Chris Hughes

Cofounder of Facebook and entrepreneur

• Born: November 26, 1983
• Place of Birth: Hickory, North Carolina

Primary Company/Organization: Facebook

Introduction

By the age of twenty-five, Chris Hughes was considered a success in the fields of both social networking and political campaigning. As a cofounder of Facebook, Hughes had a special knack for understanding the impact of particular features on users of the social networking site, which earned him the nickname the Empath. He stressed the need for online privacy more than some of his collaborators. After leaving Facebook, he expanded his interests to public policy and was credited with developing the groundbreaking online campaign for Barack Obama's presidential bid in 2008. In 2012, Hughes purchased the New Republic, becoming its publisher and editor-in-chief until selling the magazine in 2016.

Early Life

Chris Hughes was born into a typically conservative southern middle-class family in Hickory, North Carolina, on November 26, 1983. He has said that he was raised to be religious but rejected his faith after leaving North Carolina. Hughes was an only child, and his parents were older than those of most of his friends. His father, Ray, was a paper salesman, and his mother, Brenda, had taught school. Although close to his parents, he applied for a scholarship to attend the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, without telling them. After suffering culture shock in the new environment, he settled in and began to enjoy it.

Hughes enrolled at Harvard University in 2002 as a scholarship student. While he was majoring in the literature and history of France, he also had a deep interest in public policy. Mark Zuckerberg was one of his roommates in Kirkland House dorm at Harvard, and Hughes signed on as one of the original members of what was then thefacebook.com. He soon became the spokesperson for the new company. When Zuckerberg and the rest of the team headed for Palo Alto, California, in the summer of 2004, Hughes's finances were such that he could not afford to waste time, and he was much more interested than Zuckerberg in completing his degree. Zuckerberg had been much impressed by a speech in which he had heard Bill Gates suggest to students that it might benefit them to take time off from their studies before completing their degrees. When Zuckerberg headed for California, Hughes had already signed up and paid for a summer program in France, so he flew to Paris instead of Palo Alto. After a brief period in California, Hughes returned to Harvard to continue his studies.

Life's Work

While still at Harvard, Hughes was besieged with requests for interviews concerning the growing success of Facebook, but he was forced to balance his public relations work with his studies. In 2006, he graduated magna cum laude and left for California to serve as onsite spokesperson for Facebook. Although he was never involved in the technical side of Facebook and had never expressed interest in learning to write software, he had an instinctive understanding of how people were likely to react to new features. He later became the head of product management, taking on responsibility for overseeing the Facebook experience and making it something that users could enjoy. He also filled the essential role of serving as a sounding board for the ideas of other members of the Facebook team.

In 2006, Facebook decided to allow politicians to set up their own profiles on Facebook, and Barack Obama was among those who signed up. Hughes learned that he and Obama shared many ideas, particularly the notion that people could work together to institute change. By the time Hughes left Facebook in 2007, he had amassed a fortune estimated at $700 million. (When Facebook went public in May 2012, Hughes's company stock became worth considerably more.)

The Obama campaign team hired him as the director of online organizing, and he moved to Chicago. His experience at Facebook served him well as he worked on creating My.BarackObama.com (MyBo) to serve as the online presence for Obama's run for the presidency. The site was up and running by February 2007, following Obama's announcement that he had officially entered the race. Raising $30 million, the site was considered a major factor in Obama's successful campaign. By November 2008, the site had generated two million profiles and thirty-five thousand groups. Users had also planned two hundred thousand real-world events. Hughes had seen the site as a way for Obama supporters to find one another, promote the campaign, and raise funds. He was successful on all counts. Although they received less publicity than the MyBo site, Hughes also managed Obama sites on Facebook and MySpace, as well as those on other networks. Overall, Hughes was responsible for helping to raise $500 million for Obama, with most of that amount coming from contributions of less than $200 each.

After Obama's inauguration, Hughes accepted a position as "entrepreneur in residence" at General Catalyst Partners, a venture capital firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he helped to motivate potential entrepreneurs. The following year, he founded Jumo, a nonprofit website with a stated mission of helping people discover ways to make the world a better place. Concerned mostly with nonprofits that lacked the resources for lavish fundraising activities, Jumo used technology to match visitors with causes that reflected their interests. By 2011, Jumo had a million users and twenty thousand followers on Facebook. Hughes sold the site to Good magazine that year, announcing that it would combine Good's three million unique monthly visitors with Jumo's access to fifteen thousand nonprofit organizations.

In 2010, Hughes was named to the High Level Commission of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), a group of business leaders, activists, and scientists that focuses on promoting social and political action on issues related to HIV/AIDS. The high-profile group was co-chaired by Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, a French physician who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008 in conjunction with her mentor, Luc Montagnier, for their joint discovery of HIV, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his campaign against apartheid in South Africa. Another member of the group was basketball legend Magic Johnson, who had announced in 1991 that he had tested HIV positive.

In March 2012, Hughes announced that he had purchased the New Republic, a liberal-minded print magazine that has focused on politics, the arts, and social issues for more than a century. He stated his belief that there was a need for "big idea journalism" in the environment of the early twenty-first century, when books, particularly e-books, were selling at an all-time high. Hughes took on the roles of both publisher and editor-in-chief. His plan was to take the magazine beyond its intellectual history to appeal to a broader audience; this included the immediate goal of bringing the New Republic into the computer age by making it available on devices such as tablet computers and smartphones. That May, Hughes announced on Twitter that the New Republic was introducing the TNR Reader, a daily collection of "the best writing on the web" as filtered through the lens of the magazine.

When he purchased the New Republic, many interviewers questioned whether Hughes's age would be a factor in his running the magazine. Other commentators considered Hughes's involvement more of a vanity project than a serious venture. Some of these concerns appeared to be validated as reports of internal tension at the magazine emerged; in 2014, a number of New Republic employees resigned in protest of the publication's new digital media focus. In early 2016, Hughes admitted he had underestimated the challenges of transforming the magazine and sold the company.

Hughes went on to cofound the Economic Security Project, an organization devoted to examining the potential of guaranteed incomes for US citizens. In 2018, he published the book Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn, which used his own life story as a basis to explore economic and social issues.

He completed a master's degree in economics at The New School for Social Research in New York City. As a PhD candidate at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, in 2024, he was a senior fellow at the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy at The New School. He also cofounded and chaired the Economic Security Project. He was simultaneously writing Marketcrafting: How the Visible Hand Shapes the Economy, which Simon and Schuster slated for publication in 2025.

Personal Life

Hughes remained friends with Zuckerberg after giving up an active role at Facebook. Like Zuckerberg and most of the others involved in founding Facebook, Hughes insisted that the depiction of the founding of the company in Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for the film The Social Network (2010) and in Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires (2009), on which the movie was based, is mostly fiction. Hughes particularly objected to the personification of Zuckerberg as a selfish egotist, insisting that his friend was kind as well as brilliant.

It was at Phillips Academy that Hughes first admitted to himself that he was gay. In 2005, Hughes began dating Sean Eldridge, an investor and political activist. They established the Telos Foundation in 2011. The couple married in 2012. Also in 2012, Hughes and Eldridge joined the bipartisan group New York Lead to promote campaign finance reform in the state of New York.

Bibliography

Bindrim, Kira. "Facebook Co-founder Has Another Network." New York Business 27.13 (2011): F-10. Print.

"Chris Hughes." The Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, 2024, lgst.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/hughes83/. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

De León, Concepción. "The Redemption of Chris Hughes." The New York Times, 21 Feb. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/books/review/chris-hughes-facebook-fair-shot.html. Accessed 8 Mar. 2019.

Dolan, Kerry A. "Chris Hughes on What's Next for Nonprofit Social Site Jumo." Forbes 21 Apr. 2011. Web. 9 Aug. 2012.

Karpel, Ari. "Forty under 40." Advocate 1049 (2011): n. pag. Print.

Kirkpatrick, David. The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World. New York: Simon, 2010. Print.

McGirt, Ellen. "Boy Wonder." Fast Company 134 (2009): 58–97. Print.

Moses, Lucia. "First Mover: Chris Hughes." Adweek 53.20 (2012): n. pag. Print.