Watch a very young Mark Zuckerberg explain “the Facebook” on CNBC

Today, Facebook is one of the biggest and most famous sites on the internet. But that wasn’t true 11 years ago, when a young Mark Zuckerberg made one of his first TV appearances to promote his new site, which was then just a few months old.

One of the surprising things about Zuckerberg’s quote is that even he didn’t seem to realize — or perhaps wasn’t ready to admit — how big Facebook could get.

“When we first launched, we were hoping for 400 or 500 people,” he said. “Now we’re at 100,000 people. We’re hoping to have many more universities by fall, hopefully over 100 or 200. From there, we’re going to launch a bunch of side applications, which should keep people coming back to the site and maybe make something cool.”

At this early stage in Facebook’s development, Zuckerberg was entirely focused on the college market. He gave no hint that the site could eventually grow to more than a billion users, the vast majority of whom are not college students.