ONE
ROOM 1524
INT. KIRKLAND HOUSE, ROOM H33 — HARVARD UNIVERSITY — FEBRUARY 2004 — NIGHT
HARVARD UNIVERSITY — FEBRUARY 4, 2004
A cramped dorm room. Beer cans. Textbooks. Computer equipment everywhere. MARK ZUCKERBERG, 19, is coding furiously. DUSTIN MOSKOVITZ, also 19, his roommate, looks over Mark's shoulder at the screen. The site is called TheFacebook. It launched hours ago.
ZUCKERBERG
Dustin, look at the server logs. We have five hundred users. In four hours. Five hundred Harvard students.
MOSKOVITZ
(leaning in) The registration flow is broken for people with hyphenated last names. I can fix that. Also, the database queries are going to choke once we hit a thousand users. The indexing is wrong.
ZUCKERBERG
Can you fix it tonight?
MOSKOVITZ
I am already fixing it.
He sits down at his own machine and begins coding. This is the dynamic that will define Facebook's early years — Zuckerberg as the visionary, Moskovitz as the engineer who makes it work. No drama. No ego. Just code.
MOSKOVITZ (V.O.)
Mark gets all the credit. And he should — it was his idea, his vision, his relentless drive. But someone had to build the infrastructure. Someone had to make the servers work when a million people tried to sign up in a week. Someone had to scale the database, fix the bugs at three AM, and keep the whole thing from falling apart. That someone was me. I was roommate number three. The one the movie forgot.
CUT TO:
INT. FACEBOOK HOUSE — PALO ALTO — SUMMER 2004 — DAY
PALO ALTO — SUMMER 2004
A rented house in Palo Alto. The team has moved west for the summer. MOSKOVITZ, ZUCKERBERG, and a handful of engineers work around the clock. Pizza boxes. Energy drinks. Whiteboards covered in architecture diagrams.
MOSKOVITZ
We are adding ten colleges a week. The infrastructure is not keeping up. We need to rearchitect the entire backend before we open to the general public.
ZUCKERBERG
How long?
MOSKOVITZ
If I do not sleep? Two weeks. If I sleep? A month.
ZUCKERBERG
Do not sleep.
Moskovitz nods. He does not sleep. The architecture holds.
INT. FACEBOOK OFFICE — PALO ALTO — 2005 — DAY
Facebook has five million users. MOSKOVITZ is now VP of Engineering. He is twenty years old. EDUARDO SAVERIN's lawsuit has been filed. The drama swirls around Zuckerberg. Moskovitz stays focused on the code.
ENGINEER
Dustin, have you seen the news about the Saverin lawsuit?
MOSKOVITZ
I have seen it. It does not affect the code. The code is what matters. Ship the news feed feature by Friday.
People think startups are about the drama — the lawsuits, the betrayals, the billion-dollar negotiations. They are not. Startups are about the work. Thousands of hours of unglamorous problem- solving. I never appeared in “The Social Network.” I was not even mentioned. And yet I wrote more of Facebook's early code than anyone except Mark. History remembers the founders who fight. It forgets the ones who build.
TWO
THE EXIT
INT. FACEBOOK HEADQUARTERS — MENLO PARK — 2008 — DAY
2008 — FACEBOOK HAS 100 MILLION USERS
MOSKOVITZ, 24, walks through Facebook's growing campus. He helped build this. He is worth billions on paper. But something has changed. He stops at a whiteboard and starts drawing something that is not Facebook.
MOSKOVITZ
(to JUSTIN ROSENSTEIN, a Facebook engineer) Justin, I have been thinking about something. The biggest problem at Facebook is not the product. It is how we work. We waste hours in meetings. We lose track of tasks. We duplicate effort. The tools for coordinating work — email, spreadsheets, to-do lists — they are all terrible.
ROSENSTEIN
I built an internal tool for task tracking at Google before I came here. Same problem. Nobody has solved it.
MOSKOVITZ
What if we solved it? Not as an internal tool. As a company.
ROSENSTEIN
You would leave Facebook? You co-founded it.
MOSKOVITZ
Facebook does not need me anymore. It has thousands of engineers. But this problem — the problem of how teams work together — nobody is solving it well. I want to build something that makes every team in the world more effective.
CUT TO:
INT. ZUCKERBERG'S OFFICE — MENLO PARK — 2008 — DAY
MOSKOVITZ sits across from ZUCKERBERG. A difficult conversation.
MOSKOVITZ
Mark, I am leaving.
ZUCKERBERG
(long pause) To do what?
MOSKOVITZ
Work coordination software. I want to build a tool that helps teams collaborate without the chaos.
ZUCKERBERG
(half-smile) You are leaving the biggest social network in the world to build... a to-do list app?
MOSKOVITZ
(laughing) It is a lot more than a to-do list. But yes. I need to build something that is mine. You understand that better than anyone.
ZUCKERBERG
(nodding slowly) Yeah. I do. (beat) You know you are leaving billions on the table.
MOSKOVITZ
I have enough billions. What I do not have is a mission that is mine.
INT. ASANA OFFICE — SAN FRANCISCO — 2009 — DAY
2009 — ASANA IS BORN
A small office. MOSKOVITZ and ROSENSTEIN at facing desks. The company is called Asana — Sanskrit for a yoga posture, representing a stable base for action.
ROSENSTEIN
We have thirty million in funding. Your reputation alone could have raised ten times that.
MOSKOVITZ
I do not want ten times that. I want to build deliberately. Small team. Right product. Facebook grew too fast and we spent years fixing the technical debt. Asana grows at the right speed.
THREE
GIVING IT AWAY
INT. MOSKOVITZ HOME — SAN FRANCISCO — 2011 — NIGHT
2011
MOSKOVITZ, 27, sits with CARI TUNA, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. They are reading about effective altruism — the philosophical movement that argues charitable giving should be guided by evidence and impact, not emotion.
CARI
This GiveWell analysis — they estimate that distributing malaria bed nets saves a life for about three thousand dollars. Three thousand dollars. That is less than our monthly grocery bill.
MOSKOVITZ
Which means that every dollar we spend on something unnecessary is, in some calculable way, a life we chose not to save. (beat) That is an uncomfortable thought.
CARI
Peter Singer makes this argument. If you can prevent suffering without sacrificing anything of comparable importance, you are morally obligated to do so.
MOSKOVITZ
I am twenty-seven years old and I am worth eight billion dollars. I did not earn that through some moral virtue. I was in the right room at the right time. The question is: what do I do with it?
CUT TO:
INT. GOOD VENTURES OFFICE — SAN FRANCISCO — 2012 — DAY
2012 — GOOD VENTURES FOUNDATION
MOSKOVITZ and CARI launch Good Ventures — their philanthropic foundation — in partnership with GiveWell and later Open Philanthropy. The approach is radically different from traditional philanthropy: every grant is evaluated for expected impact per dollar.
MOSKOVITZ
(to their team) We are not writing checks to feel good. We are deploying capital to maximize human wellbeing per dollar spent. That means malaria nets, yes. But also AI safety research. Pandemic preparedness. Criminal justice reform. Whatever the data shows has the highest expected value.
CARI
People will say we are cold. That we reduce human suffering to spreadsheets.
MOSKOVITZ
Spreadsheets save more lives than good intentions. If being rigorous about saving lives makes us cold, then the warm approach of traditional philanthropy — which wastes billions on vanity projects and administrative overhead — is the real cruelty.
By the time I was 26, I was the youngest self-made billionaire in history. That record has since been broken — by people building cryptocurrency platforms and social media companies. But the distinction never mattered to me. What mattered was the question: what is wealth for? Cari and I decided it was for solving problems. Not for yachts. Not for private islands. For solving the specific, measurable problems that cause the most suffering in the world.
INT. OPEN PHILANTHROPY OFFICE — 2017 — DAY
Open Philanthropy — the research arm spun out of Good Ventures — has become one of the most influential funders in effective altruism. MOSKOVITZ reviews grants: $50 million for AI safety, $30 million for biosecurity, $100 million for global health.
RESEARCHER
Dustin, the AI safety researchers we funded at OpenAI and elsewhere are making real progress on alignment. Your early bet on this area is looking prescient.
MOSKOVITZ
It is not prescient. It is obvious. If artificial intelligence is going to be the most transformative technology in human history, someone should be working on making sure it goes well. The fact that so few funders saw this is terrifying, not flattering.
FOUR
THE WORK
INT. ASANA HEADQUARTERS — SAN FRANCISCO — 2020 — DAY
SEPTEMBER 2020 — ASANA IPO
Asana goes public via direct listing. MOSKOVITZ stands with ROSENSTEIN and the Asana team. The company has over 80,000 paying customers. Millions of people use it to coordinate work. It is valued at billions.
ROSENSTEIN
Twelve years from that whiteboard conversation at Facebook. We actually did it.
MOSKOVITZ
We built a product that helps teams work together. Not as glamorous as a social network. But every day, millions of people are more productive because of what we built. That matters.
INT. MOSKOVITZ HOME — SAN FRANCISCO — EVENING
A home that is comfortable but deliberately not extravagant. MOSKOVITZ and CARI sit together. They have pledged to give away the vast majority of their wealth through the Giving Pledge.
CARI
The Open Philanthropy grants this year — nearly a billion dollars deployed. Pandemic preparedness. AI safety. Global health. Criminal justice. We are actually moving the needle.
MOSKOVITZ
Not fast enough. There are trillions of dollars of philanthropic capital in the world, and most of it is deployed based on social connections and emotional appeal rather than evidence. If even ten percent of philanthropic dollars were allocated by expected impact, we could solve malaria. We could prepare for the next pandemic. We could make AI go well.
CARI
You sound like you are still debugging code.
MOSKOVITZ
(small smile) I am. The world is the codebase. And it has a lot of bugs.
EXT. SAN FRANCISCO — DUSK
The city that became the center of the tech universe. The camera drifts over the skyline, past the former Facebook offices, past the Asana headquarters, toward the horizon.
MOSKOVITZ (V.O.)
History remembers the founder. The one who had the idea, who gave the speeches, who became the face. It does not remember the co-founder. The one who wrote the code. The one who scaled the servers. The one who left to build something quieter and give most of it away. I am fine with that. I was never in it for the recognition. I was in it for the work. The work at Facebook. The work at Asana. The work of figuring out how to deploy billions of dollars to do the most good. That is enough. That is more than enough.
FADE TO BLACK.
Dustin Moskovitz co-founded Facebook at age 19 and became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 26. He co-founded Asana in 2008, which went public in 2020 and serves millions of users worldwide. Through Good Ventures and Open Philanthropy, he and his wife Cari Tuna have deployed over $3 billion in philanthropic capital focused on global health, AI safety, pandemic preparedness, and criminal justice reform. They have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donate the majority of their wealth. Moskovitz's net worth is estimated at over $11 billion.