Had I had been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.
—attributed to Alfonso X, “the Wise,” of Castile
FRIDAY, APRIL 13, 2012
The area housing the Facebook high command was a completely unexceptional cluster of desks, remarkable only for the pile of sporting equipment kept by Sam Lessin, one of Zuck’s lieutenants. Similar clusterings, arranged like hedgerows, extended as far as you could see into either leg of the large L formed by Building 16 on Facebook’s campus. The décor was standard-issue Silicon Valley tech: industrial shag carpet, exposed ceilings revealing ventilation ducts and fire-retardant-covered steel beams, and the odd piece of home-brewed installation art: an imposing Lego wall featuring the blocky murals left by employees, another wall papered with the vaguely Orwellian posters the in-house printshop churned out.
At the exact vertex of Building 16 was the “Aquarium,” Facebook’s glass-walled throne room, where Zuck held court all day. It jutted into the main courtyard, allowing passing Facebookers to snatch a glance of their famed leader while strolling to lunch. Its windows were reputedly bulletproof. Just outside the Aquarium’s entrance was a makeshift foyer with couches and some trendy coffee-table book or another, which the ever-present scrum of waiting FB courtiers ignored as they made last-minute tweaks to presentations or demos. An adjoining minikitchen, like so many that littered the campus, stocked plenty of lemon-lime Gatorade, Zuck’s official beverage.
Inside Facebook’s campus, geography was destiny, and your physical proximity to Zuck was a clear indicator of your importance. Along the periphery of the L ran the exclusive conference rooms of Facebook’s five business-unit leaders. Zuck’s desk neighbors at that point were Sheryl Sandberg, the star chief operating officer (COO) of Facebook; Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, the engineering director who had created News Feed; and Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technical officer (CTO). None of them were at their desks as I strode in from the courtyard that afternoon.
Unlike much of the user-facing side of Facebook, the Ads team was held at arm’s length, as if it was a pair of sweaty underwear, in the next building over. That would eventually change, and Ads team members would occupy some prime real estate in and around Zuck’s and Sheryl’s desks. That was still a long way off, though, and every senior management meeting I was pulled into involved crossing the courtyard at ground level.
The centerpiece of this Facebook Champs-Élysées were the letters H-A-C-K, actually inlaid in the concrete slab that formed the courtyard and easily a good one hundred feet long. Angled to be readable on the Google Maps satellite image of campus, it appeared as the supreme Facebookian commandment.
My mission today was a meeting with Zuck, scheduled in Sheryl’s conference room, which was named, for reasons I never discovered, “Only Good News.” Skirting the pile of athletic equipment around the executive-desk cluster, I walked into the glass cube of the conference room, which featured a long, white table flanked by a score of pricey Aeron chairs, a flat-panel screen on one wall, and a whiteboard on the other. Most of the meeting attendants, except the two most important ones, were already seated.
Gokul Rajaram, the product management head of Ads and my boss, was slouched in his usual twitching, anxious knot; he took a nanosecond’s break from his ever-present phone as his eyes rose to mine. Next to Gokul sat Brian Boland, a buzz-cut-and-balding guy you imagined had wrestled in college, and whom cozy, corporate life had made thick with age. Boland ran product marketing for the Ads team, the group that wove the thick packing layer of polished bullshit that any Ads product was wrapped in before being given to the sales team, who would then push it on advertisers.
Sitting at a remove and staring into his phone was Greg Badros, a former Googler who ran both Search and Ads, but seemed more absence than presence in either. Mark Rabkin, the engineering manager in Ads, and an early hire on the Facebook Ads team, was closest to me in rank and attitude. A close collaborator since my first days at Facebook, he resembled a less satanic version of Vladimir Putin. Elliot Schrage was in his usual perch, close and to the right of the table’s end. Schrage held an elevated-sounding and vague title but was Sheryl’s consigliere in all matters. In his fifties, wearing a button-down shirt and “business casual” slacks, he seemed out of place among the fleece-and-jeans-wearing techies; he could have been mistaken for a senior lawyer in a stodgy East Coast law firm—which is what he had been before joining Google and the Sherylsphere.
I took a seat toward the opposite end of the Sheryl intimates, and flipped open my Facebook-issue MacBook Pro to nervously remind myself of the meeting’s script. The agenda was pitching Zuck on the three new ads-targeting ideas I had dreamed up, and which constituted a big monetization bet the company was (hopefully) soon to make.
Camille Hart, Sheryl’s all-powerful executive administrative assistant, or admin, milled about and tapped away on her laptop, wrangling meeting participants.
“Where’s Fischer?” asked Sheryl as she blew in through the door and took her seat at the end of the table.
No meeting could start without the minyan of Elliot Schrage and David Fischer, the entourage she had poached out of Google. Camille bolted out to find him.
Most everyone stayed silent, pecking at smartphones or laptops. Boland and Sheryl quietly conferred on the state of the slides we were presenting. We’d already prepitched her our products, tweaking the message to maximally appeal to Zuck. Any Zuck meeting around Ads required a bit of prechewing and spoon-feeding. The reason was simple: Ads were not something he cared about at the time, and I imagine he saw these meetings more as duty-bound drudgery than anything else. In one year in Facebook Ads, I had seen the famously micromanage-y founder and CEO in the Ads area precisely once: when he was walking around the building in a circle to get in his ten thousand daily steps. This stood in sharp contrast to the gossipy stories I had heard from product managers on the user-facing side of Facebook about the withering spotlight one lived in when working a product Zuck cared about.
In our premeeting meeting, Sheryl had let slip various hints about the best way to present our plans. She clearly knew her boss inside and out. Here was a woman who excelled in the role of gatekeeper and shepherd to difficult and powerful men, whether that role was chief of staff for the prickly US treasury secretary Larry Summers, or COO of and for Zuck. Between her ability to navigate and manage the mercurial and fractious political landscape of a complex organization like Facebook, and her ability to shape messages for Zuck, she was both de facto and de jure the person who ran Facebook Ads. As the debate about the future of Facebook monetization grew more polarized and heated, these meetings would resemble the Supreme Court of Sheryl, the one place where conflicting views could be aired with some hope of resolution.
In came Fischer: slim, dapper, and the best-coiffed man at Facebook. Originally one of Sheryl’s reports at the Treasury Department, he had begun his career as a journalist at U.S. News & World Report, and then, as with many senior Facebook people, joined Google. As Facebook’s vice president of sales and operations, he ran the entire sales team for Sheryl, and in my time at the company I rarely heard him utter anything other than corporate platitudes and MBA-speak (Stanford Graduate School of Business ’02, bien sûr).
Greetings all around as Fischer took a seat to Sheryl’s left near the head of the table, opposite Schrage. Executive admin’s duty done, a satisfied Camille disappeared to wherever she lived at FB.
Noiselessly, Zuck padded into the conference room, staring at his smartphone, and sat down in the empty seat to Schrage’s right. Now the meeting could really begin.
Sheryl kicked things off. “Mark, as you know we’ve been considering some new initiatives in Ads.”
Way to understate things, Sheryl.
The company had announced its intention to go public months ago, and the IPO was imminent. Precisely when the company was opening itself to investor scrutiny, its revenue growth was slowing, and revenue itself was plateauing. The narratives the company had woven about the new magic of social-media marketing were in deep reruns with advertisers, many of whom were beginning to openly question the fortunes they had spent on Facebook thus far, often with little to show for it. A colossal yearlong bet the company had made on a product called Open Graph, and its accompanying monetization spin-off, Sponsored Stories, had been an absolute failure in the market. The company’s senior leadership had called on the Ads team to dream up something fast to revive the lagging fortunes of the enterprise. This being Facebook, the initiatives originated not at the senior levels of the company but rather at the lower: random engineers who had conceived of a bit of cleverness, glib product managers (that would be your humble correspondent) who had managed to seduce a few people to their vision.
On the agenda this afternoon were three proposed products, each very different from the other. The first involved using Facebook’s Like buttons—“social plugins” in Facebookese—as all-seeing eyes that would hoover up users’ browsing behavior for fun and profit.
A bit of background for the nontechie: When you load a page in your browser, everything you see (and most of the things you don’t) is not from the company whose “.com” address you’ve entered. The way the modern Web works, different elements come from different places. Every element you load, whether you like it or not, touches your browser, and is allowed to read data in the form of what’s known as cookies.
The popularity of Facebook’s Like and Share buttons meant Facebook was on something like half the Web in a mature market like the United States. As you browse the Web far and wide, from shoe shopping on zappos.com to news reading on nytimes.com, Facebook sees you everywhere, as if it had a closed-circuit TV on all city streets. Facebook’s terms of service had so far prohibited the use of the resulting data for commercial purposes, but this bold proposal suggested lifting that self-imposed restriction. As ominous and powerful as that may sound, it was not guaranteed to succeed, as the actual value of that data was unknown.
I knew a thing or two about the value of Facebook data. A year before, I had been hired as Facebook’s first product manager for ads targeting, charged with converting Facebook’s user data into money by whatever legal means available. This task had proved considerably more difficult than it sounds. For months, the targeting team and I had been testing and ingesting every piece of Facebook user data—posts, check-ins, shared links, friends, Likes—to see if it would improve the targeting and delivery of Facebook ads. Almost without exception, none of it increased monetization to a substantial degree. The miserable conclusion was that Facebook, though assumed to be a rich repository of user data, did not in fact have much commercially useful data at all. Social plugin data, despite its ominous and all-pervasive nature, might fall into that same depressing category.
The second and third proposals were more radical from a business, if not a legal, perspective and reflected this grim realization. The plan was to join the Facebook Ads experience to data generated completely outside Facebook. Thus far, all ads on Facebook used FB-only data, but this proposal would involve tapping into “external” data like browsing history, online shopping, and offline purchases in physical shops. Historically, Facebook had been a walled garden, in which advertisers could not use their data on Facebook or use Facebook data elsewhere. From the data perspective, it was as if Facebook was absent from the Internet ecosystem, off on some island under its own complete control. Via two different technical mechanisms—one roughly in keeping with the existing Ads system, another vastly more sophisticated—we were proposing to bridge that divide at last. Both proposals, at an abstract level, were equivalent; at the implementation and business level, however, they were vastly different, and required completely different approaches to the advertising market.
Zuck and Sheryl hated projecting PowerPoint decks, so somebody had printed out the slides I had prepared and stapled them into neat packets. Boland had summarized debates and meetings going back months in easy-to-parse bullet points on the first page. That’s all anyone ever saw. My detailed technical schematics, with walk-throughs of data flows and outside integration points, were, as I suspected, completely ignored. Sheryl wouldn’t have cared about the technical detail, and Zuck wouldn’t have had the patience to go through it anyhow. As I observed more than once at Facebook, and as I imagine is the case in all organizations from business to government, high-level decisions that affected thousands of people and billions in revenue would be made on gut feel, the residue of whatever historical politics were in play, and the ability to cater persuasive messages to people either busy, impatient, or uninterested (or all three).
Boland did his breezy best walking through the summary slide, leaving out the endless debates concerning privacy and legal regulation that had eaten up countless hours of everyone’s time. If ads already made Zuck drowse, then privacy trade-offs would have sent him keeling over off his Aeron chair. Whatever Zuck approved, we’d engineer the legal workings.
“So do we think using the plugin data will make us more money?” Zuck asked.
Boland and Gokul turned to me, the usual cue for the lowest-ranked but most-informed guy in the room—that is, the actual product manager—to pipe up and say something.*
My brain reacted like an old truck in winter, failing to start and cranking away futilely.
“Well, that depends . . . I mean, there are lots of things that affect monetization. We haven’t really done the controlled A/B studies, as it’s legally touchy, but it is possible that it’s unique data in some way. Of course, there’s also the issue of whether the Like button is even where we want it to be datawise, as—”
“Why don’t you just answer the question?” blurted Zuck, cutting me off.
Panic breeds focus.
“I don’t think it would move the needle much, given recent experience,” I replied flatly.
Silence, as we all waited for what Zuck would say.
“You can do this, but don’t use the Like button,” he said finally.
The statement percolated through the room.
“So yes to retargeting, but no to using social plugins,” reiterated Sheryl, more question to Zuck than assertion.*
“Yes.”
And that’s all he ever said about the matter.
What was still undecided was which of the two proposals Facebook would pursue. A year from this meeting and in this same conference room, with more or less the same cast assembled, we’d finally decide that question. It would take Facebook an exasperating year to even decide to decide. The resulting decision, when it finally came, would see me ejected from Facebook, and change how Facebook made money for years to come.
But right then, on that Friday afternoon, I was giddy inside. The last two months of scheming had worked out. We could build this magic targeting device I had proposed that would combine the two great Internet data streams, Facebook and the outside world, and change everything.
I took one look at Gokul, who half nodded. Sheryl turned to the next item on the meeting agenda. This was her weekly meeting between her, the Ads team, and Zuck. Product reviews were packed into fifteen-minute slots. Other product managers had filed into the room during the brief discussion, and were waiting their turns. As discreetly as possible, I vacated the spring-loaded Aeron chair and slid out the door. I had my marching orders.