When 19-year-olds Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, along with 24-year-old Sean Parker, were evicted from their first Silicon Valley rental in the summer of 2004, they urgently needed to find a new home and a new home. basis for your thriving business.
Facebook co-founders were forced to leave their former Palo Alto site after an incident related to a zip line tied around a chimney leading to the pool, probably impressive; they are probably not authorized in their lease.
With nowhere else to spend their frantic nights launching what would become one of the most successful tech platforms in history, they turned to Judy Fusco, a landlady looking to rent her newly renovated six-bedroom, five-bedroom home. bathrooms in the nearby area of Los Altos. to a responsible tenant.
Fusco’s house, along with the small Palo Alto boys’ party, would become the backdrop to the tradition of the tech world, immortalized in movies like “The Social Network” and alluded to in TV shows like “Silicon Valley “. Inside the house of Fusco, the small startup was launched into a global company that is now a multimillionaire.
But Fusco could have told you.
“[When] I then decided that I would rent the house, I invited a monk to come and bless the house, ”Fusco, now 76, told The Post. “As he walked around the house, he said, ‘Someone who was going to be very rich and famous will come to live here.'”
Now, the house can be rented for $ 10,000 a month, according to The Post. Amenities include solar electricity, hardwood floors and a part of Silicon Valley history.
When Fusco rented the house in late August 2004, its first potential tenants came from Microsoft. The second group would be Zuckerberg and Moskovitz, now 36, and Parker, 41.
Zuckerberg, whose representatives did not respond to The Post’s request for comment on the story, wore black sweater shorts, sandals and his branded hood, Fusco recalled.
“Mark stayed outside and never entered the house, while Sean and Dustin ran up the stairs earlier to see the house,” Fusco recalled. “Mark stayed there and asked the place if they could rent the place, without even looking inside.”
As a first-time landlord, she didn’t think to ask herself the reason for Zuckerberg’s urgency: the zip line would probably have made her think twice about renting the crew. But he told his new tenant he would require the first month’s rent and deposit, for a total of $ 10,000. The now-wrapped tech prodigy wrote him an on-site check.
“I read the check and asked him what he was doing, and he told me about a company called Facebook and how he planned to connect the world,” Fusco said. “I said, ‘I don’t care if you connect the world, if this check doesn’t happen, you won’t move.’
The check ended and Zuckerberg, Moskovitz and Parker settled in two weeks later on September 14, 2004, along with a few unexpected guests.
“There were only six rooms, and the solarium had only ten inmates housed in bunk beds,” Fusco said. “The house exploded with engineers and Facebook employees,” unlike the “hacker house” that appears on HBO’s “Silicon Valley”.
Fusco said Zuckerberg would refer to the kind of tech communities as “Facebook House,” the same title he would give to his book detailing his six-month experience as a sole owner of Facebook.
One of those experiences he remembered was a week before Thanksgiving in 2004, when the technical assistants left the house to go on a ski trip.
“I get a call late at night from Mark, and he panics telling me that they left all the doors unlocked and that the 10 servers were there unattended,” Fusco said. “He told me that if these servers are stolen, the whole business is over because they have no more cash resources.”
Fusco would get in his car and head home about half an hour later to find an empty house with all the lights on, sound music and doors open for any stranger to get into.
“I went in with my gardener and took him with me because I was afraid someone would come into the house. But the first thing I did while my gardener was exploring the area was count the servers. The 10 were still there, thankfully. ”
Fusco also watched a tense moment with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss on the balcony arguing with Zuckerberg. The twins filed a lawsuit in 2004 against Zuckerberg alleging that Zuckerberg had copied his idea and illegally used the source code for the website he hired to create. In February 2008, a settlement agreement valued at $ 65 million was reached.
“I didn’t know who they were at the time,” he said of the culturally known duo as the Winklevii. “But I saw them shouting at Mark on the balcony. They were not happy.
There was the time when Zuckerberg returned from a meeting with venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who was one of Facebook’s former investors, he recalled.
“He was driving that old car at the time – a green Ford SUV – and he died on the highway. So he arrived three hours late at the meeting with Peter Thiel. And Peter saw Mark getting out of a taxi. So “Mark told him what happened and Peter wrote him a $ 50,000 check to buy a new car. So he supported him all the way.”
On October 1, 2005, Facebook expanded to 21 universities in the UK and others around the world.
During his stay at home, Facebook grew internationally and reached more than 6 million users in December 2005.
Despite his commotion, Fusco looks back with charm at the few months he noticed that Zuckerberg’s crew was older. One of her fondest memories was when the Internal Revenue Service located her after Zuckerberg posted her as “employee number 8” on Facebook.
“I called Mark and said, ‘Mark, they think I’m working for you,'” Fusco continued. “He said,” I’m sorry, Judy, we have no idea what we’re doing, I’ll have the accountant call to the IRS and fix it. ” And he did. They fixed it. And the next day they sent me flowers at home ”.
The “Facebook House” team would move in March 2005 after the space was too small for their growing business. But he wasn’t the last to hear from the “boys,” as he still tells them.
“Sean [Parker] he came to me repeatedly asking me to invest, telling me that one day I would be a billionaire if I did, ”admitted Fusco. “I was offered to give me the shares instead of the rent: a dollar per share. I said no.”
“And looking back I always think of the monk who had come to my house. I had no idea what the Facebook brand would be. I had a daughter to go to school, I was afraid to take the risk at the time. But Sean was right. ”
Today Facebook is estimated to be worth $ 280 billion.
“I guess I didn’t have to be a billionaire,” Fusco said. “That wasn’t my destiny.”