The Accidental Billionaires - review

Jack Dikian

February 2011

I usually prefer to read the book before the movie comes out, unfortunately, this time, I saw the movie once or twice before reading the book. I was already familiar with the story line, the characters, and the backdrop the book and the movie is set against – mostly Harvard University. It is no surprise therefore that while reading this book, I would continually look for how the movie diverged from this, the sequence, who said what and when, the events that led up to launching Facebook, and asking myself, which account is closer to the facts.

I was also very interested in The Accidental Billionaires because I was curious, not only about the geneses of Facebook, but also if and how incubated start-ups have changed in the last 10 years. I spend a small number of years working on an Internet idea with colleagues, seeking angel capital, building a system, and struggling with creditors and maintaining a belief in our product. It turns out that the technology has changed, but the origins and development of a start-up to a more far-flung enterprise remain very much the same.

So despite seeing the movie "The Social Network," I sat down with Ben Mezrich's "The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal". Ben Mezrich has a gift for finding high-energy, strange-but-true tales and The Accidental Billionaires is no exception. Mezrich is the Harvard educated author who drew public attention when he chronicled the story of a group of MIT students who finessed a blackjack card counting system and had the kahunas to try it out in the Vegas casinos. Mezrich, also wrote Rigged, Busting Vegas, Ugly Americans, all around a similar themes.

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