10. MARK ZUCKERBERG

“Nerds win”

The first significant computer program young Mark Zuckerberg wrote was a version of the board game Risk set in the Roman Empire. “You played against Julius Caesar. He was good, and I was never able to win,” Zuckerberg recalled with a twinge of pride.¹ That’s the thing about playing a video game of your own creation while barely a teenager: even if the character you control loses, you’ve still won. Caesar’s victories, the computer’s victories, were Zuckerberg’s, too. This veneer of ultimate control, according to the computer science pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum, was the best explanation of what motivated the young hackers he found toiling away at all hours of the night at MIT. “No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops,” he wrote back in the 1970s. “The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver.”²

Zuckerberg was given the chance to build his own universes beginning in the sixth grade. This was the mid-1990s, the World Wide Web was catching fire, and PCs were well within reach for a well-to-do family like the Zuckerbergs. Young Mark wouldn’t need to hustle for computer time the way young Bill (Gates) did twenty-five years earlier, proposing school rummage sales and then creating businesses just to get his hands on a minicomputer for a few hours. Mark’s parents were enthusiastic partners in his youthful computer obsession, buying him a first personal computer when he was eleven; and after their son was initially stumped by a programming book “for dummies,” they provided him with a tutor, as well.³ Mark was hooked. “I’d go to school and I’d go to class and come home and the way I’d think about it would be, ‘I have, you know, five whole hours to just sit and play on my computer and write software,’” he recalled about his time growing up in Dobbs Ferry, a suburb just outside New York City. “And then Friday afternoon would come along and it would be like, ‘Okay, now I have two whole days to sit and write software.’ This is amazing.”⁴

Even as a youngster, Zuckerberg planned on shaking up the world with his brilliant programs in a way the original hackers never could have imagined. The hackers of earlier generations were basically coding to impress their computers and themselves, while Zuckerberg was coding to impress his classmates. Video games of all stripes sprang from young Mark’s fingers, often based on drawings from friends who would sketch while he was programming. In 1996, he hacked together a messaging system for his dad’s dental office to announce that a patient had arrived. Later, while away in prep school, Zuckerberg and a classmate, Adam D’Angelo, created an “artificial intelligence” program called Synapse that studied your music listening habits to suggest the next track to play. The program was powered by an algorithm they named “the brain,” whose accuracy in assessing your musical preferences, Zuckerberg and D’Angelo insisted, was within a hundredth of a percent, whatever that means.⁵

Throughout these experiences, Zuckerberg wasn’t just coding, but “building things,” as his older self likes to say. Synapse gave Zuckerberg his first taste of the rewards to come; the program received a positive mention on the influential Web site Slashdot and drew the interest of a number of big companies, including Microsoft and AOL.⁶ Initially, Zuckerberg and D’Angelo were reluctant to sell their program, but by the time they had a change of heart the offers (said to be in the $1 million to $2 million range) were gone. All that remained for Zuckerberg, who attended Harvard, and D’Angelo, the more talented programmer who went to Caltech, was a memorable lesson about striking while the iron is hot.⁷

Zuckerberg, with intense eyes and an easy grin, long resisted being defined by the traits of a traditional hacker, even if he put in similarly obsessive hours in front of his computer and was known to indulge in the same silly programmer jokes, like how to instruct a computer to get drunk. The hackers were antisocial and anarchic, their vision shrunken to fit the dimensions of a metal box; Zuckerberg was worldly, as proud of his broader interests—whether in human psychology or fencing or ancient history—as of his programming skills. The hackers were inward looking; Zuckerberg was constantly taking stock of his environment. The hackers considered Microsoft the Evil Empire; Zuckerberg was in awe.

The hackers loathed Microsoft not only for its opposition to the free software movement but also for what one might call aesthetic reasons. Microsoft software was plain and uninspired, as if the company wouldn’t waste the effort on elegant programming since whatever it produced was destined to become the standard anyway. To hackers, the only reason to program was to do it elegantly. Zuckerberg, by contrast, told the world how impressed he was by Microsoft’s commercially dominant operating systems. “I mean, I grew up using Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95, and I just thought that those were, like, the most unbelievable things,” he said in a talk with Paul Graham, a self-proclaimed hacker and important investor in start-ups through Y Combinator. Graham appears taken aback by this praise of Microsoft products and replies cryptically, “In a sense, they are [unbelievable].” Zuckerberg carries on: “Yeah, they were. They really were awesome. Right?” The crowd chuckles, assuming Zuckerberg is being sarcastic. “Well, I don’t know if you meant that positively, but I did. And I thought, you know, building this ecosystem was really neat, and that kind of inspired me.”⁸

Yes, the hackers may have correctly observed that Microsoft products impose a dull uniformity, but Zuckerberg was willing to let that pass. He was focused on what that simplicity and uniformity provided in return: millions of people using the same operating system and software as they composed their letters or balanced their financial books or played their video games. Here was the age-old tension between indulging individuality (hackers) and imposing order so things could run smoothly (builders). Monty Python’s Life of Brian captured it well when Reg, the ornery leader of a small sect of Judean rebels resisting Roman occupation, tries to rally his followers by asking, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” Annoyingly, they offer example after example, until Reg shouts in frustration: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Zuckerberg found a role model in Gates, the Harvard dropout who became a tech billionaire. Gates, like Zuckerberg, was a computer obsessive intent on building things—a company, operating systems, suites of software, an entire computer ecosystem. Gates, like Zuckerberg, was out of step with his fellow hackers, which became apparent when Gates, at age nineteen, accused a group of Bay Area hackers of stealing the software his company, Micro-Soft, had produced. In 2004, Gates was invited to speak to Zuckerberg’s computer class, where he encouraged students to take time off to start a new project. As Zuckerberg recalled it, Gates said, “You know, one of the things about Harvard is they let you take off as much time as you want and then you can always come back, so you know if Microsoft ever falls through, I’m going back to Harvard.”⁹ The class chuckled. Turns out, that would be Zuckerberg’s last semester before relocating to the Bay Area and (so far) never returning.

Zuckerberg is Gatesian in seeing how computing might prosper under one company’s Roman-like system for connecting people across the globe. The hacker types, like Reg, would hate that rules were being imposed from above, but the public would love the ease of use that such uniformity would deliver. When Zuckerberg was still in college, he allowed his mind to wander. “I was working on this Facebook thing and I thought it would be cool for Harvard and . . . I thought that over time someone would definitely go build this version of this for the world but it wasn’t going to be us.” The job of creating a platform to connect the world seemed too monumental for a bunch of undergraduates to pull off. “It was going to be you know, Microsoft or you know someone who builds software for hundreds of millions of people.”¹⁰ To Zuckerberg’s eternal surprise, or so he says, the task of creating a global social network fell to a bunch of kids barely out of their teens. They would be the new Microsoft and so much more.

While at Harvard, even more than in prep school or back in Dobbs Ferry, Zuckerberg had the freedom to program all the time. He routinely skipped classes and ignored study periods to tinker on his computer. Yet in college there was an opposite pull, too—opportunities seemed to be opening up before his eyes, and Zuckerberg was naturally curious about how he would fit in. Would he be liked? Would he have friends? Would he be successful? What would he make of himself? In the span of a year, Zuckerberg built a series of campus-wide Web sites, one more famous than the next, that were fundamentally social in nature. Zuckerberg was keenly aware of belonging to a community, which by turns he wanted to impress, intimidate, imitate, get to know.

First, he created a Web site called CourseMatch, which allowed students to share what classes they were taking. He was planning his schedule and wondered what students he knew from computer science classes would be studying. Was he looking for new areas of study or wanting to keep tabs on what everyone else was doing? A bit of both? In a matter of weeks, two thousand Harvard undergraduates had joined CourseMatch, which Zuckerberg ran from a laptop in his dorm room. He wasn’t expecting this level of interest and his laptop was fried in the process. Zuckerberg quickly abandoned CourseMatch, after gaining valuable experience in how to create a campus-wide Web site that spread virally, and perhaps how to keep one running in the future, as well.¹¹

In that same vein, Zuckerberg in the fall of 2003, his sophomore year, built the infamous Facemash, which was an even quicker hit on campus. The idea was to let students compare the attractiveness of their classmates head-to-head, the tried-and-true hot-or-not method for reaching an online audience with advertising. But Zuckerberg at this point wasn’t an entrepreneur on the make. He says he wasn’t planning to turn Facemash into a business and he wasn’t trying to persuade students to upload personal material Web 2.0 style. In fact, much of the fun for Zuckerberg was “liberating” photos of Harvard students by hacking the university’s servers. In a digital journal that appeared on the Facemash site, Zuckerberg detailed how he obtained the pictures the site used. It’s a brief glimpse into his puzzle-solving mind, as each dorm on campus offered its own obstacles: for some, Zuckerberg had to deduce the student passwords before accessing a photo file, in others he only had to run a computer script that could copy photos twenty at a time. When one cache of photos proved particularly hard to hack, he writes, he took a break and opened another Beck’s.¹²

After he had collected the photos and completed the programming during a couple of all-nighters, Zuckerberg published the site, which randomly matched two photos to be compared by a visitor to the site. His slogan: “Were we let in for our looks? No. Will we be judged on them? Yes.” Word spread over a single weekend and there were already 450 visitors who voted at least 22,000 times. Student organizations complained, and Zuckerberg quickly shuttered the site. He wrote to apologize to two campus women’s groups, Fuerza Latina and the Association of Black Harvard Women, saying he didn’t anticipate how quickly interest would spread and that he hadn’t really thought the idea through. “I definitely see how my intentions could be seen in the wrong light,” Zuckerberg wrote in his apology. In a student newspaper article on the controversy, he portrayed himself as little more than a junior computer scientist: “I’m a programmer and I’m interested in the algorithms and math behind it.”¹³

The fallout from Facemash was intense, and Zuckerberg was brought before Harvard’s disciplinary board, providing yet another parallel with Gates, who faced the same board back in the 1970s over his use of a university computer for company business. Zuckerberg says he and his friends were convinced he would be expelled. Not only could the project be seen as bullying in its premise, but Zuckerberg had trampled over students’ privacy by copying and then publishing their photos without permission. The Harvard College Administration Board found Zuckerberg guilty of “improper social behavior” and placed him on probation.¹⁴ One good thing to come from the whole experience, he says looking back, was that he met his future wife, Priscilla Chan, at what was supposed to be his farewell party.¹⁵

Yet there were other benefits, too, important lessons about building online networks. First, he saw how being part of a relatively small community like Harvard made a social Web site take off—even something as tangential as a hot-or-not site blew up because of the likelihood that a user knew at least one of the participants. Clearly there was an urgent need (call it prurient, call it social, call it mean, call it supportive) to engage online with the people you were living next to. Second, he now grasped what would be the primary challenge in running a successful social site: enticing people to share their personal information online. Hacking that information wasn’t a practical solution, of course, but neither was limiting oneself to what was already available.

Zuckerberg took heart from an editorial in the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, which accepted Facemash for the mischievous idea that it was and just wished that he had limited himself to students who agreed to participate. “Such a site,” the Crimson wrote, “would have brought joy to attention-seekers and voyeurs alike.”¹⁶ Zuckerberg said at one point that this editorial gave him the idea of building Facebook with voluntary participants and built-in privacy restrictions. But within that praise from his fellow students was that fundamental misperception—Zuckerberg’s next project couldn’t simply appeal to attention-seekers and voyeurs. It had to appeal to everyone or, alternatively, bring out the attention seeker/voyeur in all of us.

During what turned out to be his two years at Harvard, Zuckerberg seemed to be pursuing a curriculum designed for operating a technical/social project like Facebook. He planned to major in psychology—his mother is a licensed psychiatrist¹⁷—where he could study what made people tick, while taking the most classes in computer science to learn what made machines tick. There would be a dash of Roman history thrown in as well. Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg homed in on the central question in computer science and psychology—namely, can a computer be programmed to think like a human? And if not, why not? His reading in psychology, he said, taught him to be wary of the idea. “The biggest thing that I took away from the psychology classes that I took were how little we know about how the human brain works,” Zuckerberg says. “I think that our understanding of the brain is kind of like if you opened up a computer and were like, ‘Oh, when you’re typing this command this part gets warm.’”¹⁸

Zuckerberg’s views on the potential for artificial intelligence typified the shift in computer science over its fifty-year history. What began as an esoteric discipline largely fueled by the ambitious search for the essence of thought and intelligence, today is a highly practical subject pursued at some level by nearly all undergraduates at a school like Stanford.¹⁹ Computers haven’t proved as profound as John McCarthy and others hoped, but they are certainly quite capable. Computer science has become content to design computers that simulate people well enough that people will acknowledge them, play with them, take their suggestions. In either approach, computer scientists relied on psychology: the early researchers studied the human brain to build thinking machines that worked along the same lines, as hubristic as that may have sounded; the Zuckerbergian social-network operators studied the brain to understand why people do what they do, the better to influence them. As Joseph Weizenbaum’s experiment with the computer therapist Eliza showed back in the 1960s, people didn’t need much cajoling to open up about themselves to computers—it seemed to come naturally. Weizenbaum was horrified at this misplaced trust by the public and ran away from AI, while Zuckerberg has tried to capitalize on it at Facebook.

Zuckerberg’s primary lesson from psychology classes is that people need people and are driven to satisfy this need. We notice and appreciate minute differences in each other’s faces and recognize that slight shifts in expression can convey a profound change in mood. “I think that that’s something that we often overlook in designing products,” he said. “And that’s one of the things that I’m just really interested in—and with Facebook—is [that] people are still interesting to other people.” People generally want to be with other people and do what other people, particularly their friends, are doing—the network effect, in other words. This interest in both hacking and psychology has allowed Zuckerberg to recognize that a social Web site could become the mechanism for connecting the world, as opposed to, say, a site about money or shopping, entertainment or information: “If you can build a product where people can go and learn about the people around them and share information and stay connected with people then that’s something that’s super important to people.”²⁰

However, the Facemash experience chastened Zuckerberg, at least momentarily. He was very nearly kicked out of school in disgrace. He had some serious explaining to do to his parents. And for what? Just to build something? Anything? Yet all the controversy served as great advertising for his programming skills and skills at promotion. In the immediate aftermath of Facemash, a pair of entrepreneurially minded Harvard undergraduates, the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and a friend who had recently graduated, Divya Narendra, sought Zuckerberg’s help in completing a student social-networking site they planned to call HarvardConnection and then rename ConnectU once it invariably spread to other schools.²¹ None of these three was a hacker, however, a fact that became apparent once Zuckerberg discovered that they had spent almost a year on their idea and had nothing to show for it. Over that same period, Zuckerberg must have created and ditched a dozen projects, including a computer application that would synch up music players so he could try to persuade everyone at Harvard to play the same song at the same time. Why? Because it would be really funny.²²

This restless energy was what the Harvard-Connection team hoped to enlist from Zuckerberg, and they were prepared to name him a partner in the business and give him a share of the company in return for getting the Web site working. But, in truth, no offer from the HarvardConnection team, other than complete surrender, could fix what was a profoundly unequal relationship. Zuckerberg, the programmer, held all the cards. One day, he emailed to say that he had completed most of the coding and that the site could launch soon, and then he ghosted the team for the next two months. When they managed to get a reply, Narenda says, Zuckerberg would invariably write back to ask for a little more time. After this sputtering couple of months, Zuckerberg broke off the arrangement entirely and informed the HarvardConnection team that he was working on a different project. On January 11, 2004, Zuckerberg registered the domain name, thefacebook.com, his next social-networking Web site for the Harvard campus. On February 4, the site went live, though the Winklevosses learned about it only from an article in the Crimson almost a week later.²³ Their first thought, “Well, that sounds like our idea.”²⁴

The drama that followed from this college breakup has been described in magazine articles, books, and even a movie, The Social Network. There was a court case, too, during which Zuckerberg had to submit to a long, contentious deposition and texts were made public in which he mocked his three wannabe partners. The case settled in 2008 with a payment of money and Facebook stock worth tens of millions of dollars to the Winklevosses and Narenda.²⁵ The central question raised by the court case and the media coverage was: did Zuckerberg steal the idea for Facebook or was an idea like Facebook too obvious for any individual or individuals to own?

One of Zuckerberg’s computer science professors, Matt Welsh, defended his former student in a blog post by observing, “Ideas are cheap and don’t mean squat if you don’t know how to execute on them. To have an impact you need both the vision and the technical chops, as well as the tenacity to make something real. Mark was able to do all of those things, and I think he deserves every bit of success that comes his way.” The lesson to Welsh, who left academia to become an engineering manager at Google: “Nerds win.”²⁶ Think about it: Zuckerberg needed nothing that the rich and connected Winklevosses could offer, while they needed everything he had to contribute. For better or worse, these young computer experts now had the power to promote their own big ideas . . . not only about computers, but about everything.

As Zuckerberg anticipated, thefacebook.com filled a vital need on campus, providing a directory for all Harvard students and some basic ways to share information like what courses you were taking and your phone number. It was introduced in early February, and by the end of the month three-quarters of all undergraduates had signed up.²⁷ Zuckerberg couldn’t help taking a shot at the IT team at Harvard, whom he considered cautious bureaucrats in need of student-led disruption. “Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard,” he said in the days after launching his site. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the university a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.” Never mind that the Harvard team was delayed in releasing its official online facebook in part because it had to remove the kind of security flaws that allowed a hacker like Zuckerberg to create Facemash. From his nineteen-year-old hacker’s perspective, it was clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.²⁸

Initially, what proved fascinating to Zuckerberg about thefacebook was that it provided a platform for social networking that was tied to a particular place, a campus, and a particular group of people, the students there. In this way, the Internet was supplementing offline relationships, not replacing them. The goal of thefacebook “wasn’t to make an online community, but sort of like a mirror for the real community that existed in real life.”²⁹ At times, 10 or 20 percent of all Harvard students were logged in at the same time. How could you not belong if all your neighbors did? Thefacebook.com ran as a self-sufficient operation almost from the start, relying on the revenue from a few ads on the site to pay the modest $85-a-month server fees.³⁰

This brief time of happy camaraderie lasted the better part of a month. Soon Zuckerberg was, as Professor Welsh describes, “swept up by forces that were bigger and more powerful than anyone could have expected when thefacebook was first launched.”³¹ Take the central question of whether thefacebook should become a full-fledged business. Zuckerberg was confident that it would not. Though Zuckerberg was never a serious computer science researcher like Brin and Page, who possessed an engineer’s commitment to running an ethical, efficient search engine, he shared their instinct that vital Web services like online directories were too important to sully with commerce. A few months into the project, Zuckerberg told a student reporter: “I mean, yeah, we can make a bunch of money—that’s not the goal . . . I mean, like, anyone from Harvard can get a job and make a bunch of money. Not everyone at Harvard can have a social network. I value that more as a resource more than, like, any money.” He said he had rejected a number of early money-making ideas for his project, like selling email addresses or allowing students to upload résumés and charging companies to search through them. Zuckerberg reassured the student reporter that he would be all right: “I assume eventually I’ll make something that is profitable.”³²

Yet Zuckerberg was almost immediately forced to consider whether thefacebook had to grow. For example, what should happen to Harvard students when they graduate? Should they be abandoned? What about students at other colleges who were clamoring for a similar service on their campus? And what about friends on different campuses who wanted to keep up with each other? How about expanding internationally? When thefacebook on March 1 decided to move beyond the Harvard campus, it had a unique advantage at its disposal: status envy. Which schools would be deemed worthy to follow Harvard? As it happens, the next schools thefacebook chose were also elite—Yale, Columbia, Stanford—which stoked a frenzy at the 99.9 percent of American schools that were still excluded. This was a nice twist on the network effect: not only did people want to join thefacebook because others had already joined, but they wanted to join because they suspected they had been deemed unworthy of joining. Studio 54 meets the viral Web.³³

Growth soon turned into a necessity for thefacebook, however, and the velvet rope was replaced by an open door. In the better part of a year, thefacebook was on nearly every campus in America, and dozens in Europe as well. Turns out that the network effect could be as much of a threat as a benefit. If thefacebook didn’t keep growing, another service presumably would spread across the country and what would become of this little, Harvard-only project? Even loyal users would leave in order to have access to all their friends at other schools. Standing still simply was not an option. In fact, Zuckerberg says that the schools where Facebook first expanded may have been elite, but they were in fact chosen because his small team had heard that they were closest to having their own student-run Facebook-type services that could potentially leap to other schools.³⁴

Growth and fighting off competitors became the order of the day. Zuckerberg recalled that about a year into the project a rival emerged that called itself College Facebook, which appeared to be a clone of thefacebook, right down to the name. Its plan, he said, was to sign up schools on the West Coast where Facebook hadn’t arrived. The response from Zuckerberg’s team was to immediately engage the battle under a practice called “lockdown,” which meant “we literally did not leave the house until we had addressed the problem,” Zuckerberg said. He added that “now it’s a little looser of an interpretation inside the company. We don’t literally lock everyone inside the office but about as close to that as we can legally get.”³⁵ Once Zuckerberg changed his view on expanding thefacebook to other campuses, rampant growth became the highest priority. His identity as a genius would now be linked to the vibrancy of his project.

Unlike the Google guys, however, Zuckerberg was under little pressure to turn his baby into a business. Even as it grew, thefacebook was able to keep the servers running with little difficulty. And because he was at Harvard, not Stanford, there was no gateway professor to make an introduction leading to an investment offer that he couldn’t refuse. The move from cool project to lucrative business seemed to run in relative slow-motion for thefacebook: after his sophomore year, Zuckerberg relocated for the summer to Silicon Valley—he’s not exactly sure why, except that it somehow made sense: “Originally when we went out there, we weren’t expecting to move out there, we wanted to go out there for the summer because we had this feeling like, ‘Okay, all these great companies come from Silicon Valley. Wouldn’t it be cool to spend the summer out there and get that experience?’”³⁶

Silicon Valley worked its magic, however. At the end of the summer and as successive new semesters approached, the team considered returning to Harvard and then thought: Why not stick it out a little longer? By December 2004, around the time to consider returning for spring semester, thefacebook had a million registered users. Also, the company had already lined up a $500,000 loan from Peter Thiel, after Thiel’s friend Reid Hoffman passed on the opportunity of being the first outside investor because of his own social network LinkedIn. Thiel’s loan would convert into a 10 percent share of the company assuming thefacebook had grown to 1.5 million users by the end of 2004. It didn’t quite reach that goal, but Thiel still decided to convert his loan into an investment.³⁷ (Hoffman didn’t entirely abstain, either. He invested $40,000 for a share of the company that today would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.)

For someone of Zuckerberg’s generation, Thiel was a much more attractive investor than a traditional VC. He had already run a successful company and was outspoken in his belief that a founder should be entrusted with guiding the company he created. Yet for all his faith in Zuckerberg’s ability, Thiel also splashed some cold water. He wanted to shake Zuckerberg out of his lackadaisical approach toward running a business. A couple of times in his career as CEO, Zuckerberg would need to have market realities made clear to him. First up was Thiel, who immediately put the twenty-year-old Zuckerberg back on his heels by pointing out that he had mangled how shares were allocated to his partners. “I really knew so little at the time,” Zuckerberg recalled. “I mean, when Peter Thiel came in to invest, one thing that he demanded was that all of the founders be on vesting schedules. And I didn’t even know what a vesting schedule was. I’d never heard of that.”³⁸ Thiel did leaven his criticisms with rewards, like his gift of an Infiniti FX35. The luxury car could be seen parked outside Zuckerberg’s modest apartment, which had a living room with a mattress on the floor and a shower without a curtain.³⁹

Facebook became the ideal candidate to test Thiel’s theories about the network effect and monopoly power. Even in 2005, Zuckerberg imagined that he was creating a service that the public needed to access every day, unthinkingly, like water or electricity. “We’re not trying to create something that people use for a specific purpose,” Zuckerberg said at a talk at Stanford barely a year in. “This is a utility that people can use to just find relevant information socially to them.”⁴⁰ In other words, a social good. Thiel saw a financial good, however, a potential monopoly that could sit above the hypercompetitive marketplace where no one makes any profit.

Thiel’s persistent message to Zuckerberg was to grow and grow fast, the equivalent of a traditional utility rushing to lay pipe or cables in order to expand its customer base. “He was good at saying, ‘Here’s the one thing that matters,’” Zuckerberg recalled about Thiel, who remains on Facebook’s board. And what was that one thing? “Connecting everyone as quickly as possible, because network effects were a massively important part of this.”⁴¹ During this growth spurt, however, Zuckerberg’s project went from a self-supporting site to a project that required large outside investments, the first of which came from Accel Partners in April 2005—more than $12 million for a 15 percent stake, supplemented by $1 million from the partner at the firm, Jim Breyer.⁴²

Facebook would need the money to add new programmers and equipment as it kept scaling. Zuckerberg explained his hiring practices at the time, which were exactly what you would expect from a young, privileged hacker and typical for Silicon Valley start-ups. The first quality he sought was “just raw intelligence,” that elusive big brain who can build things. Youth, too. Young big brains. “You can hire someone who’s a software engineer and has been doing it for 10 years, and if they’re doing it for 10 years, then that’s probably what they’re doing for their life. And I mean, that’s cool . . . but if you find someone whose raw intelligence exceeds theirs, but has 10 less years of experience, then they can probably adapt and learn way quickly and within a very short amount of time be able to do a lot of things that that person may never be able to do.”⁴³ The second quality, he said, was devotion to the company’s cause so that they will be willing to work really hard.

Here was the typical staffing method of a Silicon Valley start-up that cared not a whit for diversity, racial or gender, or an outside life, and wasn’t afraid to tar someone as young as thirty-two as washed up. It’s a sobering description of how to staff for a small company, focused on this prized if elusive quality “raw intelligence,” which emerges from test scores or an intense interview. But that approach becomes downright scary when you consider that this company now has thousands of employees. There was an awkward scene, too, when a Rolling Stone reporter was visiting Facebook’s headquarters early on and heard Dustin Moskovitz, Zuckerberg’s roommate and cofounder of Facebook, joke about trying to use their Facebook powers to meet attractive women back at Harvard. “Dude, we just got out of a sexual harassment seminar,” Zuckerberg snapped at him. These were kids who were still college age, grappling with adult responsibility. The disconcerting fact, however, was that the grownup in charge was Peter Thiel.⁴⁴

Zuckerberg enthusiastically adopted Thiel’s advice of pursuing runaway growth, which meant coming to terms with a profound shift in the purpose of his social network. Rather than running a service centered on a particular location, Facebook would increasingly be based on relationships, whether formed online or off. Back in 2005, he expressed his doubts about spreading thefacebook too far, too fast and made a case that a social network should focus intensely on a particular community. “There is a level of service that we can provide when we were just at Harvard that we can’t provide for all of the colleges,” he said, “and there is a level of services when we’re a college network that we wouldn’t be able to provide if we went to other types of things.”⁴⁵

Once Facebook made this shift from colleges to high schools to particular companies to the wider world, it sought ways to re-create the feelings of connection that came from living close by. The immense amounts of data Facebook collected provided some clues. There was the “ten friend rule,” for example; it revealed itself as a pattern among new users as they explored the site, particularly the main newsfeed containing updates about Facebook friends’ lives. “Once you had 10 friends,” Zuckerberg observed, “you had enough content in your newsfeed that there would just be stuff on a good enough interval where it would be worth coming back to the site. . . . We re-engineered the whole flow of having someone sign up to get all this extraneous shit out of the way and just make it so that the only focus at the beginning is helping people find people to connect with. And we honed what the tools were to get them to do that.”⁴⁶

For a puzzle solver and amateur psychologist like Zuckerberg, the access to so much information about people was thrilling. The company put this data to other uses as well. Like PayPal under Max Levchin’s guidance, Facebook designed algorithms to determine if a registered user was a real person or a bot accessing the site as part of some scam. “We actually compute how, like a percentage of realness that a person is, and if they fall below a threshold then they’re gone,” Zuckerberg said in 2005, describing how the algorithms treated humanness fluidly. “It’s actually pretty funny. This is something that my friends and I like to do. We just go through and like see how real certain people are who we know are actually real people. We’re like, you’re only 75 percent real.”⁴⁷ Another purpose for its algorithms was more akin to what Google does; that is, to help users sift through piles of information to get to what is most relevant. For example, Facebook’s algorithms had to determine who among three hundred friends should have his photos shoot to the top of a newsfeed, and whose should largely be ignored.

This Google-like question—what are the most relevant photo results for a particular Facebook user?—points out the similarities between the missions of the two companies. Both are in the information-organizing business. The information that Google organizes is everything that appears on the Web, as well as the material on its own sites, while the information that Facebook organizes is whatever people are willing to share about themselves on its site. Google’s initial hurdle was to locate, copy, and store immense amounts of data, using computers that “crawl” the Web; Facebook’s hurdle is to persuade the public to be more forthcoming. “You can’t just send a Web crawler around and learn what’s going on with people,” Zuckerberg said, “you have to build tools that give people the power to share that content themselves.”⁴⁸

In July 2006 Yahoo offered a cool billion for Facebook, which Thiel pushed Zuckerberg to at least consider. Marc Andreessen says he was a rare voice encouraging Zuckerberg to follow his instincts and keep trying to expand Facebook. “The psychological pressure they put on this 22-year-old was intense,” said Andreessen. “Mark and I really bonded in that period, because I told him, ‘Don’t sell, don’t sell, don’t sell!’”⁴⁹ When Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting that considered the Yahoo offer, Thiel recalled, he said, “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.”⁵⁰

Looking back, Zuckerberg says he regrets that he even entertained the idea of selling. “I mean if you don’t want to sell your company, don’t get into a process where you’re talking to people about selling your company,” he said, laughing. But the entire experience, he says, gave him a way to assess the core values of his team, and then shed those who tipped their hand that they were motivated exclusively, or primarily, by getting a share of a billion-dollar fortune. “That’s an awesome outcome, but that’s not what I was in it for and I wanted people around me for whom that’s what they were in it for was to build a company for the long term,” he said.⁵¹ Thiel wasn’t tarred by his association with the Yahoo offer. He remains a key advisor to Zuckerberg, though Zuckerberg clearly enjoys needling him about what a mistake selling Facebook would have been, even worse than selling PayPal for $1.5 billion.⁵² On the other hand, Andreessen was invited to join Thiel on the Facebook board two years later, in 2008.

The Yahoo offer was so scarring because it confirmed what Zuckerberg distrusts about the predominant view in Silicon Valley—so many there appear to be in it for the money! “If I were starting now, I just would have stayed in Boston I think,” he told an interviewer in 2011, when he was still in his mid-twenties. Silicon Valley clearly had the experienced hands to help a nineteen-year-old scale his college project—the accountants, the lawyers, the data centers, the programmers, the steely minded VCs. But, he adds, “there’s aspects of the culture out here where I think it still is a little bit short term focused in a way that bothers me. You know, whether it’s like people who want to start companies . . . not knowing what they like, I don’t know, to like flip it.”⁵³ Zuckerberg is clearly conflicted by the idea of running a business. A year earlier, in 2010, he defended the role of the market in Facebook’s growth, speaking in engineering terms. “Building a company,” he said, “is one of the most efficient ways in the world that you can kind of align the incentives of a lot of smart people, towards making a change.”⁵⁴

In May 2012, these abstract considerations suddenly became real. Facebook stumbled through its IPO, and the scenario was similar to what Google’s founders were put through when they acted as though they were running a computer lab rather than a business with investors who were only interested in profits. Their resistance to carrying advertising on their beloved search engine, or to accepting an outside CEO, melted away. Likewise, when Facebook was failing to deliver the expected level of profits after the stock offering, Zuckerberg was forced to adjust his attitude. He assigned a top engineer to the task of giving a boost to advertising, just as the Google guys had. “Wouldn’t it be fun to build a billion-dollar business in six months?” Zuckerberg asked the engineer, Andrew Bosworth.

Like Brin and Page, Zuckerberg made a big concession on advertisements, reversing his view that they should not be permitted in the main newsfeed unless a friend had “liked” the product. The newsfeed had been sacrosanct—a process that had its own logic, flowing from the interests of your particular set of friends, independent of business considerations—much the way Brin and Page had treated search results. Interestingly, when Zuckerberg bent on this principle, he, like Brin and Page, later cited research showing that users were actually happier with the new ads.⁵⁵

These detours into business calculations must have struck a blow to the egos of Know-It-Alls like Zuckerberg and Brin and Page. From the start, they have been the indispensable ones; they called all the shots. Yet when the market turned, a hard truth emerged: in fact, others were calling the shots. You could take the long view and see this as nothing more than the Tesla lesson, which taught that even the most free-thinking innovators had to spend some serious brainpower pleasing investors lest they lose the freedom to work on the really important questions. In Google’s case, those questions involve applying artificial intelligence in ever more elaborate ways, which was what brought them to the Stanford computer science department in the first place.⁵⁶ Zuckerberg seems to have even more ambitious goals that he wants to be free to pursue: connecting the world “so you have access to every idea, person and opportunity.”⁵⁷

In the immediate years that followed, Zuckerberg returned to the goal of global connection and communication, something his company pursues through technical improvements, like the algorithms designed to entice users to share more data or the drones and satellites that provide rudimentary Internet access to remote areas so that new users can share personal information about themselves. At times, too, Facebook has relaxed the privacy settings for the information stored in its computers, confident that once more material is being shared, its users will be pleased and accept the new standards. Users have at times objected, however, and then Facebook apologizes and returns to some version of the old settings.⁵⁸ But it keeps trying, confident that, as the ten-friend rule suggests, once people experience the benefits of sharing information they will want to share more, too. In fact, Zuckerberg has observed that the amount of information being shared online has doubled every year—a discovery his friends have called Zuckerberg’s law, in a tip of the hat to Moore’s law, which predicted the steady increase in microchip processing speed.

This new law, Zuckerberg believes, has a disruptive potential similar to that of Moore’s law. As we share more information via digital tools like Facebook, we as a species are enhancing our ability to connect and feel empathy for others. If a computer is about extending a person’s ability to think—providing what Steve Jobs called “a bicycle for our minds”⁵⁹—a social network “extends people’s very real social capacity,” Zuckerberg argues.⁶⁰ As evidence, he points to a change Facebook has detected in the so-called Dunbar number, which was originally proposed to suggest that there is a cap to the number of close friends a person can have at one time. Based on observations of other primates and correlating brain size to the number of members in a species’ social group, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that humans were capable of maintaining genuine, empathetic relationships with up to about 150 people.⁶¹

Facebook, Zuckerberg contends, has raised that number because of the ease and efficiency in making and keeping online friendships. “Naturally when people sign up the average amount of friends that they get is around 150,” he said, “but then over time it can expand and you can keep in touch and stay in touch with many more people.”⁶² This is an oddly quantitative way of suggesting that there has been an “improvement” in the human ability to feel empathy. To start, this presumes that maintaining many good friendships is superior to nurturing just a few. But this bias shouldn’t necessarily be surprising. Silicon Valley is a culture that evaluates intelligence with a number and business success with a number and attractiveness with a number. Why not sociability, even if it means draining friendship of all that is unquantifiable—the depths of shared history, a mysterious sympatico?

In a letter Zuckerberg and his wife wrote to their daughter, Max, they explain how expanded Internet access will help the public in so many ways, extending life spans, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, broadening educational opportunities. They are expressing a generous impulse, but it necessarily comes in a disturbing package: a world filled with isolated individuals—geographically and emotionally—who are expected to fend for themselves rather than look to the community for sustenance. In the Zuckerbergian vision, an Internet connection becomes a lifeline: “It provides education if you don’t live near a good school. It provides health information on how to avoid diseases or raise healthy children if you don’t live near a doctor. It provides financial services if you don’t live near a bank. It provides access to jobs and opportunities if you don’t live in a good economy. The Internet is so important that for every 10 people who gain Internet access, about one person is lifted out of poverty and about one new job is created.”⁶³

This seems a strange way to think of helping a person, as opposed to helping, say, a computer. For better health care, we must build clinics and hospitals and train doctors, as well as improve access to self-treatment via the Internet. For a better education, we must build schools and hire more teachers and train and compensate them better, as well as introduce self-teaching via the Internet. For a better work experience, one that ensures that workers are treated fairly and given responsibility as part of a motivated team, we must promote unions and mutual support in the workplace rather than encourage an individual to become a “start-up of you” forced to sell her services online at the whim of the market. Any path to health, education, and wealth must include neighbors, the people who are part of an actual community, not just a virtual one. Even the great Zuckerberg needed a personal tutor at first to learn how to program.

Education has been a particular focus of Zuckerberg’s philanthropy, and he has brought his familiarly individualistic, mechanistic view of how people behave to both teachers and students. There was his well-publicized foray as a donor to the Newark, New Jersey, school system, when he tried to tie his $100 million gift to a series of policies toward teachers, like awarding bonuses of up to 50 percent of salary to teachers based on performance. An educational algorithm, if you will. He also proposed eliminating certain other policies—algorithms that he didn’t like—like teacher seniority, which is an automated way of saying that age and experience should entitle you to advantages.

Zuckerberg’s positive program of using bonuses to extract better performances from teachers, and encouraging more ambitious people to become teachers, faced a few problems and was never adopted by the school system. First, the district would be unable to sustain such a program once Zuckerberg’s donation ran out—it was too expensive, when applied to a unionized school system. Furthermore, there was no precise way to measure the quality of a teacher; test results can be gamed and can reflect the preparation and home life of the students rather than the performance of the teacher. Finally, bonuses were not likely to be as effective as Zuckerberg imagined in motivating a group like teachers, as opposed to members of a Silicon Valley start-up. Teachers explained that the money wasn’t such a direct influence—it wasn’t that they didn’t want or believe they deserved more pay, it was just that bonuses wouldn’t lead to “better teaching” perforce, as Zuckerberg’s view of human motivation would expect. Having a supportive principal was the greater motivation for a teacher to work hard than money.⁶⁴

Zuckerberg viewed students, not only teachers, as individuals who approached education in isolation. “You’ll have technology that understands how you learn best and where you need to focus,” Zuckerberg and Chan write in their letter to their daughter about how education should improve. “You’ll advance quickly in subjects that interest you most, and get as much help as you need in your most challenging areas. You’ll explore topics that aren’t even offered in schools today. Your teachers will also have better tools and data to help you achieve your goals.” What Zuckerberg and Chan call personalized learning—guided by algorithms applied to a student’s work—“can be one scalable way to give all children a better education and more equal opportunity.”⁶⁵ When the term scalable, which defines something unbound by all-too-human frailties, is applied to a something as human as preparing a child for life, perhaps a warning flag should go up.

Interestingly, however, when Zuckerberg and Chan discuss a school they are planning in East Palo Alto, California, after the debacle in Newark, they include working with health centers, parent groups, and local governments to ensure that “all children are well fed and cared for starting young.” In order to improve the quality of education, they write, “We must first build inclusive and healthy communities.”⁶⁶ A sensible approach, no doubt, but also one that won’t scale and is more traditional than disruptive. In fact, traditionally, we would expect this kind of work to be carried out by local, state, and federal governments rather than concerned billionaires dipping into their monopoly profits.

Assistance for the developing world from Zuckerberg is still stuck in the earlier, algorithmic, phase. For example, he expresses mathematical certainty in the benefits from Facebook’s Free Basics, which offers a free, stripped-down version of the Internet, including Wikipedia and Facebook, to those who can’t afford any access to the Internet. Zuckerberg again cited his one in ten formula for poverty reduction from Internet access: “There are more than 4 billion people who need to be connected and if we can connect them, then we’ll raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty,” he said in defense of Free Basics.⁶⁷ The Indian government nonetheless rejected the idea, in part motivated by more than 750,000 emails complaining that the service would create a poor Internet for poor people.⁶⁸ Critics in India, like one group called Savetheinternet.in, saw a more nefarious purpose behind Facebook’s offer, which it described as “Zuckerberg’s ambitious project to confuse hundreds of millions of emerging market users into thinking that Facebook and the Internet are one and the same.” All children, even poor children in India, the group wrote, “deserve the same experience and opportunities when it comes to an open and free Internet, as much as their urban or richer peers.”⁶⁹

Facebook board member Marc Andreessen was enraged and shared his feelings, via Twitter. The Indian government clearly didn’t know what was best for its people. “Another in a long line of economically suicidal decisions made by the Indian government against its own citizens,” read one Andreessen tweet. Another, which drew the most complaints, “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?”⁷⁰ Like Thiel, another Facebook board member, was known to do, Andreessen was merely stating what everyone around him thought, though he later apologized to the nation of India and the Indian people. Because Andreessen’s medium was Twitter, he couldn’t say he was misquoted or misunderstood by an interviewer; rather he insisted that he was “100% opposed to colonialism, and 100% in favor of independence and freedom, in every country, including India.”

Zuckerberg quickly condemned Andreessen’s comments and stated his objection to the Indian government’s decision on Free Basics with much more finesse. He wasn’t criticizing the Indian people, but, on the contrary, was speaking up for those without the power to speak for themselves. “Remember,” he said, “that the people this affects most, the four billion unconnected, have no voice on the Internet. They can’t argue their side in the comments below or sign a petition for what they believe. So we decide our character in how we look out for them.”⁷¹ Zuckerberg, along with his wife, makes a similar pledge to his daughter: “We must engage directly with the people we serve. We can’t empower people if we don’t understand the needs and desires of their communities.”⁷²

Of course, another way to empower people is simply to give them power. Power to use or even misuse. But Zuckerberg wasn’t speaking as a politician. Or even as an entrepreneur. His vision of an interconnected humanity, whose members share details of their lives within the Facebook platform, wasn’t something that emerged organically from the people, or even with some gentle nudging from the people’s representatives, the government. Zuckerberg was conceiving a new online civilization before our eyes and, if he succeeded, he would be responsible for something grander than Julius Caesar or even Bill Gates could ever have imagined.