The Social Network - Review

My review of The Social Network comes from an IT entrepreneur who went to the cinema with fairly low expectations and came home with a head full of new plans. I watched the film with my wife in Boca Raton yesterday, and bloody hell, what a pleasant surprise.

I’m not becoming a film critic. But this particular film deserves a few words because it captures something I know from life as an entrepreneur: the dedication, conflicts and strange world inside the head of someone who just wants to build something.

This is my experience from October 2010, when Facebook has around 500 million users. When I discuss the people and their roles, it’s how I experience them in the film.

Review of The Social Network: I expected a load of rubbish

When I first heard there’d be a film about Facebook, I thought: Right, Hollywood takes a famous brand, wraps a story around it and invents some intrigue. Add some famous actors, and we’ll sit there yawning.

I barely knew any of the actors, either. The only one I’d heard of was Justin Timberlake. That didn’t improve my expectations. Honestly, I thought it’d probably be a load of crap.

Then I saw there were a couple of positive reviews. I didn’t read them, but it surprised me. Usually, I’m right when I’m sceptical about that sort of thing beforehand. In short, my wife and I ended up at the cinema anyway.

And fuck, what a surprise. The film is simply bloody exciting.

The story is simple. The people make it exciting

The film portrays Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook. Others think the idea was really theirs, and there are conflicts about it. Then there’s his friend Eduardo, involved from the start but eventually pushed out. The man behind Napster arrives, played by Justin Timberlake, followed by the lawyers and lawsuits.

It might sound like a fairly ordinary story. We already know Facebook became huge. The suspense isn’t about whether the project ever amounts to anything. Yet they build incredible tension around the people and what happens between them.

For me as an entrepreneur, one of the best parts is the extreme dedication. How the film’s Zuckerberg wants things. How he works. He’s inside his project while the rest of the world carries on outside.

Geeks and the rest of the world talk past each other

I love geeks, so I don’t mean it negatively when I say the film shows the struggle between the geek and the more ordinary people around him. The quiet, determined technological genius can be hard for the outside world to understand. And the outside world can be just as hard for him to understand.

There’s a wonderful scene at the beginning where he talks to his girlfriend. As I see it, they both want the best but talk completely past each other. She gets angrier and eventually doesn’t want to see him again. He doesn’t really grasp what’s happening and reacts almost with: Yeah, okay, but shall we go and get something to eat, then?

It’s completely absurd, and the dialogue is fantastic. The film captures the enormous gulf that can exist between technical people and people who think differently. You can misunderstand each other so thoroughly even though neither necessarily started with bad intentions.

A brutal environment and a world inside the mind

I also think they’ve portrayed the US venture environment really well: How hard it is, how brutal it can be and how lawsuits become part of everything.

And they’ve captured the work with technology. People sit wearing headphones, coding so intensely you could almost throw atom bombs around them without them noticing. That feels very familiar to me.

I really admire the team behind the film. How the hell do you make something I can watch as an IT entrepreneur and find both professionally interesting and exciting, while my wife also thinks it’s a good film?

A few technical terms come up that I had to translate for her. A VC, for example, a venture capitalist. But that didn’t make the story boring for her. The rest of the cinema seemed gripped too, and I doubt they were all IT entrepreneurs.

There are beautiful images and powerful moods. I particularly noticed the shots of Mark running through Harvard in the rain. The rest of the world is having drinks, doing homework and going about its business. But he’s inside his own head. He gets an idea, rushes off and changes something. That little closed world and complete focus on the project are captured incredibly well.

I came home and had to get going on my own projects

When we got home, I simply couldn’t stop myself starting projects. I had to grab my iPad and start making plans. The film gave me an enormous urge to really get stuck in. I tell my own story as an IT entrepreneur in Iværksætter til jeg dør.

That’s why I think you should see it as an entrepreneur. Perhaps go in with slightly more modest expectations than I risk giving you here, so you can be pleasantly surprised too. There are some overdramatic elements as well. It is a film, after all.

But you can take your wife without her having to fall asleep. Children may not be the obvious audience, but it certainly isn’t only for people who live and breathe IT.

The villain isn’t necessarily the one who contributes least

It actually isn’t particularly about Facebook itself. It could just as easily have been Google or Yahoo. To me, it’s the story of an extremely talented entrepreneur and all the people, conflicts and difficulties around him as he tries to make his project succeed.

One interesting thing is the Napster founder, whom the film portrays as the bad guy. He certainly isn’t easy to like. But as I read the film, Facebook wouldn’t have developed in the same way without him either.

Eduardo, on the other hand, is the good friend you feel sorry for. He brings the first thousand dollars, as the film tells it, and seems like a nice guy. But beyond that money, I also experience him as a dead weight for Zuckerberg. If he’d had his way, I don’t think the film’s Facebook would have become what we see today.

That’s the provocative thought I’m left with: Apparently, it also takes some bastards if you want to go all the way. Like it or not. The film certainly makes it harder to draw a simple equivalence between the nicest person and the one contributing most to the company’s development.

So if you’re an entrepreneur, go and see it. And if you aren’t, I actually think you should see it too. Enjoy.