10 Things You Didn't Know About Your Favorite Startups

Well before they became known as the go-to social media platforms for Russian hackers to disrupt American elections, many now-successful social-media companies started in the garages, basements, and dorm rooms of brilliant (and possibly borderline insane) entrepreneurs. The apps we can’t seem to do without were once struggling startups. Many entrepreneurs who tried to follow the same path as Facebook failed, and the ones who made it could have easily been ended up in the same boat. Their one-in-a-million ability to succeed is never more clear than in their origin stories, which are often sort of comical or depressing, depending on how you look at them.

You may have some knowledge of some major startup stories of their beginnings because they’ve seeped into pop culture through film and TV (as in Social Network, which portrays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as an asshole-genius, giving rise to the startup-founder-bro stereotype). But for many apps and devices we use daily, there are quirky truths behind their rise to fame that are forgotten from public memory.

Whether they were started because the founders just needed an idea to make rent or because their CEOs just couldn’t resist a challenge, most startups had to bootstrap from the beginning and then hang on for dear life, especially as competitors started to emerge (hey, not every startup has help from notable celebrities). This high-pressure environment caused for some interesting behaviors, as well as strange and brilliant innovations that defined these companies’ futures. Here are 10 things you didn’t know about your favorite startups—most of which come from their surprising origins.

Before Mark Zuckerberg’s babyface and normcore uniform was as recognizable as any Hollywood celebrity’s visage, he was recruited by twin brothers to create a social network on his campus, Harvard University. At the time, it was to be called HarvardConnections.com. The Winklevoss twins tapped Zuckerberg because he had made a splash on campus with the website Facemash, a “hot or not” concept that pulled two photos of Harvard students from the internet and asked users to vote for who was more good looking.

Although Zuckerberg got in trouble with the school, the site was so popular (each visitor returned an average of 48 times) that the Winklevoss twins couldn’t resist. Once he agreed to work with the brothers, however, the Zuck delayed developing HarvardConnections.com and instead covertly worked on a similar social network, which he launched as thefacebook.com. Needless to say, the Winklevoss brothers were less than happy, and they sued Zuckerberg for stealing their concept. In the end, the two parties reached a settlement, and the rest is history.

According to Twitter leaders, the tech startup was founded when two former Google employees, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, joined forces to create a podcasting platform, Odeo. Realizing that Apple had already cornered the podcasting market with iTunes, they teamed up with Jack Dorsey, another Odeo employee, to make Twitter.

However, this leaves out a key contributor: Noah Glass, who was the man behind Odeo’s original audio technology. Glass worked with Dorsey to develop the first iteration of Twitter, a platform focused on “status” where you would send a text to one number, and all your friends would receive it. Glass dubbed it “Twttr” and was made the leader of the team to develop the platform. When, through some shrewd maneuvering, Evan Williams eventually took financial ownership of Twitter, he kicked out Glass because of what many involved said was a personality clash. Since then, Glass was deleted from Twitter’s official origin story.

Today, that would mean hundreds of thousands of bells going off all day. But in the beginning, Amazon employees would gather around to see if they knew the customer every time a bell would go off. However, this only lasted a few weeks before the bells got intolerable. In the first month of its launch, Amazon sold books to people in all 50 states and 45 different countries. And since the Amazon servers were located in founder Jeff Bezos’ garage, his family’s house constantly blew fuses, requiring more and more power month over month.

Before Snapchat was on every millennial’s phone, the photo-sharing app was mostly a platform for sending nudes that would disappear. But Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg saw the potential of the then little-known tech startup and invited cofounder Evan Spiegel to Silicon Valley. Spiegel made Zuckerberg come to him and meet with him and his co-founder, Bobby Murphy, instead. During the meeting, the Zuck made it clear that he was working on a similar photo-disappearing technology. According to Spiegel, “It was basically like, ’We’re going to crush you.’”

Instead of giving up, the Snapchat founders armed themselves for a fight, ordering The Art of War by Sun Tzu, a Chinese military general from the 5th century BCE, for all six of their employees. This ancient wisdom must have inspired something in the group, because Snap IPOed at an estimated $20-$25 billion value, which was the largest IPO on the US Stock Exchange since 2014.

In 2010, bored with working at other tech companies, one of Instagram’s co-founders, Kevin Systrom, started an app called Burbn, so named because of his love of whiskey. During this time, Foursquare and some other location-sharing apps were doing well; the idea was to “check in” to different places or share your plans. Instead, people were using Burbn to share candid photos of everything around them, from pictures of their lattes to selfies. During that time, Mike Krieger, Instagram’s other co-founder, came on board, and the two began to focus on how Burbn’s users were approaching photo-sharing. From there, they created another app named after Systrom’s drink of choice, Scotch. Eventually, Scotch evolved into Instagram.

Today, Square is the go-to payment method at every coffee shop or boutique store in your neighborhood. But before it became so ubiquitous, it was founded with an admirable mission: to help small businesses compete. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey created Square to allow small businesses to easily accept credit card payments. But his inspiration for doing so was personal: Dorsey’s former boss and friend Jim McKelvey lost money on his hand-blown glass sales because he couldn’t accept credit cards. Dorsey came up with a solution, Square, and McKelvey went on to be his co-founder.

They say that necessity is the mother of innovation, and that adage is proved true with the story behind the house-sharing app Airbnb. The concept for Airbnb was born in 2007 when co-founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia needed money for rent on their apartment in San Francisco. To do so, they rented out air mattresses in their apartment for people attending a conference in the city when all the hotels were booked. The supremely uncomfortable bedding was the inspiration behind the name “Air Bed and Breakfast.” Today, the company is worth $30 billion, and it often helps its 2.1 million users make rent.

Tumblr was supposed to be the visual creative’s answer to a written blog—focused on quick image-sharing and cultivating a curatorial identity online. This made it different from Facebook and Twitter, which were focused on written communication. Carp has said of other platforms, “They are not tools built for creative expression. No one is proud of their identity on Facebook.” While it’s true that many Tumblr aficionados initially used the platform to build a cult following, like many new platforms, it was also originally used to distribute porography. In 2012, five years after its birth, 14 out of the top 20 search keywords containing “tumblr” were associated with adult blogs. But hey, who said porn couldn’t be artistic anway?

Groupon is the startup founder’s nightmare. It was once one of the fastest-growing tech companies in history, with the largest IPO since Google. But that stock quickly plummeted and the founder, Andrew Mason, was faced with mounting pressures from the SEC and his own employees. But what became a total clusterfuck started as a do-gooder platform in 2007 when Mason founded The Point, a social network designed to get people to solve issues together and make the world a better place. Facing financial pressures, he shifted the platform to help people save money by getting group discounts, and thus Groupon came to be. Little did Mason know that solving his money problems meant bringing on a ton of other demons.

Even though Spotify was founded in Sweden by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzen, the cold climate wasn’t enough to cool the streaming platform servers for the first few months after launching Spotify. Working out of their apartment, Ek and Lorentzen stripped down to near nakedness to hammer away at their new startup because it was so hot inside due to the Spotify servers’ hard work. Even Sweden’s cold winters didn’t help. Today, the company’s 140 million active users would probably burn the place up.