Zucked. Roger McNamee
anticipated many problems, but not the possibility that a foreign country could interfere in our elections without consequences. I could not sit back and watch. I needed some help, and I needed a plan, not necessarily in that order.
New technology is not good or evil in and of itself. It’s all about how people choose to use it. —DAVID WONG
I should probably tell the story of how I intersected with Facebook in the first place. In the middle of 2006, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, sent me an email stating that his boss was facing an existential crisis and required advice from an unbiased person. Would I be willing to meet with Mark Zuckerberg?
Facebook was two years old, Zuck was twenty-two, and I was fifty. The platform was limited to college students, graduates with an alumni email address, and high school students. News Feed, the heart of Facebook’s user experience, was not yet available. The company had only nine million dollars in revenue in the prior year. But Facebook had huge potential—that was already obvious—and I leapt at the opportunity to meet its founder.
Zuck showed up at my Elevation Partners office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, dressed casually, with a messenger bag over his shoulder. U2 singer Bono and I had formed Elevation in 2004, along with former Apple CFO Fred Anderson, former Electronic Arts president John Riccitiello, and two career investors, Bret Pearlman and Marc Bodnick. We had configured one of our conference rooms as a living room, complete with a large arcade video game system, and that is where Zuck and I met. We closed the door and sat down on comfy chairs about three feet apart. No one else was in the room.
Since this was our first meeting, I wanted to say something before Zuck told me about the existential crisis.
“If it has not already happened, Mark, either Microsoft or Yahoo is going to offer one billion dollars for Facebook. Your parents, your board of directors, your management team, and your employees are going to tell you to take the offer. They will tell you that with your share of the proceeds—six hundred and fifty million dollars—you will be able to change the world. Your lead venture investor will promise to back your next company so that you can do it again.
“It’s your company, but I don’t think you should sell. A big company will screw up Facebook. I believe you are building the most important company since Google and that before long you will be bigger than Google is today. You have two huge advantages over previous social media platforms: you insist on real identity and give consumers control over their privacy settings.
“In the long run, I believe Facebook will be far more valuable to parents and grandparents than to college students and recent grads. People who don’t have much time will love Facebook, especially when families have the opportunity to share photos of kids and grandkids.
“Your board of directors, management team, and employees signed up for your vision. If you still believe in your vision, you need to keep Facebook independent. Everyone will eventually be glad you did.”
This little speech took about two minutes to deliver. What followed was the longest silence I have ever endured in a one-on-one meeting. It probably lasted four or five minutes, but it seemed like forever. Zuck was lost in thought, pantomiming a range of Thinker poses. I have never seen anything like it before or since. It was painful. I felt my fingers involuntarily digging into the upholstered arms of my chair, knuckles white, tension rising to a boiling point. At the three-minute mark, I was ready to scream. Zuck paid me no mind. I imagined thought bubbles over his head, with reams of text rolling past. How long would he go on like this? He was obviously trying to decide if he could trust me. How long would it take? How long could I sit there?
Eventually, Zuck relaxed and looked at me. He said, “You won’t believe this.”
I replied, “Try me.”
“One of the two companies you mentioned wants to buy Facebook for one billion dollars. Pretty much everyone has reacted the way you predicted. They think I should take the deal. How did you know?”
“I didn’t know. But after twenty-four years, I know how Silicon Valley works. I know your lead venture investor. I know Yahoo and Microsoft. This is how things go around here.”
I continued, “Do you want to sell the company?”
He replied, “I don’t want to disappoint everyone.”
“I understand, but that is not the issue. Everyone signed up to follow your vision for Facebook. If you believe in your vision, you need to keep Facebook independent. Yahoo and Microsoft will wreck it. They won’t mean to, but that is what will happen. What do you want to do?”
“I want to stay independent.”
I asked Zuck to explain Facebook’s shareholder voting rules. It turned out he had a “golden vote,” which meant that the company would always do whatever he decided. It took only a couple of minutes to figure that out. The entire meeting took no more than half an hour.
Zuck left my office and soon thereafter told Yahoo that Facebook was not for sale. There would be other offers for Facebook, including a second offer from Yahoo, and he would turn them down, too.
So began a mentorship that lasted three years. In a success story with at least a thousand fathers, I played a tiny role, but I contributed on two occasions that mattered to Facebook’s early success: the Yahoo deal and the hiring of Sheryl. Zuck had other mentors, but he called on me when he thought I could help, which happened often enough that for a few years I was a regular visitor to Facebook’s headquarters. Ours was a purely business relationship. Zuck was so amazingly talented at such a young age, and he leveraged me effectively. It began when Facebook was a little startup with big dreams and boundless energy. Zuck had an idealistic vision of connecting people and bringing them together. The vision inspired me, but the magic was Zuck himself. Obviously brilliant, Zuck possessed a range of characteristics that distinguished him from the typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur: a desire to learn, a willingness to listen, and, above all, a quiet confidence. Many tech founders swagger through life, but the best ones—including the founders of Google and Amazon—are reserved, thoughtful, serious. To me, Facebook seemed like the Next Big Thing that would make the world better through technology. I could see a clear path to one hundred million users, which would have been a giant success. It never occurred to me that success would lead to anything but happiness.
The only skin in the game for me at that time was emotional. I had been a Silicon Valley insider for more than twenty years. My fingerprints were on dozens of great companies, and I hoped that one day Facebook would be another. For me, it was a no-brainer. I did not realize then that the technology of Silicon Valley had evolved into uncharted territory, that I should no longer take for granted that it would always make the world a better place. I am pretty certain that Zuck was in the same boat; I had no doubt then of Zuck’s idealism.
Silicon Valley had had its share of bad people, but the limits of the technology itself had generally prevented widespread damage. Facebook came along at a time when it was possible for the first time to create tech businesses so influential that no country would be immune to their influence. No one I knew ever considered that success could have a downside. From its earliest days, Facebook was a company of people with good intentions. In the years I knew them best, the Facebook team focused on attracting the largest possible audience, not on monetization. Persuasive technology and manipulation never came up. It was all babies and puppies and sharing with friends.
I am not certain when Facebook first applied persuasive technology to its design, but I can imagine that the decision was not controversial. Advertisers and media companies had been using similar techniques for decades. Despite complaints about television from educators and psychologists, few people objected strenuously to the persuasive techniques employed by networks and advertisers. Policy makers and the public viewed them as legitimate business tools. On PCs, those tools were