The Boy Kings (24 page)

Writing a blog post in Mark’s words, then, would mean formulating
sentences that sounded like they were coming from the master and commander of this global platform, someone who believed in it, and assumed that you believed in it and wanted it too. If I got the job, this would be a fun puzzle, not unlike the programs the boys wrote to obtain the data they wanted: how to think like Mark, how to convince everyone that Facebook is a necessary and inevitable world-changing thing, our world’s only hope for true and permanent connectedness. I knew how to do this in part because, in my more enthused moments, I believed in it too.

I worked on a sample blog post for Mark, beginning with his standard “Hey Everyone” and proceeding to describe the ways in which some new feature advanced our Facebook-connected future. The work took an evening, punctuated by exasperated moments of typing and erasing and retyping, trying to get the boyish cadence just right: just flat enough to sound like Mark, but still animated enough to be readable, compelling.

A few days later, Mark asked to meet me in his conference room. It was my first one-on-one with the boss and the first time he had ever given me his full attention, even though at this point I had worked for him for over three years. His conference room was entirely white: white plastic Saarinen table, egg-shaped chairs, white walls, whiteboards. From the glass windows I could see as far as Stanford to the west and the peninsula to the north, like a long corridor of wealth stretching to the horizon, tapering off into clouds.

Mark closed the door and stood near his whiteboard, dressed in his usual outfit of squarely cut jeans and a hoodie, looking slightly away and off into the distance. Whenever he looked at me directly, which was rare, it was either with blankness or a
slight smirk, some acknowledgement that we were in on some joke that he assumed that I, as longtime Facebook employee and member of what felt by now like a virtual family, would get. I wasn’t sure what the joke was, if it even existed, or if our simply being there—in command of a universe—was the joke.

“How did you know how to write like me?” he asked with disbelief, once I had situated myself at the white table, my arms folded. “When I read this I thought it was something I wrote.” A slight smile appeared on his face, finally. When he smiles, you know he feels comfortable, among bros, like you’re at the fraternity house and someone has said something particularly funny. I have worked hard, I suddenly realized, to hone myself into a proxy bro to these boys: nonchalant, stolid, avoiding the appearance of caring too much about anything, but especially about the wrong things, which are anything too girly or nontechnical or decorative, things that in this world do not scale. All the girls who acted like girls (and who didn’t have social connections to the founders and early engineers) were still stuck down in the lower tiers of the company, largely ignored except when they appeared at company parties or in the tagged photos of them that appear on Facebook after parties.

“I don’t know, I guess I’ve just spent a long time listening to you speak.”

“Okay, well, you’ve got the role,” he announced. Facebook tended to refer to jobs, especially the loftier and more outward-facing ones, as “roles.”

“Cool,” I replied, “I’m excited.” I was. My interest in internationalization had been waning since we had finished translating Facebook into nearly every language. By that point, my
job had segued into managing the maintenance of the translated Facebook sites, which was a more bureaucratic function than the original translation process had been. Writing for Mark, on the other hand, appealed to a stronger passion of mine: writing in English. It might be the funniest thing I had ever done, and the weirdest job I’d ever have. It seemed almost perfect that I, fascinated by the dark sides of Facebook, would become the shadow Mark Zuckerberg, there to explain what he couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Mark took out the sample blog post I had written and made a few stylistic notes on it with a pen. “This pretty much sounds exactly like what I would write,” he said. “Except for one important thing. I never use a comma before a conjunction,” he said, crossing out all the Oxford commas I had inserted as a matter of habit.

“Okay, no Oxford commas,” I said. I could already see why he wouldn’t like them: Oxford commas weren’t efficient. His style aimed towards the quick, modern, streamlined. I reminded myself also not to use two spaces after a period.

“Have you seen
The West Wing
?” he asked.

“Some episodes, yeah, but I’ve never watched the whole thing,” I explained.

“I want you to watch it,” he said.

“Okay,” I agreed. Of course,
The Wire
was the show that I believed best reflected how things really work, at Facebook and anywhere else. But, where I saw the struggle, the war on the streets that wasn’t polished and clean and was waged by people who weren’t in power, Mark saw the presidency and some new virtual Oval Office of his own making, as white and spotless as his fifth floor conference room.

I wondered sometimes if the very fact that I saw things in ways he didn’t was what had gotten me that far. Because, for all their rabid data consumption, there was a lot the engineers didn’t know. That was partly why Mark made Facebook, and why the boys of the valley were so busy turning our lives into data, as if by doing so, their algorithms could tell them something that their eyes and hearts couldn’t. As Thrax announced triumphantly at his desk one day, “I just wrote an algorithm to tell me who I am closest to!” He went on to show a set of scores that, according to his algorithm’s calculations, revealed how close he was to all his Facebook friends.

• • •

Two weeks later, my job in internationalization wrapped up and, in my new role as Mark’s writer, I was moved to a desk near the door to his conference room. As soon as I had set up my new desk, Mark asked me to step into his office.

“I want you to write an email to the company in my voice announcing that you’ve moved into this position,” he explained.

“Okay,” I said. “Is there anything in particular that you want me to mention?” I asked.

“I think just tell the positions you’ve had and what you’re going to be working on,” he replied. “It’s a good story,” he added with a grin.

“Yes, it is,” I thought, and smiled back. This was the inexorability of Facebook, the desire it seemed to have ever since the launch of News Feed, the desire to turn everything into a story.
Now, as I suppose we all always were on Facebook, I was the story.

Sam stopped by my new desk as I was writing the announcement to ask what I was doing there, and I told him I was going to be writing for Mark. Even Sam, who usually approached everything with deadpan irony, seemed surprised at this almost pitch-perfect, sitcom-like outcome, in which the odd literary one becomes the new power player. He recovered quickly and we laughed together as always, then he jumped on a ripstik and skated off, leaving me to my email-writing.

“Hey Everyone—” I began. “I wanted to congratulate everyone on the fact that we reached 150 million users last week. This is an important milestone and reaching it shows how well we are doing at executing on our mission of making the world more open and connected. We’re really just at the beginning, though, and we have so much more to do. I also want to make a couple of announcements. One is that Kate Losse, who began in Customer Support in 2005 and has since contributed to the Platform and Internationalization teams, is going to be taking on a role as Writer . . .” This isn’t hard, I thought. You just need to sound like everything is easy, like everything happens as it should. At Facebook, I remember thinking at various points along this journey, the world is simple.

When I wasn’t writing for Mark, I was watching the comings and goings of executives and visitors, wondering what decisions were being made that I would have to quickly catch up on and write about. I paid particular attention whenever unfamiliar and important-looking new businessmen came to the office, as that usually meant that some deal was going down that would have
to be announced to the company later, such as when a group of Russians rolled in with the vague, almost fake-sounding name Digital Sky Technologies and invested in Facebook in May 2009. Mark’s days were made up of constant meetings, whether with businessmen in blazers or Facebook product engineers, streams of young men in jeans and tight T-shirts marching nervously in and out of his office on the hour, laptops in hand. I was invited to attend his weekly executive team meetings, but only to, as Elliot told me, absorb Mark’s thoughts.

In the first executive meeting I attended that January, Mark, Elliot, and Sheryl discussed the Twitter threat. Mark, who was usually sanguine, was quite nervous about the speed with which Twitter was picking up users and press, beginning in 2009 with about 7 million user accounts and rapidly
hockey sticking,
as rapid growth is called in the valley (up to about 70 million users by the end of 2009). Twitter threatened to be a faster, simpler, more efficient way of posting information to a wide public. As it turned out, the hunger for social media was big enough to accommodate both Facebook and Twitter, along with a host of later apps like Instagram and Foursquare that provide slightly different variations on ways to post and distribute to an audience.

I listened to Mark and Sheryl discuss the threat and what could be done to stop it, and whether it was something to worry about. At points I wanted to chime in, and began to do so, but saw Mark and Sheryl’s displeased looks and quickly realized that I wasn’t really supposed to speak. This was a power and a status game, after all, and even the highest executives were playing. Everyone in their place. So, I just listened, staring out at the rooftops
of Palo Alto and playing with a loose piece of rubber on my Vans. We will be fine, I thought, Twitter doesn’t have any native pictures; it’s just text. Facebook, as the boys taught me, was all about the faces: the pictures, the video nation, mapping a world.

Eventually, after a month or so, once I had supposedly absorbed enough of Mark’s ideas and mannerisms, I wasn’t invited to the executive meetings anymore, but I didn’t mind. I had begun to realize that aside from the blog posts that I was occasionally called on at midnight or seven in the morning to write, I didn’t have much to write. Around then, many early Facebook employees’ jobs, like mine, had become mainly to serve as the trusted, familiar faces of the company, and sometimes, in the boys’ case, to serve as a research and development arm for our culture, which the company was so intent on preserving.

For example, on a designer’s birthday, his friends rented sumo fat suits and held wrestling matches in the yard, posting hundreds of pictures on Facebook, which showed up in all of our News Feeds due to the heavy activity of people liking them. This is what in Silicon Valley is called a
proof of concept,
proving via the metrics, which in this case are high numbers of likes, that sumo suits at parties are a cultural hit. So, at the next Facebook company party, the party planners rented the same suits and made sumo wrestling into a company party game.

By the same logic, when Thrax wore an American Apparel track jacket to work, Facebook bought one for everyone in the company to wear. For years, some people wore them every day, walking around in matching jersey track jackets like an enormous high-school sports program. In this way, Facebook (and increasingly, the valley’s) fascination with what was cool could
make for a certain kind of career strategy: If you had the right look and played the right games, you could play all the way to the bank.

• • •

In the late spring of 2009, we moved to a new, sprawling campus in an old Hewlett-Packard building. Mark’s desk was purposefully positioned in the building’s dead center, on the lower floor, nearly underground. He called the building a bunker. We were starting to dominate the social media game completely now, to Mark’s sometime chagrin. While he wanted to win, he preferred us always to be in a state of emergency, on lockdown, so that we had to devote ourselves entirely to the company and its mission.

Sometimes, when people didn’t feel stressed enough, he called official lockdown periods, during which employees were required to work on weekends and late into the night. Lock-down periods were often called when some new, other social product, like Foursquare or Tumblr, came on the scene and we needed to mount some serious resistance by incorporating a version of it into Facebook’s feature set, like the Places product (Facebook’s answer to Foursquare, which was eventually superseded by general location tagging similar to that of Google+ or Twitter). Whereas, in 2006, the social network field consisted only of MySpace and Facebook (and a dwindling Friendster), by 2009 and onward, the social application field was becoming increasingly crowded, as many more entrepreneurs and programmers and investors got into the game.

The catch for Facebook was that the more successful we became
(and we were still, despite all the competition, dominant), the more likely employees were to be distracted by money and the new pastimes it enabled: fine dining, bar hopping, five-star vacations, expensive cars. In this sense, winning the game completely was a bit of a curse, because as our user numbers climbed quickly to 250 million in July 2009 and 350 million in December 2009, early employees had less incentive to work constantly, and more leeway to play games and party earlier in the night instead of waiting until the dead hours of two in the morning to socialize like we used to. New engineers were being hired all the time to take up the slack of bug fixing and code development from employees who had been there longer. The Facebook product itself made staying on task difficult: With the steady stream of pictures flowing down our pages, how could we be expected to focus on anything but planning our next photo opportunities and status updates? Looking cool, rich, and well-liked was actually our job, and that job took a lot of work.

Late that summer, employees were invited to sell up to a quarter of our stock to Digital Sky Technologies, the Russian group who had invested in the company. The Internet whispered that some of their money came from a Russian mobster with a violent past. However, when the stock sale was announced at our weekly All Hands, no one asked if the Russians’ money was clean and any questions that even skirted around the topic of who they were and where they came from got what is called a
hand-wavy
answer in Silicon Valley: a brushed off nonanswer at best. Transparency may be Facebook’s business, but there were some things that no one wanted or was allowed to know. One way or another, the Russians cleaned up on their investment:
Five months after we sold our stock to them the stock had tripled in price, and one of the investors had purchased a $30 million mansion in Silicon Valley.