The lesser-known member of Facebook's original team is ready for the spotlight
Andrew McCollum, part of Facebook's founding team, seen outside the office of his current company Philo in Boston.
Image: Philo
By Seth Fiegerman 2015-02-04 14:22:47 UTC
One of the original five Harvard students who helped build the largest social network in the world walks into a gastropub just a few blocks away from the dorm room where it all began. The handful of students and staff who have returned to campus on this bitterly cold January day show no signs of recognizing him. The host seats him without a second glance. The waitress breaks his heart by announcing they don't serve root beer.
"I have a really complicated relationship with Harvard," Andrew McCollum says after finishing his meal. McCollum, 31, who still has the look of a college student with jeans, a casual half-zip sweater and some light scruff, has moved away from Harvard multiple times over the years. Somehow, though, he always seems to end up back in this place. After all, this is the school that changed his life. "I definitely got some amazing things out of Harvard. I met Mark and Dustin and the other Facebook guys."
McCollum became friends with Mark Zuckerberg through the many computer science classes they took together in Harvard and was one of the first people Zuckerberg told about his idea for TheFacebook before it launched on Feb. 4, 2004. For more than a year after that, McCollum worked as part of the small founding team in Boston and later Palo Alto, California. Like Zuckerberg and cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, McCollum left Harvard to work full-time on the startup.
Then, in 2005, just as it was becoming clear that Facebook was taking off, McCollum did what now sounds unthinkable: He left Facebook and went back to school.
For the better part of the next decade, McCollum kept a low profile on and off campus. He got a bachelor's degree in computer science and a master's degree in education, traveled to 40 countries in a year, invested in and worked with startups behind the scenes. Humble by nature, according to friends and colleagues, McCollum stayed away from press and was effectively a footnote in the official Facebook story. He's mentioned a handful of times in media articles and in The Facebook Effect, the authorized history of the company, mostly as a guy in the background. The other four original Harvard students are listed as cofounders on Facebook, but not Andrew McCollum. And no, you won't hear his name mentioned in The Social Network movie.
See also: 'It Was Just the Dumbest Luck' — Facebook's First Employees Look Back
At the end of last year, McCollum decided to tiptoe into the spotlight. He agreed to take over as the CEO of Philo, a 4-year old live TV streaming service for college campuses, backed by nearly $9 million in funding and based a couple blocks from the Harvard campus. Philo had already enjoyed comparisons to Facebook: it was founded by two Harvard students who have since taken a page from the social network's playbook of spreading first across college campuses.
By bringing on a CEO who was present during Facebook's earliest days, Philo now gains an even greater claim to being the heir apparent. It may also get first-hand insights into the product strategy that drove Facebook's success. On the other hand, it's putting someone in the top spot who has never served as a CEO of a startup. If Philo succeeds in reshaping the TV experience for a broad swath of viewers, McCollum may get the kind of public credit for helping to build up the "next Facebook" that he shied away from after working on the original one. If it doesn't work out, he may simply be known as the guy who left.
Either way, the new role has pushed McCollum to finally open up a little more to the media about his time at Facebook and how it shaped his thinking — and everything else.
Andrew McCollum (center) talks about his early role at Facebook in a rare on-stage interview at Oxford's business school in 2012.
The Facebook guy
Eleven years ago, McCollum received an instant message from his buddy Mark that rewrote the rest of his life.
"He IMed me saying, 'Hey Andrew, you should help with the graphics and the logo and the icons and stuff,'" McCollum recalled in our first conversation over the phone. The classmates had talked about computer projects and technology before; now he was being pitched to help with Zuckerberg's latest idea, TheFacebook. There was just one problem. "I was like, 'Mark, I'm not really a graphic designer. I'm a computer science major.'"
Zuckerberg, as many have learned since, was never one to take no for an answer. "He was like, 'There's no one else to do it. You just have to figure it out.'" So he figured it out. McCollum designed a logo showing a vaguely recognizable face covered in ones and zeros. Users dubbed it "The Facebook Guy," until years later when it was revealed to be Al Pacino. With that task, he effectively became Facebook's first designer, one of many hats he would wear at the startup, though they never called it that. "I don't think we even knew the word 'startup.' We always called Facebook a 'project' for the first year of the company."
Looking back now, McCollum claims no "special talent" in designing that logo or any other graphics for Facebook. "I just sort of did what needed to be done."
After watching Facebook's rapid spread across Harvard and other college campuses, Zuckerberg decided to move the operation to Palo Alto for the summer, in part to be at the center of the technology world and in part because he knew McCollum was going out there anyway for an internship with Electronic Arts.
Growing up, McCollum assumed he'd become a game developer. That was why he first took up programming on the old computer in his parents' home in the resort city of Sun Valley, Idaho. While in high school, he was connected with Bing Gordon, the CEO of Electronic Arts, who vacationed in Sun Valley and was friendly with McCollum's neighbors. That's how he ended up with the dream internship — one that would ultimately be overshadowed by his friend's ambitions.
"We started Facebook when we were pretty young college kids," McCollum says. "We didn't really know that clearly, or at least I didn't, what we wanted to be or do in the world."
By the time Facebook moved into its first California headquarters — the house depicted in the movie — the day-to-day team consisted of McCollum, Zuckerberg, his roommate Dustin Moskovitz and two interns from Harvard. Chris Hughes, another one of Zuckerberg's roommates credited as a co-founder, spent the summer in France before taking over as the company's de facto spokesperson. Eduardo Saverin, the fourth cofounder and first investor, stayed on the east coast and his relationship with Zuckerberg grew strained.
McCollum was there with Zuckerberg and Moskovitz when they first ran into Sean Parker randomly on the street in Palo Alto and invited the Napster founder to the Facebook House. He accompanied Zuckerberg to investor meetings, including the now infamous episode where the pair trolled Sequoia, the influential VC firm. Parker was well-liked inside the house, according to early employees we spoke with, at one point creating a makeshift zip line from the chimney to the pool out back.
As with any small startup, McCollum was part of product discussions and worked on whatever design or engineering tasks needed to be done. That included, for much of his time there, serving as lead engineer for Zuckerberg's side project Wirehog. The service connected to Facebook and was intended to let students share files with friends and access those files on various computers. Parker, who had no desire to deal with the copyright problems of a file-sharing service again, wanted to kill the project. But Zuckerberg and McCollum pushed ahead.
Years later, McCollum defends Wirehog as "maybe a bit before its time." As if to prove that point, he recalls how Wirehog had different sections for different file types, including a password protected section called Lockbox. "Sean was living in the same house as us and he looked at this and he said, 'You know what we should do is create something called the Dropbox and then the files are just available whenever they want them,'" McCollum says with a laugh. "He basically just described what Dropbox is.'"
Wirehog finally shut down in early 2005 as Facebook gained traction. Zuckerberg and McCollum resumed putting their time and energy into the social network, but soon enough McCollum decided he was ready to go back to Harvard.
"I did Facebook as a once-in-a-lifetime experience and it was amazing to be part of that, but then on the flip side, I also viewed finishing school as an important experience that I wanted to have," he explains. "I knew if I didn't leave when I did, it was not going to happen."
The decision, he admits, also came down to control. Facebook has always been "a Mark Zuckerberg production," as the CEO wrote on the website when it launched. "While Facebook is very collaborative, it's always been Mark's vision," McCollum continued. "Which is great. But I knew that eventually I was going to be working on something where I could define the vision."
McCollum (right) and Philo cofounder Tuan Ho look at an older picture of McCollum on Google at Philo's office in Boston.
In search of the next cool thing
When Dane Hurtubise first met McCollum in 2008, the ex-Facebooker was living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Austin with "minimal furniture." McCollum had completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard the year before and began visiting new cities to check out their tech scenes. The pair became friends and business partners, but as Hurtubise recalls, it took at least a month before he found out McCollum was on the original Facebook team.
"You would have never known," Hurtubise says. He later learned McCollum's understated living quarters were actually a hallmark of the Facebook founders. "From all of them that I've met, including Mark, there is kind of this element of getting things done. The material things that people often possess aren't actually that valuable."
Even so, McCollum's ability and desire to remain fairly anonymous in the years after Facebook was unusual. Hughes left Facebook in 2007 to work on the Obama campaign and later purchased The New Republic. Saverin, who filed a lawsuit against Facebook, officially gained cofounder status in early 2009 and would feature prominently in the movie. Moskovitz left the social network in 2008 with dreams of building a company as big as Facebook. And Zuckerberg was, well, Zuckerberg.
"I try to fly sort of below the radar intentionally. I don't really prefer to be in the spotlight," McCollum said during one of our conversations. "I feel somewhat successful about that."
McCollum would spend the next year or so working with Hurtubise day-to-day on the latter's startup, Jobspice, a tool for building better resumes — again without calling much attention to himself. After that he returned to Harvard, this time to get a master's degree. Once completed, he joined two VC firms and quietly resumed searching for a Facebook of his own.
On the Jobspice website, now effectively operating without a staff, McCollum is still listed as "cofounder of Facebook." In the media, during public events and at subsequent firms where he worked, McCollum was alternately referred to as a Facebook cofounder, part of Facebook's founding team or simply an early Facebook employee. While Facebook officially omits McCollum from its list of cofounders, some early employees suggest otherwise.
Ezra Callahan, Facebook's sixth employee, compares McCollum's role to that of Hughes. "I knew Chris and Andrew had been involved since virtually the beginning but they didn't quite seem to be the same 'type' of cofounder as Mark and Dustin, either in their ability to steer strategy or the product, or their day-to-day involvement," he said in an email. "But I think everyone on the engineering side understood Andrew's ground-floor role in the company." A rep for Facebook declined to comment.
Other early employees we spoke with stressed that job titles were generally murky in Facebook's early days as everyone simply helped out where they could — a point McCollum echoes. "My title at Facebook for most of the time I was there was 'General Rock Star.' That pretty much says it all about the importance that we placed on titles," he says, quickly dismissing the cofounder question. "I generally don't wade into it. I think it's not an interesting thing for me. The work that I did at Facebook hopefully stands on its own."
Three of the four credited cofounders would go on to become billionaires from their stakes in Facebook, with Hughes, the fourth, not far behind. Early employees that arrived after McCollum still made tens of millions. McCollum shies away from talking about his financial situation, but comments during our conversations suggest money isn't exactly a concern. "I viewed the time in my life post-Facebook as seeing that I had a huge amount of freedom to choose what I wanted to work on. I could be very picky," he said in one interview. Likewise, when asked what motivates McCollum, Patrick Chung, a Philo board member who also worked with him at the firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), said "it's definitely not financial anymore."
Chung invited McCollum to join NEA in 2011 with the expectation he would use the position "as a platform from which to scout for the thing that would really excite him and that he would devote full-time the next phase of his career to." In that role, McCollum invested in about 20 companies and worked closely with big names like Pulse, later acquired by LinkedIn.
He did eventually settle on a startup for the next phase of his career, but it wasn't one discovered through the VC firms or even through his travels. He found Philo the same way he found Facebook: through a student at Harvard.
Mark Zuckerberg (right) testing out Philo (then called Tivli) while McCollum looks on during a visit to Harvard in 2011.
Changing the channel
While pursuing his master's at Harvard, McCollum attended an entrepreneurship dinner with students and alumni on campus. He noticed one distracted student during the event who was busy doing system tests on what turned out to be a brand new TV service.
"Andrew looked over and said, 'That's interesting. What are you working on?'" recalls Tuan Ho, cofounder of Philo, which then operated under the name Tivli. As with Facebook, Philo's founders didn't plan to start a company. They wanted to build a tool for themselves to stream TV on campus. Then it gained interest among students and staff. That's when they realized the potential to spread across Harvard and beyond. "Andrew felt like he'd seen this story before," Ho says.
At first, McCollum served as informal mentor to the startup before joining as a board member and advisor. As he'd done at Facebook, McCollum helped talk Philo's team through product strategy. He connected the startup with employees, including the CEO who preceded him, and even got Zuckerberg to visit the team in 2011. Philo's leadership tried for awhile to bring McCollum on in a full-time product role. Eventually those talks shifted to getting McCollum as CEO, which finally happened in November.
"From the moment I heard about [Philo], I was just really excited about the idea, about the company, about the potential," McCollum says. "I've been patient since Facebook to wait to find projects that I really love and this is one that I really love."
On any given day in his new role, McCollum must talk with entertainment partners, gather with Philo's team and meet with investors. His top priority is to advance the product — to do that he's taking inspiration again from Facebook by adding more social features. You might, for example, see what friends are watching, share shows with them and weave in conversations.
"A lot of what we intend to do around the product involves pushing the social experience of television forward in a way that hasn't really been done before," McCollum says. Then he returns to a key lesson learned from Facebook's focus on campuses first. "When you're talking about building social products, it's much, much easier to build critical mass within a population of thousands."
Unlike Aereo, another streaming TV startup, Philo has found traction partnering with coveted networks like HBO, which are interested in new ways to get students hooked on their programming. But developing and managing those partnerships, competing with players like Sling TV and eventually expanding beyond colleges — a longer-term interest, according to sources close to the company — will test McCollum's leadership and vision.
"I think he's evolved as a leader certainly since I've known him," Hurtubise, McCollum's former business partner, says of his road to CEO. "He was more on the technical end on Facebook, but I think his time at NEA and Flybridge really helped him scope out how to run a business."
"Obviously I was incredibly lucky to be part of Facebook and it has opened all kinds of doors," McCollum says, before admitting that his early involvement with the huge tech company "creates expectations." But he's okay with that. "If other people expect a lot from me and from [Philo], I'm perfectly happy with it."
When we get back to the Philo office after lunch, McCollum is quick to excuse himself. He walks into a small, dimly lit office — not his own, as he says it's "not really my style" to have an office — and settles at his laptop. Andrew McCollum still looks at his most comfortable in the glow of a computer screen with work to do.
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Topics: Business, chris hughes, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, Facebook, mark zuckerberg, Startups, streaming television