Sometimes, it’s hard to separate the fact from the fiction when it comes to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. We know that he felt jaded by a former girlfriend and created Facebook in an attempt to prove his worth to her and all of the other Harvard elitists that wouldn’t let him in their exclusive clubs.
No, wait – that’s the plot of The Social Network.
Ok, but we definitely know that early on in the company, he ran a misogynist boy’s club filled with boob-graffiti and drunken cabin escapades involving sexually demeaning activities.
No, wait – that’s just what one former Facebook employee said in a recently published tell-all book. Another ex-Facebook employee actually contradicted the whole frat-boy image of early Facebook.
My point is, it’s nice to find someone with no book to sell or no real motivation for truth-stretching who can talk about the Zuck of Harvard days, before he was a billionaire – before Facebook had nearly a billion users.
Today, that comes in the form of Samyr Laine, Zuckerberg’s freshman roommate at Harvard. Laine is an impressive character in his own right. He’s a triple jumper who’s about to participate in the London Olympics for his parents’ birth country of Haiti. He holds the Harvard records for the triple jump (both indoor and outdoor). And after he gets done competing for medals, he’s going to be a lawyer in New York City.
He recently talked to Bloomberg about many things, one of those things being his time spent at Harvard with Zuck.
Here are some of the interesting tidbits that he drops about the Facebook founder:
- “We had a good time our freshman year in Straus, we played a ton of PlayStation,” he said.
- Zuckerberg was a night owl: “We probably didn’t sleep nearly as much as we should have. None of us slept as little as Mark did, and now you can see why.”
- Zuckerberg was soo godo with computers that Laine and the other two roomies would often challenge him to see how fast he could hack their systems.
- One time, Zuckerberg overslept and missed an entire hour of a computer science exam. It didn’t really phase him, as he still ended up scoring the top score in the class.
Apparently, Laine and Zuckerberg are still friends and keep in touch ever few months.
So, while Zuckerberg is figuring out how to boost mobiel revenues for one of the most talked-about companies on Earth, Samyr Laine will be competing at the highest level in the world. It’s just funny to think that they once were just two guys who played a lot of Playstation.
