He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
—Samuel Johnson
DECEMBER 15, 2011
Like hermit crabs, successful companies outgrow a series of larger and larger shells.
By late 2011, the 1601 California Avenue location was feeling tight. People were packed in nut-to-butt in the Ads area, and the whole building was looking a bit run-down. This was typical of any busy tech company too focused on the metrics that mattered to bother with what appeared to be the carpet stains from a double homicide lingering in a corner (and was really hastily cleaned happy-hour vomit). The conference rooms stunk of sweat from too many people sleeping in them (or something) and the café was overcrowded like a soup kitchen.
The Facebook nomenklatura decided that we should move, and the New Jerusalem of Facebook was to be the abandoned remains of that tech has-been Sun Microsystems. Given the sad state of that campus, the company would have to move in stages, with the engineering teams arriving last.
When it was finally our turn, of course, nobody had actually prepared for the move, despite the email we’d all gotten weeks before from the facilities team that was managing the pilgrimage. Come the final moment, around four thirty p.m. (we were to be out of the building by five o’clock), all hell broke loose.
People started stuffing their accumulated detritus into cardboard boxes. First it was all the shit on their desks. If you lived at Facebook, you kept lots of books, the odd girlfriend photo, stuffed animals of indeterminate origin, corporate swag like mugs or mouse pads accumulated from sales conferences, maybe random stuff you’d made in off-site corporate team-building events. Then it was the team toys like skateboards and Nerf guns. Then it was the area decorations that seemed to sprout like moss around any Facebook product team: posters from the Analog Research Laboratory, gag props like a plywood altar to your engineering manager (yes, really), or the local speakeasy liquor cabinet.
Then suddenly it was kind of everything, and it wasn’t just going into moving boxes. People were prying the corporate artwork off the walls, snagging the conference room name tags, and stuffing it all into laptop bags, garbage bags, whatever else they were planning to haul home.
Things got so out of control that at one point Aileen Cureton, the one admin for Ads (back when there was one for the whole team, rather than one per executive), stood up, and in her best attempt at a Marine drill-sergeant voice, started bellowing at the rampaging vandals to put down all the shit they were hauling off. Her bellows went unheeded; within the span of a quarter hour, the office had been picked clean.
Having been in a few violent demonstrations and riots (thanks to time spent studying in the Basque country in the late nineties), I couldn’t quite say this was slouching toward the real car-burning, rubber-bullets-flying mayhem of legit group violence, but it was about as close as American corporate culture surely got in its early-twenty-first-century dotage.
Then an idea occurred.
There was one series of conference rooms close to Zuck and the high command whose names were supposedly inspired by the series of countries that had “tipped” to Facebook usage during the time the building was occupied, including the madre patria of the misbegotten Hispanic race, the original homeland of my people. Wouldn’t the area around the presidential palace fall last to the revolutionary violence? Perhaps it was still there. . . .
I threaded my way through the pillaging mayhem and ran into Mick Johnson, the original YC comrade who had kicked off my Facebook story with his official intro and unofficial advice, who was wearing a smile and carrying AUSTRALIA in his hands. Rushing down the halls to the cluster of conference rooms in question, I found hastily detached sticky tape on one door after another. Almost all of the plaques were gone.
But not the one I wanted.
Whipping out the rigging knife I always carried, I pried against the drywall, levering the sign off. Tucking it into the front of my pants and under my Facebook fleece like a shoplifter, I made my way back to Ads just under Aileen’s furious radar.
When the riot finally quieted down as everyone abandoned the building, I headed back to the boat and installed SPAIN (complete with textured braille) along the series of portholes on the starboard side. Its bright yellow corporate sterility and sans serif font offset the warm, rich browns of mahogany and cedar. All that matters in the end is what we take away from an experience—even if pried off the wall with a weathered rigging knife.
For whatever reason, Facebook always had a fascination with graffiti office art. Early on, Sean Parker, an early Svengali at Facebook who had been Zuck’s adviser and temporary CEO, and who was memorably played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, had asked a noted muralist, David Choe, to paint sexually themed murals at the original Facebook offices in downtown Palo Alto. They were reputedly somewhat toned down in the final implementation. Now, years later, the same artist would be hired to decorate the bare expanses of white drywall in the new campus’s reception and meeting areas—in part, I imagine, as a remedy to the fiasco that was about to take place.
With no warning, a few weeks after we had settled into the new digs, Zuck announced that we ourselves would be decorating the inside of our newly conquered corporate campus.
Certainly, the campus needed a bit of personalization. The main courtyard was still under construction, and the halls and walls gleamed with rapidly applied paint. Things had that just-moved-in feeling; despite its flaws, the old office had felt lived-in and homey, like an old, beaten-down couch you can’t bring yourself to toss. The indisputable upgrade in office quality, the newness and poshness of it all, threatened to congeal into corporate sterility. Zuck informed us that we’d be given all the spray cans, brushes, and paints we wanted, and be allowed to stake out any part of the campus as our own . . . and create art! Given our little performance of mob violence during the moving-out step, this was a considerable leap of faith.
The appointed day arrived, and a Home Depot’s worth of paints and supplies were drop-shipped into the public areas of every building. The time was early evening, when people were switching gears from the meetings and coding of the day, and pondering going either to the gym or to the cafés for dinner. With nothing in the way of direction other than Zuck’s mandate to produce art, people started arming themselves with the stockpile of paints and going at it.
Of course, pandemonium ensued.
Unskilled geeks, confronted with the graffiti canvas of an unblemished wall for the first time, started sketching pathetic stick figures in the halls, with large thought bubbles featuring corny jokes about Facebook culture. People drew crude flowers, or animal figures that only the parent of the three-year-old who drew them could ever think beautiful. Slogans appeared, at a top-of-urinal level of graffiti intelligence, in random places.
An older guy, no doubt some engineering manager with a lengthy LinkedIn CV and a mortgaged house in San Mateo, was leading his child by the hand while aforementioned child sprayed a continuous red line down the still-virgin white hallway, Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of bread crumbs.
An ambitious engineer set up shop in the heavily trafficked public square between what was then Ads and Growth, and one of the busiest thoroughfares. Using a printout of a comic book scene in hand as guide, he started sketching a Superman emerging fist-first from a jumble of figures and shapes. Like a good muralist, he was busily engaged with the initial line sketch, which he’d have time only to partially fill with color before he abruptly departed. It resembled Jesus in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, a twisted shape flinging the universe around him.
Some teams kicked into product-development mode, dreaming up artistic visions around some central theme. The product manager handled logistical matters like masking tape, marking pens, and stencils, and the engineers did the actual work. It was a microcosm of Facebook product development itself. One of these depicted a huge unicorn head over a complicated tessellated pattern that looked algorithmically generated. These were about the only efforts that could even remotely be titled art.
This mayhem lasted for a good two days.
That weekend Zuck sent another to-all email (or maybe it was posted in the general Facebook internal group to which everyone belonged), the gist being: I trusted you to create art, and what you fuckers did was vandalize the place. This was of course true. The place looked like an alleyway in the Mission now, not the offices of the world’s most promising tech startup. Worse: the Mission actually had some epic mural art; Facebook’s art was comparable to that inside a blasted-out favela.
By his own report, Zuck had spent two days walking the entire FB campus, marking everything that was to be taken down. Indeed, come Monday, there was a thick band of blue masking tape marking every badly conceived attempt, or bit of joyful vandalism. Zuck must have gone through ten rolls of the stuff.
Immediately, Roddy Lindsay, one of the Facebook old-timers and keepers of the corporate culture, created a comment macro inside the code-review system. The code-review tool is how a Facebook engineer sees the world and does 90 percent of his work, submitting his code for consideration to the engineering team, where it is hotly debated almost as if it were in an online forum. The macros are geek emoticons, a witty or instructive image or GIF often reminiscent of kitschy Internet memes. There are hundreds of them, and they are like a rebus of engineering commentary, either encouraging someone to boldly ship a new feature, or pejoratively insulting some code-writer’s ability. At the time, typing “bluetape” produced an image of a piece of blue masking tape on a wall, indicating that a piece of code should be removed for the sake of aesthetics and/or sanity.
This was Facebook culture for you: lots of bold, unconventional experiments, mostly failures with some notable successes, an immediate course correction to prune the failure, and then internalizing the experience via the culture. The crap murals and bluetape were as core to Facebook as the Like button (and Beacon).*