Zucked. Roger McNamee
Facebook benefitted not only from lower barriers for startups and changes in philosophy and economics but also from a new social environment. Silicon Valley had prospered in the suburbs south of San Francisco, mostly between Palo Alto and San Jose. Engineering nerds did not have a problem with life in the sleepy suburbs because many had families with children, and the ones who did not have kids did not expect to have the option of living in the city. Beginning with the dot-com bubble of the late nineties, however, the startup culture began to attract kids fresh out of school, who were not so happy with suburban life as their predecessors. In a world where experience had declining economic value, the new generation favored San Francisco as a place to live. The transition was bumpy, as most of the San Francisco–based dot-coms went up in flames in 2000, but after the start of the new millennium, the tech population in San Francisco grew steadily. While Facebook originally based itself in Palo Alto—the heart of Silicon Valley, not far from Google, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple—a meaningful percentage of its employees chose to live in the big city. Had Facebook come along during the era of scarcity, when experienced engineers ruled the Valley, it would have had a profoundly different culture. Faced with the engineering constraints of earlier eras, however, the Facebook platform would not have worked well enough to succeed. Facebook came along at the perfect time.
San Francisco is hip, with diverse neighborhoods, decent public transportation, access to recreation, and lots of nightlife. It attracted a different kind of person than Sunnyvale or Mountain View, including two related types previously unseen in Silicon Valley: hipsters and bros. Hipsters had burst onto the public consciousness as if from a base in Brooklyn, New York, heavy on guys with beards, plaid shirts, and earrings. They seemed to be descendants of San Francisco’s bohemian past, a modern take on the Beats. The bros were different, though perhaps more in terms of style than substance. Ambitious, aggressive, and exceptionally self-confident, they embodied libertarian values. Symptoms included a lack of empathy or concern for consequences to others. The hipster and bro cultures were decidedly male. There were women in tech, too, more than in past generations of Silicon Valley, but the culture continued to be dominated by men who failed to appreciate the obvious benefits of treating women as peers. Too many in Silicon Valley missed the lesson that treating others as equals is what good people do. For them, I make a simple economic case: women are 51 percent of the US population; they account for 85 percent of consumer purchases; they control 60 percent of all personal wealth. They know what they want better than men do, yet in Silicon Valley, which invests billions in consumer-facing startups, men hold most of the leadership positions. Women who succeed often do so by beating the boys at their own game, something that Silicon Valley women do with ever greater frequency. Bloomberg journalist Emily Chang described this culture brilliantly in her book, Brotopia.
With the biggest influx of young people since the Summer of Love, the tech migration after 2000 had a visible impact on the city, precipitating a backlash that began quietly but grew steadily. The new kids boosted the economy with tea shops and co-working spaces that sprung up like mushrooms after a summer rain in the forest. But they seemed not to appreciate that their lifestyle might disturb the quiet equilibrium that had preceded their arrival. With a range of new services catering to their needs, delivered by startups of their peers, the hipsters and bros eventually provoked a reaction. Tangible manifestations of their presence, like the luxury buses that took them to jobs at Google, Facebook, Apple, and other companies down in Silicon Valley, drew protests from peeved locals. An explosion of Uber and Lyft vehicles jammed the city’s streets, dramatically increasing commute times. Insensitive blog posts, inappropriate business behavior, and higher housing costs ensured that locals would neither forgive nor forget.
ZUCK ENJOYED THE KIND OF privileged childhood one would expect for a white male whose parents were medical professionals living in a beautiful suburb. As a student at Harvard, he launched Facebook. Thanks to great focus and enthusiasm, Zuck would almost certainly have found success in Silicon Valley in any era, but he was particularly suited to his times. Plus, as previously noted, he had an advantage not available to earlier generations of entrepreneurs: he could build a team of people his age—many of whom had never before had a full-time job—and mold them. This allowed Facebook to accomplish things that had never been done before.
For Zuck and the senior management of Facebook, the goal of connecting the world was self-evidently admirable. The philosophy of “move fast and break things” allowed for lots of mistakes, and Facebook embraced the process, made adjustments, and continued forward. The company maintained a laser focus on Zuck’s priorities, never considering the possibility that there might be flaws in this approach, even when the evidence of such flaws became overwhelming. From all appearances, Zuck and his executive team did not anticipate that people would use Facebook differently than Zuck had envisioned, that putting more than two billion people on the same network would lead to tribalism, that Facebook Groups would amplify that tribalism, that bad actors would take advantage to harm innocent people. They failed to imagine unintended consequences from an advertising business based on behavior modification. They ignored critics. They missed the opportunity to take responsibility when the reputational cost would have been low. When called to task, they protected their business model and prerogatives, making only small changes to their business practices. This trajectory is worth understanding in greater depth.
Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. —ALBERT EINSTEIN
During Mark Zuckerberg’s sophomore year at Harvard, he created a program called Facemash that allowed users to compare photos of two students and choose which was “hotter.” The photos were taken from the online directories of nine Harvard dormitories. According to an article in Fast Company magazine, the application had twenty-two thousand photo views in the first four hours and spread rapidly on campus before being shut down within a week by the authorities. Harvard threatened to expel Zuckerberg for security, copyright, and privacy violations. The charges were later dropped. The incident caught the attention of three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, who invited Zuck to consult on their social network project, HarvardConnection.com.
In an interview with the campus newspaper, Zuck complained that the university would be slow to implement a universal student directory and that he could do it much faster. He started in January 2004 and launched TheFacebook.com on February 4. Six days later, the trio of seniors accused Zuck of pretending to help on their project and then stealing their ideas for TheFacebook. (The Winklevoss twins and Narendra ultimately filed suit and settled in 2008 for 1.2 million shares of Facebook stock.) Within a month, more than half of the Harvard student body had registered on Zuck’s site. Three of Zuck’s friends joined the team, and a month later they launched TheFacebook at Columbia, Stanford, and Yale. It spread rapidly to other college campuses. By June, the company relocated from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Palo Alto, California, brought in Napster cofounder Sean Parker as president, and took its first venture capital from Peter Thiel.
TheFacebook delivered exactly what its name described: each page provided a photo with personal details and contact information. There was no News Feed and no frills, but the color scheme and fonts would be recognizable to any present-day user. While many features were missing, the thing that stands out is the effectiveness of the first user interface. There were no mistakes that would have to be undone.
The following year, Zuck and team paid two hundred thousand dollars to buy the “facebook.com” domain and changed the company’s name. Accel Partners, one of the leading Silicon Valley venture funds, invested $12.7 million, and the company expanded access to high school students and employees of some technology firms. The functionality of the original Facebook was the same as TheFacebook, but the user interface evolved. Some of the changes were subtle, such as the multitone blue color scheme, but others, such as the display of thumbnail photos of friends, remain central to the current look. Again, Facebook made improvements that would endure. Sometimes users complained about new features and products—this generally occurred when Zuck and his team pushed users too