IN MARCH 2005, Thefacebook finally moved into an office. Parker secured a second-floor space on Emerson Street in downtown Palo Alto, over a Chinese restaurant.
By then Zuckerberg had moved out of the Los Altos house. As the company was getting bigger it was less seemly that the CEO was bunking with the underlings. After crashing in different locations for a few months, Zuckerberg would move to a small apartment in downtown Palo Alto, a few blocks from the office. He had no TV, just a mattress on the floor and a few sticks of furniture. He was the CEO and biggest shareholder of a company with more than a million users and he still stacked his clothes on the floor.
In the first few weeks in the office, Thefacebook faced a financial crisis. Though it hadn’t yet spent all of Thiel’s angel money, the server bills and other costs were accumulating. The company still needed a new pot of cash, ideally coming from an investor who could act as an adviser to a CEO who had never even worked for a big company before, let alone run one. There would be no problem getting the money. But the choice of lead funder was fraught.
Zuckerberg had a strong preference for who he wanted to fill that role: Washington Post chairman and CEO Don Graham. Not a venture capitalist. Chris Ma, the father of one of Zuckerberg’s Kirkland House classmates, headed business development for the Post, and his daughter Olivia’s description of Thefacebook’s conquest of the college market intrigued him. In January 2005, Parker and Zuckerberg went to Washington, DC, to explore a business relationship. Ma invited Graham to the meeting, and the Post CEO listened in fascination as Zuckerberg described how Thefacebook worked. He wondered, though, whether privacy was an issue. Are people convinced that their posts will be seen only by those whom they want to see them? he asked.
People were indeed comfortable with sharing, Zuckerberg told him. A third of his users, he said, share their cell-phone numbers on their profile page. “That’s evidence that they trust us.”
Graham was startled at how emotionless and hesitant this kid was. At times, before he’d answer a question—even something that he must have been asked thousands of times, like what percentage of Harvard kids were on Thefacebook—he would fall silent, staring into the ether for thirty seconds or so. Does he not understand the question? Graham wondered. Did I offend him?
Nonetheless, before the meeting was over, Graham became convinced that Thefacebook was the best business idea he’d heard in years, and told Zuckerberg and Parker that if they wanted an investor who was not a VC, the Post would be interested.
Negotiations were well along when Matt Cohler joined the company. He didn’t agree with Zuckerberg’s choice. Yes, he was pleased that the two CEOs had strangely bonded. And Graham would certainly be valuable as a mentor. But Cohler told Zuckerberg that you only do an “A round” once. (Thiel’s money was the “seed round,” and the next step in start-up life is an A round from a venture capital firm.) Ten percent of the company was at stake! Cutting a better deal than the Post was offering could yield a difference that would prove significant to the company’s finances later on.
Word had already gotten out among the VCs that an incredibly promising start-up was seeking money. Cohler doesn’t deny spreading the word himself, and Parker—while giving Graham the impression that he was all for the Post investment—was also eager to get a better deal from a Silicon Valley VC.
Though the benchmark firm and the top VC at the time, Kleiner Perkins, loved Thefacebook, ultimately their investments in Friendster presented a conflict. The most persistent VC was a company called Accel: one of its partners virtually camped out in front of Thefacebook’s office until he got a pitch. When Accel’s lead investor, Jim Breyer, finally made his offer, it was nearly twice what the Post was offering. He’d pay $12.7 million at a valuation of an eye-popping $98 million for that year-old company run by a twenty-year-old. What’s more, he was okay with an arrangement where Zuckerberg would retain long-term control of the company—Breyer and Thiel would be on the board, but Zuckerberg would control two seats and Parker would have one. Zuckerberg would never get frozen out of his own company like Parker had.
But by then Zuckerberg had already agreed to take the Post investment. No papers were signed. But in spirit, the handshake had been made.
Zuckerberg was in a quandary. He had kind of a management crush on Graham, and had even followed him around for a day at the Post to see how a CEO operated. But Cohler and Parker were making strong arguments. The more money Facebook had, the faster it could grow, and the more ammunition it would have to take on MySpace, which had many more users. Still, Zuckerberg did not want to think of himself as someone who would go back on a deal, especially with someone he respected so much.
He called Graham. “Don, I have a moral dilemma,” he said, and explained that Jim Breyer was offering him twice the money.
Graham wanted to make sure Zuckerberg understood that going to a VC meant that part of the company would be owned by a party whose goal was reaping the highest return. It might push for a sale that Zuckerberg opposed, or agitate for an IPO before Facebook was ready.
“I understand that,” said Zuckerberg.
“So, it’s important for you to have that additional money?” asked Graham.
“It really is,” he said. “We need to grow. We need to grow fast.”
Graham thought that maybe he should match Accel’s offer—but figured that Accel would then just top that, and there would be another phone call asking him to top the offer. He simply said he couldn’t match it, and Zuckerberg would have to make his choice.
Soon after the call, Jim Breyer took Parker, Cohler, and Zuckerberg out to the Village Pub in Woodside. It was one of the few places in the Valley where a fusty, Old World formality prevailed. Breyer was celebrating his imminent victory, and when the wine list arrived, he ordered a Quilceda Creek Washington State cabernet, raving about the legendary and legendarily expensive wine. Parker and Cohler were jazzed to drink it. Zuckerberg said he couldn’t partake because he was still underage. He ordered a Sprite.
“I like Sprite,” he would later explain in an onstage interview with Breyer that year.
As the dinner progressed, Zuckerberg appeared more and more uncomfortable. Cohler wondered if he wasn’t used to fancy restaurants. Zuckerberg finally excused himself and went to the men’s room. And did not return. Finally, Cohler went back there to see what happened.
Mark Zuckerberg was on the floor of the Village Pub men’s room. And he was weeping.
What’s up? asked Cohler.
Zuckerberg told him he couldn’t go through with the Accel deal—it was wrong. “I gave my word to Don Graham, and that’s all that matters,” he said. “I’m not doing this.”
The tortured moralist was a side of Zuckerberg that Cohler had not seen—certainly it would have been a shock to the Winklevoss twins—and Cohler was impressed. It also presents a contrast to Zuckerberg’s stoicism in future jams. There would be plenty more moral dilemmas in the future, and most often Zuckerberg would resolve them with cold-blooded pragmatism.
Which is what happened here, after the tears dried. Cohler later explained that he wanted Zuckerberg to go forward without regrets and reservations. After the dinner, Cohler suggested Zuckerberg call Graham and ask him what he thought he should do.
“It was probably an unfair thing for me to do,” says Cohler. Anyone who knew Don Graham could guess The Washington Post CEO’s response to that question. Certainly, Mark Zuckerberg knew. Graham was not the kind of person who would compromise his values for a business advantage.
“Mark, if that’s your feeling, I will release you from your moral dilemma,” said Graham. He told Zuckerberg to take the Accel money. Take as much as you can get, Graham said. He hoped that the two of them would remain friends. (Zuckerberg would later ask Graham to join Facebook’s board, and the two did remain close.)
But at twenty, Zuckerberg had learned something about business and also about who he was. He had made a major decision between what seemed morally right and what was right for him and Thefacebook. That month he painted the word FORSAN on the wall near his desk. It was a reference to a famous passage in the Aeneid, “Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit,” where Aeneas addresses his lost and battered troops, saying, “Someday perhaps, remembering even this will be a pleasure.”
WITH THE MONEY in the bank, one of the first orders of business was buying the Facebook.com domain, so the company could drop the awkward “the” from its name. It belonged to a company called AboutFace, which had nothing to do with colleges; it built employee directories for law firms and corporations. Parker was able to snag the domain for $200,000, clearing the way for Thefacebook to become simply Facebook.
More critically, with the venture money, Thefacebook could hire more people. The Harvard coders had done well to get the site off the ground, but it required people actually trained in computer science to scale the product for the huge population that used it. (Matt Welsh, Zuckerberg’s Operating Systems instructor, blogged that “the original version of Facebook was a mess, technically.”) But hiring those engineers was a challenge for a start-up, especially one that only college students could see. One tactic was to stand outside the CS department at Stanford and physically buttonhole geeky-looking people. Cohler’s pet tactic was a bait and switch. He’d solicit top students for summer internships and then convince them to drop out of school.
One big win from that approach was Scott Marlette, a master’s student who was frustrated with his professors. Even before meeting Zuckerberg, Cohler had lured him with the argument that at a small company, his impact would be huge. On his first day, he walked the two blocks to the Apple Store to buy a laptop, found a place in the office, and began to address the complicated infrastructure problems that the smart but inexperienced undergrad dropout engineers hadn’t been able to fix. The process was helped along immeasurably by an experienced world-class engineer named Jeff Rothschild, who at fifty was almost like the ancient mariner. With experience at HP, he was perhaps the biggest whale Facebook landed. Marlette and Rothschild would keep Facebook’s systems running as growth skyrocketed. Even with that expertise, the task was challenging: at one point, the heat in Facebook’s server cages rose so high that Rothschild ran an expedition to buy the entire inventory of fans in local Walgreens stores to drive the temperature down.
The engineers coming to Facebook either were straight out of school—often leaving before they graduated—or moving after a year or so at a bigger company like Microsoft or Oracle. The latter group would be taken aback at the persistent chaos of the workspace above the Chinese restaurant on Emerson Street. Before noon, the office would be sparsely populated, and in the early afternoon people would drift in and settle at their workstations for fourteen hours or so of coding. Zuckerberg would be wandering around, often in his pajamas. “It basically felt like my dorm room at Carnegie Mellon, is the best way to describe it,” says Aditya Agarwal, who chatted with Zuckerberg and had a more substantial interview with Jeff Rothschild. Agarwal got an offer that day, deciding to accept only when his girlfriend, Ruchi Sanghvi, who was still at Berkeley, told him how the product was blowing up. It paid $75,000 and “some options.” Sanghvi herself joined a few months later.
That pattern happened often—an engineer would look askance at this ragtag operation and then make a call to a younger sibling in college, who would put to rest any doubts about the prospects for this dubious company. “I remember calling my brother, who was in his sophomore year at Johns Hopkins, where Facebook had just launched,” says Soleio Cuervo, who had been puzzled by the mismatch between the stratospheric IQs he encountered at Facebook and its seemingly frivolous mission. Facebook is bigger than God out here! his brother told him. It’s blowing up! Cuervo became Facebook’s second designer, joining Sittig.
Zuckerberg actively took a hand in recruiting, particularly when trying to lure someone from an industry giant. A typical prime target was Greg Badros, who had just moved to Google’s Gmail team. Also, perhaps not coincidentally, he was in charge of Google’s social network Orkut. (The dual role told Zuckerberg a lot about the low priority Google assigned to social networking.) Interviewing Badros at the Facebook office would risk exposure, so they met at Zuckerberg’s apartment on Ramona Street in downtown Palo Alto. Badros was struck by how sparsely Zuckerberg lived, in a one-bedroom apartment with a tiny table, a mattress in the corner with one blanket and no sheets. Sitting on the steps outside was Priscilla Chan, doing her homework there so she wouldn’t disturb her boyfriend’s recruitment push. (The couple had split when Zuckerberg first came to California but had gotten back together when Chan started medical school at Berkeley.) They spoke for more than an hour, and Badros, who had been wondering whether this wunderkind was out to change the world or just cash in on the start-up boom, had his answer: the former, times ten. Badros didn’t take the job then, but Zuckerberg’s intensity and curiosity stuck with him. Less than two years later he was at Facebook.
As the company grew, Zuckerberg’s move-fast process often led him to hire people who might not fit, especially managers, and subsequent quick dismissals would lead to missing connections in the hiring process. In the spring of 2005, Sittig and Parker met a promising Stanford sophomore at an open house hosted by a Palo Alto start-up also casting for new hires. They urged him to come to Facebook, even for an internship. He met Zuckerberg at a Palo Alto noodle bar and fell into conversation about what it’s like to start a company. Even as Zuckerberg was telling him it was the hardest thing ever, the student was thinking, I want to do that someday.
The student’s peers and even a Stanford mentor advised against joining what they considered a silly college-based start-up. And he was having fun at Stanford; he had a girlfriend and was into his fraternity. Still, it was tempting. He kept corresponding with the engineering lead who was recruiting him. He was leaning toward taking the job. And then the mails went silent, and he decided Facebook didn’t want him anymore. What he didn’t know was that the engineer he’d been corresponding with had been fired. Had he pursued it, the job would have been his.
But Facebook was not done yet with Kevin Systrom.
WHAT CHARACTERIZED FACEBOOK’S method was the speed with which new code got pushed out. For instance, when Agarwal was at Oracle, he worked for months before he was allowed to make his first “commit” to the code base, and even then, his work went through four reviewers to make quadruple sure that the changes wouldn’t affect anything. Even then, the actual change didn’t appear to customers for years, because products were on a two-year release cycle.
At Facebook, they pushed out code four or five times a day. Essentially, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz were operating by the same rules as they did when Facebook was a dorm-room project. Since they never worked at any other company, they didn’t realize how subversive their process was, that it essentially violated the accepted best practices of software development. Even Google rebuilt their indexes only every two weeks or so, queuing up changes for the regular updates. “We had no dogma, nothing to unlearn,” says Agarwal. “So it’s obvious—why would you wait?” If veterans who lived under the previous paradigm felt this to be blasphemy, they clearly weren’t Facebookers. The attitude was, We don’t give a shit how long it took you to write code in your previous gig. At Facebook we want to move at light speed.
The indoctrination came on an engineer’s first day, when you’d download the code base, get your dev environment set up, and go fix a bug. If you hadn’t coded in PHP before, or didn’t know how an object-relationship model worked, figure it out—today. No excuses.
Maybe if Facebook had been working on something that clearly affected people’s safety or well-being, it might have been different. But it was only . . . Facebook. What serious consequences could come from a glitch?
Almost to underline that point, if you introduced some horrible bug in your code that brought down the whole software stack of cards, with hundreds of thousands of Facebook users deprived of their passion, your embarrassment would be leavened by an email CCed to the entire engineering team: Congratulations! You brought the site down—which means you’re moving fast! (Making the same mistake twice was not so celebrated.)
The process later became formalized: every employee who had anything to do with engineering, even someone at the VP level, would have to attend a “boot camp.” Each attendee would be quickly exposed to the system and make a “code base commit” (making a change in the actual computer program that ran Facebook) within the first twenty-four hours—and push out the code in the next day or so. It was like being given control of a rocket ship the first time you entered the cockpit.
The main job of the engineers was “firefighting.” A large part of what everyone did was fix problems to make sure the site didn’t go down. Moskovitz was the central dispatcher. Later on, he would have regular meetings with Katie Geminder, an engineering manager hired in 2005, and they would try to keep track of who was working on what. But for months, the process was ad hoc.
Since the vast majority of the workforce consisted of people in their early twenties—including the boss—stepping into Facebook was like taking the SAT while playing a video-game version of beer pong. Employees were encouraged to basically consider the office their home. Zuckerberg even gave his workers a $600 a month bonus if they agreed to live within a mile of the office.
The company ethos was right there on the office wall. Only a few months after moving into the first office, Facebook opened a second one on the main downtown drag, 156 University. PayPal had started there, imbuing the space with excellent karma. In the lease negotiations, Parker offered a sweetener: in exchange for the right to take more space in the building, he’d allow the landlord to invest $50,000 in Facebook, a rare opportunity. The landlord was willing, but his partners nixed the deal, potentially costing them hundreds of millions of dollars.
Parker had the idea to hire a hot graffiti artist named David Choe to decorate the place. Choe thought that social-networking sites, including Facebook, were a big joke, and gave an outrageous quote of $60,000. Unlike the landlord, Choe gave in to Parker’s offer to accept payment in Facebook stock options. Choe produced a sprawling mural with grotesque and profane images that metastasized all through the office. It was as if Playboy had commissioned Hieronymus Bosch to tag a subway car. Later, a girlfriend of Parker’s would festoon the ladies’ room with similarly non-PC images. The artwork was beloved by the nearly all-male Facebook workforce. But not so much by the (few) women working there.
Parker and a few Facebookers celebrated Choe’s work at dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. They asked Choe if he understood the value of those stock options he’d received. Did he even know what stock options were? Choe admitted he didn’t. But his previous job had paid him with a drum kit, so this seemed similar. Choe’s stock options would eventually be worth more than $200 million.
Zuckerberg was an awkward public speaker, and at first was terrified to address even the ten or fifteen people at early all-hands meetings. “I had to sit down, I was so afraid,” he later said. At another all-hands, he felt so awkward that he bailed halfway through, turning it over to Matt Cohler. But eventually he got fairly comfortable addressing his troops, and held weekly Friday meetings where anyone could ask him anything. When the session ended, he would shout out, “Domination!” in the spirit of the ancient leaders who had so long ago captured his imagination. Invoking a hero’s journey for Facebook to a Kool-Aid-saturated workforce empowered a natural introvert to express the ambition he hid behind a poker face, and to do it with a bit of air-quote irony that provided a measure of deniability. “It was tongue in cheek but he also meant it,” says Geminder. “And it was inspiring.”
Eventually, Parker told him to cut it out, as one day it might be cited in an antitrust suit.
IN JUNE 2005, Mark Zuckerberg gathered his employees and told them what he had in mind for Facebook’s second summer.
A site redesign.
A photo application.
A personalized newspaper based on users’ social activity.
An events feature.
A local business product.
And a feature that he called I’m Bored, which would give people things to do on Facebook.
It was a list that would transform his site from a college directory to the world’s premier social utility.
Zuckerberg’s product vision was something that had been evolving since the move to California. At Harvard, he had simply pursued ideas on a whim, coding them up himself and releasing them with little thought. Even Thefacebook, which was a conscious culmination of his work to date, was quickly coded and shipped.
Now he had a growing team of engineers and a base of millions of users. While much of the effort was devoted to scaling the site and extending it to new campuses, he knew it was critical to introduce new features that would expand its powers and make it more addictive. He wanted those features to be ambitious, while the company still kept his own ethic of moving fast and fixing later. This meant not only directing projects cooked up in his own head but empowering his employees to make up their own, as long as they promised to add some value to Facebook. There was a try-anything flavor to the workflow. Moskovitz made sure that people were assigned to see that the crucial stuff got done, like keeping the site up, and doing the legwork to get the next campus rolling. But the group was always talking about new ideas. “We spent so much time together, sitting in the living room, eating meals, hanging around the pool, always talking about things we could build,” says McCollum. “And the next step would be, someone would just build it.” The projects had to be done fast, though. It was like you were constantly cramming for a final in a course where you hardly showed up during the semester. And the grader was Zuckerberg. “Mark would always be the final arbiter of what went in the product and how it worked,” adds McCollum.
ONE PROJECT COMPLETED while the team was still at the La Jennifer house was the Wall. While Facebook still wasn’t competing with AIM in real-time communications, Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to become a forum for expression. While he didn’t openly promote his own politics, if he even had them, free speech was a passion for him. He had begun to see how the product he had created could be a powerful tool, maybe a historic one, to give people a voice. He would later tell me that free speech was “the founding ideal of the company.” At the moment, Facebook users could only input snippets of information about themselves on the profile page. After endless internal debate, Facebook came up with a way to start actual interaction, by introducing kind of a dynamic whiteboard in the center of the profile page. In the style of Wikipedia, people could add to or edit parts of someone’s profile. “That was when Wikipedia seemed like the most innovative, unbelievable, incredible thing,” says Chris Hughes. “We created a spot on the profile where you could write anything, free-form, and other people could write too.” It eventually evolved into a way for people to add text-only remarks on someone’s profile page. The comments were organized in reverse chronology, like a blog, and appeared in the center of the page. People could comment on someone’s profile, discuss what happened at the party last night, or just talk trash.
It subtly changed the character of the site, moving it from a directory to something more interactive. Facebook, via the profile information, was already hosting what was known in the industry as “user-generated content.” But throwing open the gates of discourse raised a lot of issues that Facebook didn’t have answers to. Who got to control the Wall? Did people own it, or did Facebook? What should be allowed there, and what was verboten? In true Facebook fashion, it released the feature with no resolution to those knotty questions.
No one thought much about how to deal with inappropriate comments.
Following the Wall was a feature called Groups, which were a variation of the profile page where the Wall could act like a bulletin board to organize people around a shared topic. Any Facebook member could launch a group, which would be accessible in the same way a profile was. Zuckerberg had lofty ideas for this: existing student groups could move their governance online; students running for college offices would establish virtual campaign headquarters; activists would petition to make changes on campus. Much of this did occur, as notices formerly posted on corkboards in dorm vestibules moved to Facebook. Still, the most popular groups seemed to be whimsical or borderline dumb. There was the Anti-Popped Collar Club and the Students for the Relocation of Harvard University to the Alternate Universe Where Kerry Won. There was even a group about loving Facebook Groups. The Crimson reported on a phenomenon called “facebook group whores”—people who promiscuously accepted every invite to a new group.
Now Zuckerberg’s ambitious initiative marked a new thinking of the website. What all the ideas had in common was that they all seemed to dovetail with an expansion of Facebook. Also, most of them were sufficiently complicated that they would take much longer than the run-and-done projects of the past.
Indeed, of the five ideas on the Zuckerberg agenda, only one was completed before Labor Day: the redesign. Aaron Sittig, who had finally joined Facebook full-time, headed the project. One of the first things he did was question “the weird-looking creepy guy” on the top of the page. Not long after, worried about intellectual-property issues, they tracked down where the vectorized image came from. It turned out to have been in a Microsoft Office clipart collection that was freely available to anyone with an Office license. That meant Facebook could not trademark its own page. The Facebook Guy was gone.
Sittig’s aesthetic was clean and modern. It was a striking contrast to what was then the dominant social network, MySpace, which had about ten times as many users but was painful on the eyes. It allowed users to customize their pages, and viewing it was like visiting Shibuya with a hangover.
Eschewing that riot of color, Sittig limited himself to a blue palette. This had the advantage of registering most clearly to Zuckerberg, who is color-blind and can’t see reds or greens. After a lot of searching, Sittig finally found a shade he liked. It was the background on the website for the powerful and politically connected Carlyle Group equity fund, once described by author Michael Lewis as “the salon des refusees for the influence-peddling class.” Sittig appropriated that blue, and it ultimately became synonymous with Facebook to billions of people. Inside the company, the Facebook site would eventually be referred to as the Blue app, and sometimes just called Blue.
Next to be implemented was Photos. Facebook’s users were allotted a single profile photo, and that was it. So desperate were they to share photos that some would constantly update their profile images, sometimes multiple times a day. Others discovered that while Facebook limited the width of photos on the page, there was no similar vertical limitation. So they would edit a bunch of photos in a stack, as you’d see in a strip of pictures from a photo booth, and use those ad hoc photo albums as their profile shot.
MySpace, which did allow people to post some photos, had just increased the number from fifteen to fifty. Meanwhile, the hottest photo-sharing site at that time was Flickr, where people publicly shared their photos, often tagging them with labels that people could search for. That was great for pictures of things. But Facebook was a place for people, specifically people you knew.
Zuckerberg assigned Sittig, Marlette, and Doug Hirsch, Facebook’s new product manager, to come up with something new. They started to whiteboard what the app might look like. As always, Zuckerberg would be weighing in, they’d work on it, talk to Mark, work, talk to Mark, and so on.
Marlette was a photographer himself, but he realized that Facebook users would care less about the artistic aspects of their shots. Their pictures, like the other things posted to their profiles like interests or relationship status, would be an expression of who they were. So it didn’t matter if they were high-resolution—it made better sense to use lower quality images so they would load fast and not overwhelm Facebook’s servers with storage issues.
One night Hirsch and Sittig were brainstorming. Hirsch suggested that Photos should have a social component. Sittig had a brilliant idea—why not tag the people in the photos? It was something our brains already did when we looked at pictures. So it was simple to execute, no AI involved—just have people click on the faces in the photos and fill in a blank text box.
Facebook didn’t have the artificial intelligence for facial recognition yet. But it did have fanatic users hugely motivated to share. Sittig set up a system where people could quickly note who was in the photo—if the person was on your social graph, just typing a few letters would automatically fill out the full name. The whole thing was engineered to encourage you to tag the people in the photo. Then a flywheel would take over, to extend the experience to others. When you were tagged in a photo, you’d get notified, and of course you would go to that person’s profile page to see the picture. If the person with the photo wasn’t your friend yet, you might friend the person right then. And you might be more likely to then post photos of your own.
At least, that was the theory: No one was sure. “We knew there was a desire for more photos,” says Sittig, “but we weren’t sure what people would do with this.”
When it was time to launch, in October 2005, they put up a big display, setting it up with a big grid that showed what people were uploading, and whether they were tagging. It was around eight or nine at night. The first photos that came up were someone’s desktop wallpaper from Windows. Not promising. But the next set was a group of girls at a party. Terrible photos—you couldn’t even see the background, just bodies and faces lit by a flash. But they were tagging!
“That’s when we knew it was going to work,” says Sittig. “A photo like that is entirely about telling a story publicly that you are friends with these people, it’s a way of expressing public support for the people you are in photos with, and reinforcing a relationship that you already have.”
Within a few months, Facebook was the most popular photo-sharing site in the world. It was all they could do to keep the servers running to store all those photos.
SEAN PARKER WAS not there to see the Photos launch. On August 27, just after midnight, Parker had been on vacation, accompanied by a college-age Facebook employee he was dating, when the police entered the house he was renting in North Carolina. They found what they assumed was cocaine, and arrested Parker for possession. Parker undoubtedly dreaded the consequences, correctly suspecting that even if the charges were eventually dropped (as indeed they were), it opened the possibility that once again, he would be robbed of a continuing role in a company he helped build.
His fears were well founded. Parker was arrested late on a Friday, and the board held an emergency meeting that weekend. Zuckerberg reorganized the company in a way that essentially demoted Parker. “I wanted him not to be president anymore,” he would say not long afterward, under oath in the ConnectU case deposition. It wasn’t just the fact that Parker’s arrest had put Facebook in legal jeopardy. By then, Zuckerberg viewed Parker more as a visionary than an operating president. He wasn’t doing a very good job of managing the sales team. Moreover, “he freaked people out,” said Zuckerberg.
“Sean’s hours were so irregular. You’d go days without seeing him,” says Ezra Callahan—Parker’s friend. “He was super flaky and unreliable and hard to get ahold of. When you needed him, he’d come in at the eleventh hour and save the day, but you couldn’t rely on this guy for anything.”
Though he lost his job, Parker was not banned from Facebook’s offices, and neither from Zuckerberg’s good graces. For the next few years he would be a mercurial presence, swooping in at various times, a usually welcome presence in product meetings. (Not much different from when he was supposed to be at all the meetings.) Zuckerberg valued his opinion. And Parker made the most of that. Parker would remark that Zuckerberg owed him. He was like the guy who saved your life in Vietnam and never let you forget it.
A month after Parker left, Facebook raided Amazon to hire Owen Van Natta, a thirty-six-year-old executive known for his deal-making skills, to head business development. After a few weeks, Zuckerberg promoted him to chief operating officer.
Years later, when Parker became somewhat maligned as a con man, a characterization cemented by Justin Timberlake’s manic and unflattering performance in the infamous movie, people would write Parker off as a footnote in the Facebook saga. But those who were actually there say otherwise.
“The company just would have been sold without him,” says Adam D’Angelo. “It would have been taken over by venture capitalists. It was priority number one for him not to get [Facebook] burned in the way he got burned.”
Parker wasn’t burned by Facebook like he was at Plaxo. He’d made sure of that during the negotiations with the VCs. His own deal specified that even if he left Facebook, he would retain his percentage in the company, a cut that would eventually provide him a reliable standing in the Forbes Billionaires list.
But it was Mark Zuckerberg who kept control, with the biggest stake of all. “Whether it’s Peter Thiel or Sean Parker, these people thought they were manipulating Mark,” says one early Facebook employee. “But Mark saw Sean as a useful tool to do the job that sucks the most—fundraising. In hindsight, it was genius that Mark convinced Parker to raise all the money for him.”