Business strategy

In 2003, Golderg and Ting were engineering students them away as the three employees turned up for work at the prestigious Columbia University, New York. Gold- so they would not know they were homeless. berg was president of his class and hearing lots of Nonetheless, Campus Network developed a sophis- complaints about lack of community spirit. Over the ticated product, with fully-customisable pages, multi- summer, he designed a social network for his fellow ple designs and backgrounds. Facebook was simpler. engineers. Unlike other existing social networks such The feel of Campus Network was a bit like Dungeon as MySpace and Friendster, this was the first network and Dragons, unlike the clean aesthetics of early which overlaid a virtual community on a real com- Facebook. Ting commented on the logic behind the munity. Mark Zuckerberg would try the same idea at early development of Campus Network: "Why would Harvard the next year. you go to a site that only had poking and a photo [like Three quarters of Columbia's engineering stu- Facebook then] when you can share photos, share dents signed up to the Columbia network over music and share your thoughts on a blog?' Looking the summer. Goldberg improved the network and back though he observed: 'A good website should have relaunched it as CU Community in January 2004, functionalities that 70 or 80% of users want to use. We open to all the University's students. Most Columbia had functions that only 10% wanted - nobody blogged, students signed up within a month. CU Commu- nobody even blogs today.' nity was sophisticated for its time. When Face- Campus Network reached 250,000 users by book launched in February 2004, it only allowed 2005, but at the same point Facebook had reached members fo 'friend' and 'poke' each other. CU one million. Goldberg and Ting decided to wind down Community also allowed blogging, sharing and the network and returned to Columbia as students cross-profile commenting. Goldberg did not worry about in the autumn of 2005. The venture had cost them Facebook: "I saw it was totally different. It had an personally something between $100,000 ($60,000, emphasis on directory functionality, less emphasis (75,000) and $200,000, as well as more than a on sharing. I didn't think there was much compe- year of their lives. Ting reflected in 2012, when an tition. . . . We were the Columbia community, they MBA student at Harvard Business School: 'There were Harvard.' are still moments when you feel a deep sense of Then in March Facebook launched in other elite regret . . .. Could we have succeeded? I think that's American universities such as Yale, Stanford and a really painful question. . . . There are fleeting Columbia. Goldberg, now joined by Wayne Ting, trans- moments like that. But I'm much prouder that we formed CU Community into Campus Network and took a risk and we learned from it.' launched in elite American universities as well. But Facebook outpaced the new Campus Network. By sum- Sources: Slate, 29 September 2010; BBC, 21 December 2010. mer 2004, Facebook had already overtaken Goldberg and Ting's network even at Columbia. Questions Goldberg and Ting now plunged into the competi- tion full-time. They suspended their studies and moved 1 What do you learn from the experience of to Montreal, hiring three other software developers to Goldberg and Ting which could be useful to help them. But resources were tight. Campus Network launching a new enterprise? refused funds from venture capitalists and turned down 2 Are there any unmet needs in your some large advertisers, including MTV. The two entre- community, at college or elsewhere, that could be turned into a business opportunity