It's hard to remember a time when you needed to explain Facebook to anyone.

Today, the ubiquitous social network is among the world's largest and most influential companies, with a market value approaching $500 billion and more than 2.2 billion monthly visitors.

On April 10 and 11, its co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered questions from members of Congress about how elections consultancy Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest the personal information of 87 million Facebook users without their consent ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

But, nearly 14 years ago, just a few months after launching the website that was then called "TheFacebook," 19-year-old Harvard student Zuckerberg went on CNBC to explain the premise behind the still relatively unknown website in his first ever television interview.

CNBC's "Bullseye" host Dylan Ratigan invited Zuckerberg on the show because "college networking websites," as he called them, were "perhaps the next big thing."

During the interview, which aired April 28, 2004, Zuckerberg described his nascent website as a place to "find some interesting information about people."