Facebook Origins

Mark Zuckerberg founded "The Facebook" in February 2004, while attending Harvard University, with support from Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin. By the end of the month, more than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service. At that time, Zuckerberg was joined by Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes for site promotion and Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. This expansion continued in April of 2004 when it expanded to the rest of Ivy League and a few other schools. The following month, Zuckerberg, McCollum and Moskovitz moved to Palo Alto, California, to continue work on Facebook's development with additional help from Adam D'Angelo and Sean Parker. In September, Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, the owners of the social networking website ConnectU, filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had illegally used source code intended for a website they asked him to build for them. Also at that time, Facebook received approximately $500,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in an angel round. By December, Facebook's user base had exceeded one million.