“Were you in the movie?”

This is generally the first question people ask me after they find out that I was one of the Harvard students who moved out to California to help start Facebook. The short answer is that, yes, I was in the movie, but only for a few seconds. There’s a character named Andrew in the house who is always programming, whose concentration can’t be broken because he’s “wired in.” (Note to Aaron Sorkin: we actually called it “lockdown.”)

I tell people that this makes me the only person in the movie who was accurately portrayed.

The truth is that’s what we were all doing. Sure, every once in a while a couple of us would go meet with an investor, and we did have a few small parties (nothing like in the movie), but generally if you had happened to walk into 819 La Jennifer Way at any random hour of the day or night during that first summer in Palo Alto, there was about a 95% chance you would find one or more of us sitting around a cluttered dining room table coding.

One thing we didn’t devote any time to was self-promotion within the tech scene. Partly, this was a matter of timing — back in 2004 there weren’t nearly as many meetups, mixers, and conferences as there are now — but the events that did exist back then we were oblivious to. Sure, we were naive college-aged kids who didn’t really know what we were doing, but more than that, it was a matter of focus. We knew that every minute not spent coding was a minute that Facebook wasn’t improving. As a result, if you don’t count late-night fast food runs, we rarely left the house.

I think the overall level of noise in tech scene has made it much more difficult to focus on the things that are truly important. To pick just one example, many entrepreneurs place much more importance on fundraising (and valuation) than ever before. Listening to them, it’s easy to forget that fundraising is only a means to an end — albeit an important means — but not the true goal. The true goal is (or should be) to create great products, a great company, and, ultimately, value in the world.

Of course, many people you meet will talk about this. The good entrepreneurs and VCs I know really believe it. The best ones actually live by it. It’s a good habit to every once in a while stop and ask yourself — “How is what I’m doing right now creating value in the world?” — but even better is when you don’t even need to ask anymore.

There’s another line in the movie that begins with:

“A million dollars isn’t cool…”

We would have left it at that.

Andrew McCollum is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at NEA.