Dustin Moskovitz

Dustin Moskovitz

Dustin Moskovitz
Born	May 28, 1984 (age 27) Gainesville, Florida, U.S.
Nationality	United States
Ethnicity	Jewish
Known for	Co-founder of Facebook; youngest billionaire in the world[1]
Net worth	$3.5 billion[2]

Dustin Moskovitz (born May 22, 1984) is an American billionaire internet entrepreneur who co-founded the social networking website Facebook along with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes.^[3] In 2008, he left Facebook.com to co-found Asana^[4] with Justin Rosenstein.

In March 2011 Forbes ranked Moskovitz as the world's youngest self-made billionaire on the basis of his 7.6% share in Facebook, which will become liquid after the company's anticipated IPO. He is eight days younger than Zuckerberg.^[5]

Background and education

Moskovitz was born in Gainesville, Florida and grew up in Ocala, Florida of Russian-Jewish descent and attended Vanguard High School, graduating from the IB Diploma Programme. Moskovitz attended Harvard University as an economics major for two years before he moved with Mark Zuckerberg to Palo Alto. He went to work full-time on Facebook.^[6]

Career

Facebook

Four people, three of whom were roommates — Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, and Moskovitz — founded Facebook in their Harvard University dorm room in February 2004. Originally called thefacebook.com, it was intended as an online directory of all Harvard's students to help residential students identify members of other residences.^[3][7] In June 2004, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz took a year off from Harvard and moved Facebook's base of operations to Palo Alto, California, and hired eight employees.^[8] They were later joined by Sean Parker. At Facebook, Moskovitz was the company's first chief technology officer and then vice president of engineering;^[9] he led the technical staff and oversaw the major architecture of the site, as well as being responsible for the company’s mobile strategy and development.^[6]

After Facebook

On October 3, 2008, Moskovitz announced that he was leaving Facebook to form a new company called Asana with Justin Rosenstein, an engineering manager at Facebook who had formerly worked at Google and whom Moskovitz had recruited. Their departures were among a series by Facebook executives at that time. In response, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, released a statement, saying, "Dustin has always had Facebook's best interest at heart and will always be someone I turn to for advice."^[10] They planned to create a company that, in their words at the time, "will be to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life."^[10]

In November 2009 Moskovitz and Rosenstein closed a $9 million round of funding for their new company from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, following $1.2 million of angel investment the previous spring from investors including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, Mitch Kapor, and Sean Parker.^[11]

The new company received some attention for giving its engineers $10,000 to spend on improving the equipment at their desks.^[12]

On February 7, 2011, Moskovitz and Rosenstein presented Asana, a software application designed to improve the way people collaborate in groups and manage projects.^[13] Asana organised work flow within a news-feed like layout and shared with many of the products created by former employees at Facebook the attempt to address social interaction online.^[12] It is powered by Luna, a JavaScript-based web framework developed by the company.^[14]

Moskovitz was the biggest angel investor in the mobile photo-sharing site, Path, run by another former member of Facebook, David Morin. It was reported^[12] that Moskovitz's advice was important in persuading Morin to reject a $100 million offer for the company from Google, made in February 2011.^[15]

Media depictions

Moskovitz is played in the film The Social Network by actor Joseph Mazzello. Responding to a question on Quora, Moskovitz said that the film "emphasizes things that didn't matter (like the Winklevoss brothers, who [sic] I've still never even met and had no part in the work we did to create the site over the past 6 years) and leaves out things that really did (like the many other people in our lives at the time, who supported us in innumerable ways)."^[16]