The Boy Kings (4 page)

As I entered through the office’s glass doors I looked around for Mark Zuckerberg, whose name I knew only from the bottom of Facebook’s pages, all of which read “A Mark Zuckerberg production.” I imagined someone ghostly, dark haired, not unlike the half-blurry figure with mussed hair in the first Facebook logo (which turned out, disappointingly, to be a slightly modified piece of Microsoft clip art). He had to be dark to make something like this, I assumed. Facebook had too much gravitas already as a useful but slightly unnerving social experiment not to be created by someone with a streak of darkness.

It turned out that Mark preferred to work at night, I was told, when he had a home-court advantage over VCs and other businesspeople used to keeping regular daytime hours. I was surprised and not a little disappointed to find out when Mark finally came into the office later that day, preoccupied as always with taking calls and holding meetings behind the glass door of the video game room, that he was sandy blond, and not particularly tall. I imagined someone reedier, wilder looking, more dark genius in the basement than light-haired goofball in shorts and a Harvard hoodie, shuffling around in athletic shorts and Adidas sandals. We didn’t actually meet on my first day: He reserved his hearty welcomes for the engineers, prodigal sons prized for their
ability to convert life into lines of code. Customer support was barely on Mark’s radar.

When I was finally introduced to Mark the following week, he smiled, seeming to like me well enough, although he soon moved brusquely to something else. He always seemed to be on a different plane when talking to nontechnical employees, distant and detached, reserving his attention for those who were directly important to him: VCs or his fellow founders, and then, gradually, the engineers that he took a liking to. It would take years for one of those people to be me. By then, people assumed that we were friends and had known each other forever. And I guess whether or not we were in fact lifelong friends was irrelevant, because, in the world we were making, all it took to establish a friendship was a few lines of code and a click of the friend button. I received a friend request from Mark a few days after our first meeting, and I clicked accept, though nothing particularly friendly had thus far transpired between us. But I was starting to see that, here, it didn’t matter: The world of relationships, as far as Facebook is concerned, is simple.

At eleven in the morning on my first day at Facebook, the office was an empty warren of desks, about forty feet by forty, cluttered with open drink bottles, half-unwrapped snacks, and video games. A few desks were occupied by young, plain-looking guys in T-shirts, gazing at their screens. They looked barely awake, having not yet consumed their daily quota of bottled Starbucks coffee drinks and Red Bull and seemed startled, if not displeased, to see a strange new woman in the office. The only other woman in the office—an administrative assistant—was more animated, smiling toothily as she welcomed me in. She sat in front of a
large piece of graffiti art featuring a cartoonish, heavy-breasted woman with green hair floating above an ominous cityscape, like an adolescent version of the eyeglasses over Gatsby’s East Egg. Many of the pieces of graffiti in the room featured stylized women with large breasts bursting from small tops that tapered down to tiny waists, mimicking the proportions of female video game characters. It seemed juvenile, but I wasn’t very bothered—it just seemed like the kind of thing suburban boys from Harvard would think was urban and cool.

“We had to move the really graphic painting to the men’s bathroom because someone complained,” an engineer told me as he gave me a tour of the tiny office. He said this with the slight mocking disapproval that was my new colleagues’ default tone in response to anything that resisted their power. I got it: Just because a few women might be let into their Palo Alto clubhouse, we weren’t supposed to complain about things like sexy images of women on the walls. This was their kingdom and their idea of cool, and we shouldn’t mess with it. I could see that it was, in a sense, a test: If you couldn’t handle the graffiti, or the unrepentantly boyish company culture it represented, the job wasn’t going to work out. Easy, I thought, and anyway, given the absence of women around, I figured they would need me for something. You can’t run a successful company with boys alone. The office was small but the stakes, I could tell, were already high. The cold, outsized confidence in the air—a sense of grim determination that accompanied the graffiti and the graphs and the scrawled in-jokes about quails on the whiteboards—said that they wanted to win it all.

Rochester eventually emerged from taking a phone call in
the kitchen. He was an august man with gray hair and an untucked faded polo, whose gaze would only ever seem to fully focus when he was talking animatedly to other engineers in the office about
scaling,
or keeping the site up in the face of increasing users and page views. Scaling, I would soon find out, was the fetish of the valley, something that engineers could and did talk about for hours. Things were either
scalable,
which meant they could help the site grow fast indefinitely, or
unscalable,
which meant that the offending feature had to be quickly excised or cancelled, because it would not lead to great, automated speed and size. Unscalable usually meant something, like personal contact with customers, that couldn’t be automated, a dim reminder of the pre-industrial era, of human labor that couldn’t be programmed away.

Though I didn’t quite realize it on this first day at Facebook, I was in possession of a skill set—that of the English major—that was woefully unscalable as far as Facebook was concerned, more of a liability than an asset. When I perused Mark’s profile on Facebook after we had become virtual friends, I noticed that in the Favorite Books field he wrote, “I don’t read.” Okay, I thought, gearing up for a long battle to be appreciated in my new role, this job
might
work out in the end but it is not going to be as easy as I had first thought.

Rochester’s mature appearance made me think that perhaps this wasn’t just the nerdiest fraternity house in Silicon Valley and that there might be some adults at the helm who understood the importance of having employees with different skill sets. He gathered me and Oliver, a blond Stanford poly-sci grad, into the conference room to give us a polite but rushed description
of our new position. “You’ll basically be answering emails from users. Jake will teach you how to do everything,” he said, handing us off to Jake, another Stanford grad who had started as the first customer-support rep three weeks before. Now that we were here, he was our de facto manager, at least until the official customer support manager could be hired. I sensed from the glowing, familiar way that Rochester said Jake’s name that they already considered him an old hand. When Jake walked into the room a few minutes later wearing a Stanford T-shirt and cargo shorts over a wiry, athletic frame, I guessed that their acceptance of him had to do with his classically preppy looks, like an Abercrombie model come to life. Facebook, it seemed, wanted to have it all: to be the new and scrappy kid on the block and also have the feel of an old boys’ club that had been around forever.

“What email address do you want?” said a blond IT guy with a goofy smile that put me at ease, as he set me up on my new, work-supplied iBook. “[email protected],” I said immediately. He pushed the laptop over me so I could set my password. “It has to be strong,” he said with a French accent, “that means it can’t be an obvious word, and it needs special characters.” I typed in a strong version of the word “Salvador,” after my favorite city in Brazil, with a dollar sign instead of an “S.” Maybe this technology will save us from something (loneliness, alienation, boredom—I wasn’t sure), I thought, and if it doesn’t, maybe it will at least save me, by making me some money and relieving me from the fate of having to start over from scratch, somewhere else, again. I was tired of starting over.

Launching my email program and seeing that “[email protected]” was my address was a heady feeling, like starting a
new country in which I was the only Kate there, queen of a world in which every other Kate would be derived from my archetype. Facebook still had fewer than 5 million users, but I was sitting at the top of what would become a very large virtual land mass. Facebook’s name alone gave me gut confidence in the site: It was a real-life term that represented the website’s function exactly. In choosing this name, Mark had announced his intention not to create some type of Internet fad but to replicate a real world need for a basic human directory. Internet fads come and go, but directories—like phone books before everyone went mobile—satisfy the basic human need to find and stay in contact with people.

Jake, Oliver, and I huddled around the conference table with our laptops and some Cokes from the fridge, which Rochester had showed us proudly was stacked full with every caffeinated soda we could desire. The lights in the conference room were turned off, as Rochester assumed that, like the engineers, we would want the room to be as dark as possible. I always liked working in darkness; it made things feel more exciting, less like an office and more like we were peering out at the world on our screens from inside a cave. Jake introduced us to the janky application through which users’ emails to Facebook flowed. Once we learned how the software worked, Jake taught us, without batting an eyelid, the master password by which we could log in as any Facebook user and access all their messages and data. “You can’t write it down,” he said, and so we committed it to memory, just the first of many secrets and customs we would learn as we became indoctrinated into our new lives as Internet social administrators.

I experienced a brief moment of stunned disbelief: They just hand over the password with no background check to make sure I am not a crazed stalker? I kept checking Jake’s face to see if he would test or caution me in any way about how and how not to use the password, but he didn’t. I worried I would be like a bull stepping into the proverbial china shop: What if I accidentally perform the data equivalent of knocking something over, accidentally changing someone’s password or forgetting to log out of their account, posting on their profile when I meant to post on mine? As surprising as it was, in a way, it was also reassuring, a vote of confidence in me as I stepped into a vast sea of personal data.

Security measures would later be implemented that made it impossible for anyone to use the master password without authenticating themselves as an employee, and a year after that, the password would disappear entirely in favor of other, more secure forms of logging in to repair accounts. But, at the beginning, there was only one password, and like all the boys in the office, I now had the keys to the kingdom. The dummy account we logged into to administer each school network, equipped with a pixelated photo of Mark wearing an Oxford button-down and a slight smirk, was called “The Creator,” and it did feel a bit like being a kind of omnipotent, all-seeing god.

After an hour’s instruction from Jake, we were set loose on the emails flowing in from colleges across the United States. They ranged from the briefest request for a password to long expositions on the social phenomenon that was Facebook and the way it had already changed social interaction on campuses for better or for worse, depending on the author’s viewpoint.
The most glowing fan letters to Facebook betrayed the author’s new sense of power while using this technology: even the shyest person could now glean information and participate virtually in social worlds that formerly seemed restricted or off limits.

There were also complaints about the usual stalker types familiar from the rest of the Internet, voraciously devouring images of women, seeking the most flesh-baring photographs, and spamming women with requests for sex. Jake, Oliver, and I played the police of the virtual college campus, issuing warnings and adjudicating arguments, and were also its tour guides, explaining how poking and tagging and blocking worked to people who were just learning to conceive their social lives in virtual terms.

“What does poking mean?” was a question asked hundreds of times a day, sometimes by people who really didn’t know and other times by people who relished the sexual frisson of writing to Facebook to ask about “poking” and its many interpretations. We always responded innocently, “It’s just a way to get someone’s attention,” knowing full well the range of childish and sexual connotations in play. Being coy, not admitting the libidinal urges driving so much of the site’s usage, was professionally necessary, a way to differentiate Facebook from the cheap and overtly sexual vibes of MySpace. Being coy was also part of the fun, part of the illusion we as a company were constructing that life on Facebook, unlike in reality, was always safe, easy, playful, free, void of cost or obligation. As Dustin Moskovitz, Mark’s Harvard roommate and Facebook co-founder, said over lunch in the office that fall, with his dry, practical intelligence, “Everything on Facebook is flirty.” He was right. Facebook, like
flirting, was a fun way to present yourself lightly and attractively to the world, with no downside, and no commitment.

• • •

A few weeks later, just as I was beginning to worry that I would be one of the only women working at Facebook, Maryann and Emma joined the customer support team. They were close friends of Jake and Oliver’s from Stanford, pleasant in appearance, also nontechnical in major, and we got along as well as needed to perform our duties. At night they disappeared to parties full of former Stanford students and the requisite ping-pong balls and beer-laden Beirut (beer pong) tables that were their university’s preferred nighttime sport.

This particular social clique preferred to discuss parties to more personal or intellectual topics, so we didn’t go beyond casual pleasantries, but that was fitting for our mission of superficially connecting everyone in the world. We had Facebook as a topic of conversation. If we wanted to know more about each other we could visit each other’s profiles and read the details we put there, and if we wanted to get closer than that, we could IM each other privately. From my first day onward, it was like my coworkers and I were connected always, virtually at least, chatting and emailing and posting on each other’s Facebook walls. The first thing Dustin said to me after I had been taught my initial Facebook duties was to get on AIM. “We are on it all the time,” he said, and it was true, for better or worse, we were.