Facebook Nearly Had a Blue Hedgehog for a Mascot
Sound familiar? According to early Facebook employee Ezra Callahan, the company’s first president, Sean Parker (who you may remember as a villainous Justin Timberlake character in The Social Network), wanted to make Facebook’s mascot a hedgehog and turn blue stuffed hedgehogs into Facebook’s calling card. Suffice it to say that this is not what ended up happening.
True story: in the very early days of Facebook, Sean Parker wanted to make Facebook’s mascot a hedgehog. We had early plans to build a local business program around each college on the site (a Yelp-like service similar to what later became Facebook Pages). As part of that, Sean wanted us to send each participating business a little blue stuffed hedgehog. Matt Cohler and I even sourced a couple companies to make them.
Sean actually wanted us to get a real hedgehog for the office. Turns out they aren’t street legal in California, or something, but I guess he found a way to obtain one in Nevada. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your affinity for hedgehogs) Sean couldn’t convince any of us to drive there to get one.
The local business program was shelved mid 2005 (we decided a revenue product wasn’t as important after the Accel financing), and Sean let his dream of the hedgehog go with it.
If I’m not mistaken, a couple employees who live near the facebook campus own a hedgehog today. I won’t name them in case they are, in fact, illegal, but I guess that sorta counts.
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