Cousin Of Actor Playing Zuckerberg in Facebook Movie Works At Facebook

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Alexia Tsotsis works for TechCrunch as a writer. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles... → Learn More

Meet Eric Fisher, Product Designer at Facebook and Design Advisor at local search site Milo. Fisher also has the notable and somewhat curious designation of being the first cousin of Jesse Eisenberg, the actor who plays his real life boss Mark Zuckerberg in the upcoming Aaron Sorkin movie The Social Network.

Fisher, who has been at Facebook since February, says he and Eisenberg are pretty close and share similar interests. In true geek family fashion, they jointly run a wordplay game at oneupme.com, which has received a modest amount of press coverage.

In some especially weird coincidence, according to Fisher, Eisenberg usually plays characters that remind people of him, “I’m really interested to see if this particular character [Zuckerberg] will do the same, which I’d find neat, since I really respect Mark and like working with him at Facebook.”

When asked whether Zuckerberg was cool with the movie, Fisher said we’d have to defer to what the Facebook CEO has already told press (we’ve contacted Facebook for more details). In the same TV interview where he first revealed the Eisenberg cousin connection, Zuckerberg also expressed his views on the film.

“I just think people have a lot of fiction…. The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time, I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? …We just sat at our computers for six years and coded.”

When asked whether fellow Facebook employees were curious about Fisher’s familial connection to the movie, Fisher replied:

“I’m actually surprised at how often the Jesse/Zuck thing comes up in conversation but I guess it’s a hot topic right now. I have talked with Jesse a lot about the movie and about working at Facebook … it’s an odd duality: he’s impressed I’m working with Mark and I’m impressed he’s playing him.”

Eisenberg himself has previously reassured Zuckerberg about  The Social Network’s reportedly incendiary nature, insisting,“This is not some kind of expose. It’s just an interesting story.”

As is this one. Small world, indeed.

Photo: Movie Cultist

Top Photo: Fishofthebay

Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: January 2, 2004
Funding: $2.34B

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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Company: Milo
Website: milo.com
Funding: $4.95M

Milo.com is a free Web site that enables shoppers to research products online and buy local, providing the best of both worlds. The leader in the local product search space, Milo.com tracks the real-time availability and prices of more than 2 million products at over 48,000 stores across the U.S. By combining the resources of the Web and the immediacy of local stores, Milo.com makes it easy for shoppers to research the best products, find the right prices and...

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Person: Mark Zuckerberg
Companies: Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Facebook, which he started in his college dorm room in 2004 with roomates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Zuckerberg is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for Facebook. He leads the design of Facebook’s service and development of its core technology and infrastructure. Earlier in life, Zuckerberg developed a music recommendation system called Synapse and a peer-to-peer client called Wirehog. However, he abandoned both to pursue new projects. Zuckerberg...

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