In 2004, a month before Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, another social media site landed on the internet with a splash of hot pink. If you were online in the mid-2000s, you might remember Orkut, with its lurid logo, fingernail-sized profile pictures, and text-heavy, pastel-blue feeds. Unlike Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, or even Tom from MySpace, the site’s founder managed to stay under the radar.
You might not know that the man behind Orkut is also called Orkut. Born in Konya, Turkey, Orkut Büyükkökten moved to Germany at the age of 1. A childhood obsession with Star Wars led him to study computer science at Stanford, where, upon noticing that people tended to socialize in their dorms rather than venturing out on campus, he launched the first ever college social network, Club Nexus.
“I noticed I met most of my friends through friends of friends,” he says. “And I was like, what if we could meet people using the social graph?” He later developed a follow-up network, InCircle, designed for alumni. Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard version, Facebook, didn’t arrive until three years later.
A meeting with Larry Page and Sergey Brin led Büyükkökten to a job as a frontend software engineer at Google. The tech giant offers a perk known as “20 percent time,” where employees can spend a day a week on passion projects. Still obsessed with helping people make friends, Büyükkökten used his time to start a new platform.
“I wanted to cr.
