The Accidental Billionaires

Remember the Code

Review
As you open your Facebook page and check your news feed and see the changes your friends have made to their photos and status. Does anyone ever thing about the code that is written into that program, the process that formed this site. After reading this book I now do. The pure technicality of getting the news feed to work drawing information from all your friends individual pages. Having watched the film The Social Network I wondered about reading this book. Would it engage me, but I can say it certainly did. Although the book and film are very similar there are some contrasting factors. Sean Parker who was portrayed to have taken illegal substances in the film in the book is portrayed as being 'cleaner than the pope.' Due to a mix of allergies and asthma the book quotes the only drugs he took as being an inhaler and epi pen. The book also puts into contrast the huge work ethic that Zuckerberg had to get Facebook launched. Not just a computer geek but a ruthless CEO of a huge company who would have done anything to keep Facebook achieving including removing Sean Parker after that fateful party. It also shows that the time spent in Silicon Valley was not just the party time shown in the film in fact. It was in fact, the time when most of the code was written for Facebook. The book also names several other websites that the computer geek amongst us may like to research, some successful, some not so.

This book is well written and fast paced and portrays the main character in the Facebook empire in a rounded fashion. Zuckerberg being described as a computer programmer with a sharp wit and sense of humour who was extremely driven.

The book and film are both well worth a look. Both have left me however with two unanswered questions:

Sean Parker good guy or bad?

and

Do the Winklevoss twins have Facebook?

Product Description
Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg - an awkward maths prodigy and a painfully shy computer genius - were never going to fit in at elite, polished Harvard. Yet that all changed when master-hacker Mark crashed the university's entire computer system by creating a rateable database of female students. Narrowly escaping expulsion, the two misfits refocused the site into something less controversial - 'The Facebook' - and watched as it spread like a wildfire across campuses around the country, along with their popularity.

Yet amidst the dizzying levels of cash and glamour, as silicon valley, venture capitalists and reams of girls beckoned, the first cracks in their friendship started to appear, and what began as a simple argument spiralled into an out-and-out war. The great irony is that Facebook succeeded by bringing people together - but its very success tore two best friends apart.