorker as “this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there,” went on the date with him. Zuckerberg didn’t get expelled from Harvard in any case, however he did famously drop out the next 12 months to give attention to constructing Fb.
Whereas the 2010 movie The Social Community portrayed Facemash as a essential stepping stone to the creation of Fb, Zuckerberg himself has downplayed its technical or conceptual significance.
“And, you know, that movie made it seem like Facemash was so important to creating Facebook. It wasn’t,” he mentioned throughout his graduation speech. However he did affirm that the collection of occasions it set in movement—the executive listening to, the “going-away” get together, the road for the lavatory—finally linked him with the mom of his three kids.
Chan, for her half, went on to graduate from Harvard in 2007, taught science, after which attended medical college on the College of California, San Francisco, turning into a pediatrician.
She and Zuckerberg acquired married in 2012, and in 2015, they co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic group targeted on leveraging know-how to deal with main world challenges in well being, training, and science. Chan serves as co-CEO of the initiative, which has pledged to present away 99% of the couple’s shares in Meta Platforms to fund its work.
You possibly can watch the whole thing of Zuckerberg’s Harvard graduation speech beneath:
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a analysis software. An editor verified the accuracy of the knowledge earlier than publishing.
