The Zuckerberg Roommate Who Said No to Facebook

KOMPAS.com - Facebook is due to become a publicly traded company on Wednesday when it will launch with an expected $100billion valuation, but one man in Mark Zuckerberg's social network won't be celebrating to the same extent.

Joe Green is the former college roommate of Mr Zuckerberg who, unlike his famous friend, decided to stay enrolled in Harvard instead of dropping out to make Facebook. That decision is called his $400million mistake.

Even in spite of the mistake, Mr Green now runs a charitable giving site called Causes and through that as well as the shares of Facebook which he owns, he will still likely make a multi-million dollar profit from the company's expected launch.

'My father, who's a professor, was not too happy with the prospect of me getting kicked out of school,' Mr Green told Good Morning America.

Instead of going on to launch the world's biggest social network, Mr Green graduated and went to work for John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, and is now running an online charitable giving service that is one of Facebook's largest applications.

Though he wasn't one of the original founders of Facebook in full, Mr Green was a part of the company's original iteration and helped Mr Zuckerberg create the website's predecessor. The college boys first made a site called 'FaceMash' which allowed visitors to judge the looks of people online.

After getting in some trouble with Harvard over the project- which involved them hacking into the university's online picture library of students- Mr Green was hesitant to get involved with another internet start-up at the risk of threatening his college education.

'We'd gotten into a little bit of trouble with the previous project,' Mr Green said.

Public service and political organizing were two of Mr Green's passions since a young age, and he was active in the local government of Santa Monica, California, where he grew up. After college, he worked in the field, getting out the vote for Democrat John Kerry's doomed presidential campaign, but that did not leave him disheartened.

'That experience made me believe in democracy,' he told The Los Angeles Times.

Even though he didn't move out to California with Mr Zuckerberg and crew immediately, he did make the jump to San Francisco when he created a site called Essembly in 2005.

He then partnered up with Mr Zuckerberg's friend Sean Parker, the man known for creating the music sharing site Napster (and telling Mr Zuckerberg to 'drop the The' which used to be at the beginning of the social network site's name).

The duo set up so-called shop in a popular Hollywood coffeeshop (where celebrity blogger Perez Hilton worked at the time) and started creating the charitable giving site now called Causes.

In 2007 he partnered up with Sean Parker, the man known for creating the music sharing site Napster (and telling Mr Zuckerberg to 'drop the The' which used to be at the beginning of the social network site's name), to create his new project called Causes.

Causes helps introduce people to different charitable effort or political issues and does so using Facebook.

While his tech friends were clearly helpful in the beginning, Mr Green has made a name for himself and was recently deemed one of Forbes Magazines' Top 30 Under 30. Causes is one of Facebook's biggest applications and has 170 million users who have raised over $50million for their efforts.

Facebook's expected $100billion valuation when their Initial Public Offering is launched, Mr Zuckerberg will likely be adding many billions to his current net worth of $17.5billion.

While Mr Green may not have the same exorbitant pay day as his former roommate, he will be fine: he was sure to get a hefty amount of Facebook stock.