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Inside the house where Facebook got its start

Inside the house where Facebook got its start

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The Mercury News went to the Palo Alto neighborhood where Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and five others spent a summer building Facebook, to see what it was like for those who knew them then.

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The Social Network House (light)
The Social Network House (light)

Anyone who's seen The Social Network knows that while Facebook may have started at Harvard, it didn't really get going until the summer the team spent in California. More specifically, at a house on La Jennifer Way in Palo Alto, where Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and five others spent a summer building the product, making connections, getting investments, hiring employees, and apparently watching plenty of Tom Cruise movies. The Mercury News recently went to that Palo Alto neighborhood and spoke with people who knew or met the team that summer — Thomas Hamilton, who rented them the house, Erik Schultink, who lived in the house, and others — to get their take on what happened. The resulting story is slightly less Hollywood-friendly than the movie's, with fewer huge parties and a lot less property damage, but nonetheless shows the beginnings of Facebook's transition from fun project to huge business. And, the zip line was real.