How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign

By: Ellen McGirtTue Mar 17, 2009 at 5:00 PM

The untold story of how Chris Hughes, today only 25 years old, helped create two of the most successful startups in modern history, Facebook and the Barack Obama campaign.

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Hughes, on the streets of New York's Soho | Photograph by Peter Yang

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Hughes, who generally went out of his way not to impose himself on the candidate, cherishes the memory. Obama did not maintain an office at campaign HQ -- he was out on the road or in his Senate office -- and his visits were infrequent. That he had taken time out for Hughes was an indication of his growing importance, though he himself saw it only as a testament to Obama's decency. His father, Arlen "Ray" Hughes, recalls, "My wife, Brenda, was crying too hard to speak. But I said, 'My son, Chris Hughes, works for you.' And Barack beamed, and he said, 'That's my Internet man!' "

Hughes grew up in Hickory, North Carolina, the only child of older parents of modest means -- his father was a paper salesman; his mother, a former public-school teacher. Hickory is a deeply conservative slice of America, and as Hughes entered high school, he decided he wanted something different. Without his parents' knowledge, he applied to prep schools, nabbing what he describes as a "very generous financial-aid package" from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. At boarding school, he came of age more quickly than he had imagined. Part of that process was realizing he was gay: "I went to boarding school Southern, religious, and straight, and I left boarding school not being at all religious and not being straight." And not so Southern either; he has no trace of an accent.

He also left Andover with a scholarship to Harvard. There, during his freshman year, he met Mark Zuckerberg, a smart kid who had this cool idea for a Web site. It wasn't a business yet. "It was all pretty informal," Hughes remembers. "Mark was like, 'Oh, Facebook is pretty together right now; you should take a look.' " Zuckerberg was user ID 4; Hughes, user ID 5. Hughes was the poet among the teenagers who created Facebook; unlike Zuckerberg and dorm mate and cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, he didn't write software code and didn't want to. Instead, he tried to figure out ways that people would want to connect with one another and share stuff more easily. (His nickname among Facebook insiders is "the Empath.") Hughes began to make product suggestions, "screwing around with the site," as he puts it. When they decided to open Facebook to students outside of Harvard, he argued that different schools should have their own networks, to help maintain the site's feeling of safety and intimacy. He became the official Facebook explainer: part anthropologist, part customer-service rep, part media spokesperson.

The three friends headed west during their sophomore summer break in 2004, in search of venture capital and online adventure. Zuckerberg and Moskovitz stayed in Palo Alto, but Hughes didn't do the dropout thing. "I didn't have the money to just hang out," he says. He returned to Harvard, majoring in the history and literature of France, spending a semester in Paris, and writing a thesis on urban space in Algiers during decolonization. (Yes, liberal-arts majors, there is a place for you in technology.) But he stayed connected to Facebook. He devoted several hours a day to the business during his senior year and relocated to Palo Alto after graduation. Matt Cohler, one of Facebook's earliest executive hires, says Hughes had strong ideas about how Facebook's technology could enrich the lives of users and was a key driver of many hugely popular features. "Chris was the leading product manager for the share functionality on the site," Cohler says. "He was the perfect sounding board for product ideas."

It was Hughes's instinct for satisfying Facebook's users, ironically, that would lead him beyond the site. In the fall of 2006, as midterm elections approached, Facebook took the then bold step of allowing political candidates to set up modified profile pages, well before celebrities and products could have fan pages of their own. When a freshman senator from Illinois came knocking, it was Hughes who provided the customer service. Barack Obama wasn't a midterm candidate, but he wanted a Facebook profile anyway. The approach came in an email from Reggie Love, Obama's now famous body man. "I liked the Facebook idea," says Jim Brayton, then the senator's Internet director, "but Reggie really got it immediately." After Love set up the profile, Brayton says, they realized its potential for an Obama presidential campaign. "We quickly wanted to be able to do more with it. Chris got it right away."

From Issue 134 | April 2009

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Recent Comments | 45 Total

March 18, 2009 at 8:47am by Neil Jensen

Thanks for the mention, Ellen! And especially thanks to Chris Hughes, who displayed an admirable humility throughout the campaign, and helped set the tone for the entire MyBO "community."

How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign

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Recent Comments | 45 Total

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