“Hi, my name is Andrew McCollum. I’m one of the co-founder of the facebook.com and I’m a technology investor.”
“Could you tell us some of the fun moments when you were making Facebook?”
There were lots and lots of fun moments, because it was a group of friends and we’re working the project together. We’re all really excited about it, just having good time, we didn’t really know what was it gonna turn into, so, we’re kind of just trying things out, and trying to figure out how to make it work and how to make it good.
A lot of the fun moments didn’t necessarily have everything to do with Facebook, they were other things happened while doing Facebook. Like one day, we’re all living in a house together in California, and we had a pool in the back of the house, and we decided it would be fun to make a zip-line from our chimney to the telephone pole on the other side of the pool, and so, we all went to Home Depot, a hardware store, and bought all this cables and pulleys and the stuff, we just put it up to a zip-line and we’ve got a big ladder so we could get on top of it, and use the zip-line to go into a pool, but it was not like well-built. It worked pretty well, but it was more fun just making it. But then our landlord came and saw the cable was on the chimney and got very scared that the chimney’s gonna fall over and got really upset that we were doing that.
Two of my favorite stories of Facebook were…, so one of them is right after we moved in to our first office. We had a door to the office where it just had a key to open it, so, the first of us who got there in the morning would unlock the door and we go in, and we leave the door unlocked all day long and the last person to leave would lock the door. That seemed like worked fine with us but as we start hire more people, they cared more about security and safety, and they are like “this is really not good” because, what if someone leaves a company and that could’ve made a copy of the key, then they could get in, or what if people just wondering off the street. We were like, we like it when people wondering off the street, we like talking to them. But they really thought that was not good, so what they did, they replaced the whole lock on the door with one of those magnetic locks where you have keycards you have to tap in to get into the door through the door and the stuff, and they were very happy with this whole system ‘cause they’re like now no one can get into the building that doesn’t have the keycard, if someone leaves, we can deactivate the keycard. But the way those system generally work is you are only supposed to have to use the keycard when you are coming in from the outside, because once you are inside, obviously you’re already in, so they don’t want you to have to use the keycard again when you are going out. But they need a way to open the door when you come out. So usually there’s a motion sensor on the inside the door, and I realized that’s what they’ve done. But because the door was made of glass, they couldn’t have a perfect seal between the door and the wall, two pieces of glass next to each other. There’s a gap. So I realized it. I just walked around the office and found a metal cloth hunger and a piece of paper, and I went outside of the door, and I put a piece of paper on the end of the cloth hunger and I pushed it through the gap of the door, and I just waved it around in front of the motion sensor, and the door just opened right up. So they were so concerned about having this super secure safe system, but then, with the cheapest materials you can imagine, they’re just found on the ground, you could open the door, and so I thought that was a good illustration of people sort of taking themselves little too seriously and treating things like security was so important but really what they were doing was not really making it more secure.
There’s another story that was really similar to that one too, which was that, … when Facebook started to get bigger, we used to have .., …first we would rent computer servers from companies that would allow you, they would do all the management of the web servers, and you would just use them, they’d deal with things making sure everything is running properly, but, as Facebook got bigger, we had to control that ourselves, so you go to what’s called co-location facilities which is a place where you can bring your own computers in and connect them up to power and internet and other sort of connections, but you can essentially manage the servers yourselves. These facilities, they have many companies are together in the same place, which is why it’s called co-location facility. They take security very seriously there, because all of the data of the companies and the users are all stored on these computers. First of all, there are these big buildings in California that are totally, … they don’t have any sign in front of them, supposedly no one knows the location of them, although it’s very obvious which building is a co-location building since they are giant buildings with no signs in the middle of Silicon Vally. I think it would be very easy to find them if you are looking but they try to hide themselves. When you go inside, we were taking a tour, they could show how secure the facility was and they were like OK when you come in, you have to show your identification to a guard, and tell them in verbal password and then go and scan a card and then type in a pin code and then scan your hand print on a hand print scanner, and then the door opens and you go inside and then you go to another terminal where you repeat the same process of scanning the card, pin code, and your hand. The idea is that once you go in the first door, if you enter the incorrect code, they let you in the first door, but when you do it for the second time, they’ll close that door behind you, and they will lock you in between in this room, and then the guys with guns will come around and surround you and you’ll be trapped. They actually call it the “man trap” or whatever. They are showing us this whole thing. We go in the first door, they explained this and that, then go to the second door, and then you are inside the facility, and we walk in, and I look over to my right, and there’s this door just open and there’s like the sunlight is streaming in from the outside, I’m like “Hey, what’s that!?” because we went through the whole this security thing then you can see a parking lot outside right there the guy was just like, you can tell, very taking off-guard just like “ah, … that’s not supposed to be opened,” and it was just funny. It was clear that the all of the security was again sort of like just to impress you, and make you think there’s a very serious attitude about it, but, really there was clearly a breaks in the chain. I thought that were the two funny stories.
“How did you design the first Facebook logo?”
The way I became Facebook’s first designer was a sort of funny story. Mark and Dustin the other guys who we worked on the Facebook together, we were all friends at school, and I spent a lot of time with Mark and Dustin, particularly with Mark and we’d be always talking about different ideas for things we might build, different projects we might work and services for other students and the stuff. Facebook was one of those ideas. Mark in the time between the two semesters of the school, the break between school semesters, Mark wrote the first version of Facebook, he wrote a very early kind of version of the site and it didn’t have any graphics or icons or anything. It was just a functionality. He sent me a message, an instant message, “Hey, Andrew, I built a first prototype of Facebook. You should do all the graphics and icons .” I was like “Well, Mark I am computer science major. I have photoshop and illustrator but I don’t really know what I’m doing. (I pirated them.) I’m not really a graphic designer. He’s like “You know, there’s no one else to do it, so you just have to figure it out and do it.” I was like “OK!” That was sort of a fun challenge because that was something that I’ve done as a hobby just sort of toyed with from time to time, but that was never anything I had really done professionally or felt like I never even let anybody see what I’ve done. At first, I was kind of nervous, and felt like I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I just figured whatever I just do what I can and probably only a few thousands of people at Harvard, or maybe a few hundred of people at Harvard are gonna see this. We didn’t really know that the Facebook’s gonna be so successful. At first, no one’s really gonna ever see this anyway. I worked on it. Me and Mark talked about what we wanted, the kind of the logo of the site to convey. The first version of the logo was this silhouetted face of a person that was dissolving into ones and zeros. It was interesting, the logos have changed over time and I certainly really don’t think that was maybe that had needed to happen that logo wouldn’t fit at all with Facebook today. But, actually for the time we created the site, it encapsulated what we thought was a very important aspect of Facebook which was actually somewhat unique at the time Facebook was created. I think one of the major reasons why Facebook was successful which was that Facebook was one of the first web site that actually try to mirror your real life online. Almost all internet communities before that, you would make a fake name and choose an avator that was not your real picture was some character or something to represent you. You would not necessarily be friends with who you are friends in real life. You would form a new kind of community of people they were all over the world who you didn’t know in person. Maybe you didn’t even know their real names and you didn’t know even whether they were male or female, how old they were. You were creating this entirely new identity. I think that it’s great that there’s place on the internet for you to able to do that and certainly something people were really interested in. But, no one had yet decided to create a site where you really were gonna put your real name on the site and be connected to the real people in your life, have real information about yourself. If I was in a group at my school, then I would be in a group on Facebook to mirror that, and I was to have this very tight connection. The logo in a way represented that because that it was this person being dissolving into the digital identity of the Facebook was creating, and that was what we were trying to illustrate. I think that idea turned out to be powerful because what ended up happening was Facebook ended up becoming this very integral part of your life, because everything you are doing in day to day life suddenly had this representation on Facebook you constantly be having this conversation back and force between the site and your life. At first we expected that to mainly be a one way conversation where people would talk about things on Facebook that it happened or going to happen in real life. It was really surprising to us when we actually realized that was two way conversation where anytime we would be around in airports or coffee shops or just going about our lives, after Facebook started catch on with college students. Anyone who is close to our age, we would hear them these conversations, we didn’t know these people, just hear them, overhear their conversations, they would be like “Oh, did you see that picture that’s so an d so posted on Facebook, or did you see what he said about that. People would be talking about things happened on Facebook in their real lives. That was really surprising to us. Cause we never expected that was going to happen. But once we realized that it was really two way transfer, we really realized that idea of having a real reflection of who you were on the web site was really a kind of powerful idea what made Facebook people to bring into their lives in much more intertwined way than any other online community ever had.
“What are the great things about designing?”
I got interested in computers when I was really young. I started learning about computer programming when I was in the second grade. It was a really early computer, it had DOS on it, Microsoft DOS. Because Microsoft’s very first product they sold was BASIC interpreter for the BASIC programming language.They included a version of BASIC with every copy of DOS and every copy of Windows. The thing about BASIC is that it’s an interpreted language which means that the source code is there for you to read. The program runs from the source code rather than running from a compiled version. They had some example programs you could run. You can also read the source codes from them. We’ve just stumbled on this and started to playing with it. Me and my brother just sort of like try to make things, little games, screen savers, and other little toy programs and the stuff. It was really exciting to me. I became fascinated with this idea you could, with the computer, create an entire world. You could imagine everything and decide exactly how everything gonna work and what other rules were, and you could create the whole thing yourself inside the computer. That was just such a cool idea to me. That’s really fueled my interest and passion in computers. From that on, I thought that what I wanted to do was to make video games. After I finished high school, I started an internet electronic art, which was the largest independent game company. I got to do that for a while, but I think eventually I ended up taking that experience and passion of mine to applying it more to things like facebook websites and other kinds of products not necessarily games. I think it’s the same thing that I’m passionate about doing that, which is the idea that, through design, you can create something new people haven’t really thought of use before, you can really have impact on them. Facebook changed the way people live their lives, changed the ways over the billion people or more live their lives everyday. That’s such a powerful idea, through designing this product, people created strong connection to. I think before Facebook, I did that already but I wouldn’t have really known to call it design. It was something that I was interested in. It was definitely not all my work. It was all of these people working together, in fact, the vast of majority of it was what other people did. I definitely saw how important it was to be thoughtful about what you were trying to create and working to make something that fit into people’s lives. I think that was the element of design that I then recognized and realized was what we were doing which was how you find a way to fit a product together with a person so they can come together. The person can use the product and the product changes because people use it.
Interviewer: Cho Kuwakado
Photographer: Hiroaki Seo
