Zucked. Roger McNamee
on television. Then came smartphones, which changed everything. User count and usage exploded, as did the impact of persuasive technologies, enabling widespread addiction. That is when Facebook ran afoul of the law of unintended consequences. Zuck and his team did not anticipate that the design choices that made Facebook so compelling for users would also enable a wide range of undesirable behaviors. When those behaviors became obvious after the 2016 presidential election, Facebook first denied their existence, then responsibility for them. Perhaps it was a reflexive corporate reaction. In any case, Zuck, Sheryl, the team at Facebook, and the board of directors missed an opportunity to build a new trust with users and policy makers. Those of us who had advised Zuck and profited from Facebook’s success also bear some responsibility for what later transpired. We suffered from a failure of imagination. The notion that massive success by a tech startup could undermine society and democracy did not occur to me or, so far as I know, to anyone in our community. Now the whole world is paying for it.
In the second year of our relationship, Zuck gave Elevation an opportunity to invest. I pitched the idea to my partners, emphasizing my hope that Facebook would become a company in Google’s class. The challenge was that Zuck’s offer would have us invest in Facebook indirectly, through a complicated, virtual security. Three of our partners were uncomfortable with the structure of the investment for Elevation, but they encouraged the rest of us to make personal investments. So Bono, Marc Bodnick, and I invested. Two years later, an opportunity arose for Elevation to buy stock in Facebook, and my partners jumped on it.
WHEN CHRIS KELLY CONTACTED ME, he knew me only by reputation. I had been investing in technology since the summer of 1982. Let me share a little bit of my own history for context, to explain where my mind was when I first entered Zuck’s orbit.
I grew up in Albany, New York, the second youngest in a large and loving family. My parents had six children of their own and adopted three of my first cousins after their parents had a health crisis. One of my sisters died suddenly at two and a half while I was in the womb, an event that had a profound impact on my mother. At age two, I developed a very serious digestive disorder, and doctors told my parents I could not eat grains of any kind. I eventually grew out of it, but until I was ten, I could not eat a cookie, cake, or piece of bread without a terrible reaction. It required self-discipline, which turned out to be great preparation for the life I chose.
My parents were very active in politics and civil rights. The people they taught me to look up to were Franklin Roosevelt and Jackie Robinson. They put me to work on my first political campaign at age four, handing out leaflets for JFK. My father was the president of the Urban League in our home town, which was a big deal in the mid-sixties, when President Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act through Congress. My mother took me to a civil rights meeting around the time I turned nine so that I could meet my hero, Jackie Robinson.
The year that I turned ten, my parents sent me to summer camp. During the final week, I had a terrible fall during a scavenger hunt. The camp people put me in the infirmary, but I was unable to keep down any food or water for three days, after which I had a raging fever. They took me to a nearby community hospital, where a former military surgeon performed an emergency operation that saved my life. My intestine had been totally blocked by a blood clot. It took six months to recover, costing me half of fourth grade. This turned out to have a profound impact on me. Surviving a near-death experience gave me courage. The recovery reinforced my ability to be happy outside the mainstream. Both characteristics proved valuable in the investment business.
My father worked incredibly hard to support our large family, and he did so well. We lived an upper-middle-class life, but my parents had to watch every penny. My older siblings went off to college when I was in elementary school, so finances were tight some of those years. Being the second youngest in a huge family, I was most comfortable observing the big kids. Health issues reinforced my quiet, observant nature. My mother used me as her personal Find My iPhone whenever she mislaid her glasses, keys, or anything. For some reason, I always knew where everything was.
I was not an ambitious child. Team sports did not play much of a role in my life. It was the sixties, so I immersed myself in the anti-war and civil rights movements from about age twelve. I took piano lessons and sang in a church choir, but my passion for music did not begin until I took up the guitar in my late teens. My parents encouraged me but never pushed. They were role models who prioritized education and good citizenship, but they did not interfere. They expected my siblings and me to make good choices. Through my teenage years, I approached everything but politics with caution, which could easily be confused with reluctance. If you had met me then, you might well have concluded that I would never get around to doing anything.
My high school years were challenging in a different way. I was a good student, but not a great one. I liked school, but my interests were totally different from my classmates’. Instead of sports, I devoted my free time to politics. The Vietnam War remained the biggest issue in the country, and one of my older brothers had already been drafted into the army. It seemed possible that I would reach draft age before the war ended. As I saw it, the rational thing to do was to work to end the war. I volunteered for the McGovern for President campaign in October 1971 and was in the campaign office in either New Hampshire or upstate New York nearly every day from October 1971, the beginning of my tenth-grade year, through the general election thirteen months later. That was the period when I fell in love with the hippie music of San Francisco: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Santana.
I did not like my school, so once the McGovern campaign ended, I applied to School Year Abroad in Rennes, France, for my senior year. It was an amazing experience. Not only did I become fluent in French, I went to school with a group of people who were more like me than any set of classmates before them. The experience transformed me. I applied to Yale University and, to my astonishment, got in.
After my freshman year at Yale, I was awarded an internship with my local congressman, who offered me a permanent job as his legislative assistant a few weeks later. The promotion came with an increase in pay and all the benefits of a full-time job. I said no—I thought the congressman was crazy to promote me at nineteen—but I really liked him and returned for two more summers.
A year later, in the summer of 1976, I took a year off to go to San Francisco with my girlfriend. In my dreams, I was going to the city of the Summer of Love. By the time I got there, though, it was the city of Dirty Harry, more noir than flower power. Almost immediately, my father was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer. Trained as a lawyer, my father had started a brokerage firm that grew to a dozen offices. It was an undersized company in an industry that was undergoing massive change. He died in the fall of 1977, at a particularly difficult time for his business, leaving my mother with a house and little else. There was no money for me to return to college. I was on my own, with no college degree. I had my guitar, though, and practiced for many hours every day.
When I first arrived in San Francisco, I had four hundred dollars in my pocket. My dream of being a reporter in the mold of Woodward and Bernstein lasted for about half a day. Three phone calls were all it took to discover that there were no reporter jobs available for a college dropout like me, but every paper needed people in advertising sales. I was way too introverted for traditional sales, but that did not stop me. I discovered a biweekly French-language newspaper where I would be the entire advertising department, which meant not only selling ads but also collecting receivables from advertisers. When you only get paid based on what you collect, you learn to judge the people you sell to. If the ads didn’t work, they wouldn’t pay. I discovered that by focusing on multi-issue advertising commitments from big accounts, such as car dealerships, airlines, and the phone company, I could leverage my time and earn a lot more money per issue. I had no social life, but I started to build savings. In the two and a half years I was in San Francisco, I earned enough money to go back to Yale, which cost no more than 10 percent of what it costs today.
Every weekday morning in San Francisco I watched a locally produced stock market show hosted by Stuart Varney, who went on to a long career in broadcasting at CNN and Fox Business Network. After watching the show for six months and reading Barron’s and stacks of annual reports, I finally summoned the courage to buy one hundred shares of Beech