“A glorious moment, but I have a dread foreboding that some day the same doom will be pronounced on my own country.” It would be difficult to mention an utterance more statesmanlike and more profound. For at the moment of our greatest triumph and of disaster to our enemies to reflect on our own situation and on the possible reversal of circumstances, and generally to bear in mind at the season of success the mutability of Fortune, is like a great and perfect man, a man in short worthy to be remembered.
—Polybius, Histories
JANUARY 2012
As mentioned, our new, freshly defaced campus had been formerly occupied by a bygone tech juggernaut, Sun Microsystems. It’s ancient history now, but Sun once made the servers that powered the Internet. Whether it was the fast (and expensive) machines that sat in colocation facilities around the world serving up the Web, or powerful machines that sat on the desks of such high-end users as scientists or engineers, each with a full suite of development tools to produce yet more Internet technology, Sun was synonymous with the tech boom of the early 2000s. Yet it got complacent, and when Linux running on commodity hardware became the infrastructure of choice for most smart tech companies (including Google), Sun did nothing to stem the tide that led to its extinction.
When we moved into Menlo Park, there were Sun logos on lots of conference room doors and public spaces. Rather than remove them all, Zuck ordered that a few of them remain. Like corporate memento mori, they were to remind employees that Facebook could also go the way of extinction, and be reduced one day to logos and swag.
The biggest such fossil was to be found behind the Facebook sign with its enormous Like button, featuring the ubiquitous blue upraised thumb, host to an almost 24/7 cluster of selfie-taking tourists. On the back of Facebook’s only publicly facing sign, and as big as a billiard table, was the logo that used to represent the sleek, new digital future. It was as tattered and flaking as some historical artifact. When Facebook arrived, instead of replacing the original sign, management had simply flipped it around, and intentionally neglected to paint or cover the back. It read SUN MICROSYSTEMS, along with the quadrangular logo made of S figures that used to appear at the top of every Web page you loaded.
This too shall pass. What befell Sun could befall us too, so MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS! Zuck was saying by implication.
Perhaps even the mighty Facebook Like button would one day be looked upon like the inscription on the fragment of Ozymandias’s statue in Shelley’s rumination on the transience of human ambition: an arrogant spasm of striving, forgotten and abandoned.
Every morning I bicycled the six miles from my sailboat docked in Redwood City to the new campus, which sat on an artificial spit of land poking into the tidal marshes that formed the San Francisco Bay’s boggy southern tip. This wasn’t as picturesque as it may sound: it was two miles of dusty pedaling next to the concrete quarries alongside the Port of Redwood City, two miles of getting buzzed by trucks through a neglected waterfront neighborhood, and then (finally) two miles of preserved marshlands (if the algae were blooming, it smelled like a camp toilet).
Hang the bicycle on the always-jammed racks inside the card-activated main door, and shower time. The bathrooms were undersized for Facebook’s population, and there were no actual locker rooms. As such, the hard-core cyclists hung their ridiculous Spandex nut-huggers on the towel racks, intentionally inside out to air the sweaty crotches (blech!).
My sailboat living situation was unusual. The company was made up of about half suburban stiffs (older, married, childrened) who lived on the Peninsula, in “bedroom communities” like Menlo Park or Mountain View, depending on how early they had joined and how wealthy they were. The other half (young, hipster, fresh out of school) lived in the trendy and expensive parts of San Francisco. The latter were trucked in on company buses. That’s right, Facebook ran a pool of shuttles that carted people either the thirty miles from SF to Menlo Park, or from downtown Palo Alto.*
These buses were a metaphor for what was happening in the Bay Area (and, I’d venture, the entire economy), a symbolism not lost on the antitechie protesters, given their penchant for smashing the buses’ windows occasionally. One set of people got one set of goods and services, and the ones with tech company IDs clipped into their belts got very much another.
Picture the scene, Valley traveler: Twenty-Fourth Street and Valencia in the Mission District (hipsterville now, but historically a poor Mexican neighborhood). White charter buses, studiously unmarked by logos, compete for bus stop space with lurching, ramshackle SF Muni buses. One fleet of buses is for the alpha-plus-plus SF residents, and features comfortable seats and Wi-Fi. The other is for the proles, and features at least one incontinent homeless man raving deliriously next to the only open seat. Careful, though! Given there are at least three companies hosting corporate shuttles, you have to make sure you get on the right one (easier said then done, given the lack of signage). Get on the wrong one, and you’ll find yourself headed to Google or Genentech instead. Of course, this did happen, and frequently. When infiltrated, someone would post on the Facebook Commute group indicating there was a Google spy on the bus, and to keep conversations down and screens hidden. What happened to those spies, I’m not quite sure. I wouldn’t be surprised if HR kept recruiters on board, like the FAA air marshals on international flights, in order to snap them up as new hires the moment the doors closed.*
While waiting for the bus during the bouts I was living in SF (depending on whatever girlfriend drama was going on), I’d amuse myself by trying to guess which group clustered together belonged to what company. In time, you trained a mental model: the Googlers were older and nerdier looking (you could cheat by looking for the bunch of colored spheres on their infantile corporate IDs), while Facebookers were younger and a bit edgier. Once on board, you’d start the day’s worth of email (or code in the case of the engineers) while bouncing around and hopefully missing the traffic snarl that congealed southbound around nine a.m.
Once inside Facebooklandia, which you wouldn’t leave for the next twelve hours or so, you’d make a beeline for the café and the first of three free meals you’d have on campus. If you were a product manager, you were likely bolting it while checking email in the fifteen minutes before your first meeting, your first of anywhere from six to twelve, plus another two to three impromptu ones. Your Microsoft Calendar, which ruled your life via audio reminders from your corporate iPhone, as well as those of your colleagues, was fought over like a hundred yards of no-man’s-land during World War I. The moment you would clear a meeting slot on your calendar, someone would likely send you an invite to fill it (there was an internal tool that helped with the ongoing calendar jigsaw puzzle).
The joke was that the biggest advantage of being at Facebook was not having to explain why you were on Facebook all day. Aside from putting the product through its paces, much of Facebook’s collaborative work was done via Facebook itself. Every product team had an internal Facebook group for the team, perhaps several, one for each subset of “shareholders” in the product (e.g., sales, marketing, and engineering).*
Poopin’!
This was one of those culture-defining inside-Facebook jokes. If you were so foolish as to leave your laptop unlocked or unguarded among that loutish lot, then anyone had full right to open your browser (which had at least two to three tabs open to Facebook) and post a status update involving a mundane gastrointestinal task (“Jell-O,” for whatever reason, was the slightly more tasteful alternative).
Looking up from your desk, just another generic white surface exactly like Zuck’s, what greets you? The product teams are clustered around their product and engineering managers; the Ads floor, which seems to be forever expanding into other floors and hallways, is a patchwork quilt of these teams. You know the route, like an ant in the pile, to the three to four with whom you collaborate. Senior management sits at one set of desks, close to whoever else was in the Ads nomenklatura that millisecond (it changes often). This is your native habitat as a product manager.
They say childhood ends when we first seriously realize we’re going to die. For a startup, there’s a similarly maturing moment, often right at the cusp of expansive success, when the founders realize their creation has left its organizational infancy.
Why do Facebook and Twitter acquire piddly little companies like AdGrok, FriendFeed, and Aardvark? We’ve already discussed how corporate mergers and acquisitions are basically recruitment via other means in the Valley’s overheated market for technical talent. But there is another motivation: by hybridizing their corporate DNA with the pluck and daring of the startup entrepreneur, they revitalize their internal cultures and add traits not typically found among their recruitment fodder (i.e., smart but obedient engineering grads). It’s like the intentional mixing of refined European breeds with wild dingoes in Australia that produced the smart and rangy Australian cattle dog.
Almost invariably (and there are exceptions) the startup product disappears into the maw of the acquiring company, and is never seen again. But those founders and early employees, skilled at creating something out of nothing when armed with very little, bring their technical flair and product chutzpah to a lumbering organization that is already forgetting its pioneering roots.
Or such was the theory.
While many such acquirees did end up having successful careers at Facebook, those who succeeded either were given incredibly wide latitude by Zuck to do what they wanted (e.g., the Instagram team), or had to adapt to their new circumstances and rein in the startup wildness a bit. Those who did neither . . . well, let’s not jump ahead.
None of this was clear to me in the beginning; on the contrary, coming in as a “successful” startup entrepreneur meant you had lots of starting social capital. Everyone treated me like some champion on a victory lap. But inside, I felt like the survivor of a shipwreck: cold, wet, hands shaking, and a Red Cross blanket thrown over my shoulders, wondering just what the fuck had happened. How I’d gotten from the wild, untethered AdGrok shipwreck in the making to the corporate Elysium of free burgers and mission statements was an ontological puzzle. But the first rule of startups is also true of any fast-paced, competitive workplace like Facebook: act like you belong there, even if you don’t.
One morning, all the employees arrived to find a 4×6 bound red book on their desks. The title was Facebook Was Not Originally Created to Be a Company, the resounding declaration that Zuck would eventually include in Facebook’s IPO documents. Inside was a slickly designed rumination on corporate values, mostly tasteful juxtapositions of typically Facebook office tableaux (a passed-out engineer on a couch), inspiring artifacts from Facebook’s history (a photo of early Facebook employees gathered at one modest dinner table), and somewhat kitschy stock photos of the inspirational-calendar genre (an overwhelming, wide-angle night sky). The content was either more storied Facebook lore (that time engineers convinced journalists Facebook was shipping a Fax button that would fax your photos), or tastefully typeset excerpts from the gospel according to Facebook (“The quick shall inherit the earth”; “We don’t build services to make money, we make money to build services”).
The penultimate page captured the spirit best. In white sans serif font, against a stark black background, it read:
If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will.
“Embracing change” isn’t enough. It has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. The Internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.
Mark that well, FB soldier.
In a thousand small ways, the company was forever reminding its people of the cost of failure. Facebook had the death awareness of the person planning on living forever. Death didn’t inspire fear, however; only a reminder of the discipline required to keep decay at bay. I had never seen a company before or since so maniacal in ensuring the perpetuation of its original values. It was like the United States on the Fourth of July, every day:
OUR WORK IS NEVER OVER
MAKE IT FASTER
WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU WEREN’T AFRAID?
THIS JOURNEY 1% FINISHED
Like the naive new recruit, I took those values to heart. And like the new recruit, I’d realize only later that the Facebook reality was rather more complicated.