Cameron Winklevoss: The Story of Facebook’s Almost Founder

Cameron Winklevoss was born in New York but raised in Greenwich, Connecticut. His dad, Howard Edward Winklevoss Junior, was a professor at Wharton.

As Cameron grew up, he demonstrated a pattern of teamwork with his twin brother Tyler that they would go on to display for the rest of their lives. They played musical instruments, built Legos, and generally did everything together.

The Winklevoss twins were quite bright too, and the brothers taught themselves HTML when they were just 13 years old. That affinity for tech would become an important ingredient in their future successes.

Cameron attended the Greenwich Country Day School before switching to Brunswick for high school. At the school, Cameron showed that he wasn’t just a tech whiz; he also had an affinity for the arts. He learned Greek and studied Latin while attending Brunswick. 

One summer in 1996, when he was just 14, Cameron and his brother Tyler got interested in rowing. They got in touch with rowing club coach James Mangan, and Mangan quickly realized that the twins had a unique talent for the sport.

Mangan was a twin himself and knew that siblings had a built-in advantage in rowing. Timing and intuition are crucial to rowing success, and siblings often had no problem getting that. 

Once the boys got into rowing, they became obsessed with it. Their high school didn’t have a crew program, so they founded the first one, and a year later, the school’s team achieved varsity status. 

However, Cameron and his brother couldn’t stay at Brunswick forever. They had to graduate, and when they eventually did, they went to study economics at Harvard. 

It was at Harvard that Cameron Winklevoss would start his first company and almost become the founder of Facebook.