The Boy Kings (12 page)

• • •

“Are you still having fun?” Mark would ask me over the course of that year. I sometimes wondered for a second, out of curiosity, what he would say if I said
no
. He didn’t speak to me much around the office except to ask this question, as if he was silently and casually monitoring the mood of nontechnical employees,
wanting to check in briefly about whether we were having fun or not. I suspect he knew that if we were having fun, we would keep going, even if we weren’t particularly important or well paid. So I always said
yes,
to which he always answered, “Good,” and then wandered off, eyes downcast to his BlackBerry. I think he asked me if I was having fun because, on balance, I was. The whole Facebook enterprise was too strange and sudden and golden, rich with potential, not to be fascinating. How wouldn’t such a wealth of ambition, boyish antics, and global potential be fun? No matter how broke and in debt I was because of my student loan, I was now indexed to an intensely wealthy venture-capital apparatus that could save us all from ever struggling with money or recognition again.

While resetting users’ passwords and explaining how to resolve browser cache issues wasn’t particularly exciting, odd and novel forms of Facebook usage occurred frequently that were fun to figure out. “I can’t tell if this group is real or not,” another customer support rep said to me from across the desk where we were all jumbled together on the third floor of the 156 University building, as the office was getting crowded with new employees. Since the previous fall, when I started, the Customer Support Team had grown from the original five people (Jake, Oliver, Maryann, Emma, and me) to over twenty employees, many of whom were Stanford humanities graduates, with graduates from a few other private colleges mixed in. He showed me a group called “If this group reaches 100,000 people my girlfriend will have a threesome.” We clicked over to the profile of the group’s creator and he looked real enough, with a profile photo and friends and flirtatious wall posts from girls, standard
stuff for a college guy on Facebook. The group he created was growing at an absurdly fast rate, with friends seeing that another friend joined the group and joining it as well. Most of the people joining were guys.

I wondered vaguely if his girlfriend was okay with having their sex life plastered all over Facebook, but I thought it possible that she might be. American college women, after all, are known to kiss each other at parties for male attention, so this group was kind of like the virtual version of that, except that her boyfriend was the one running the show. Just another day at Facebook with another set of peculiarly Facebook problems, like discerning whether someone really wants to have a threesome, or if they are simply, in grand advertising tradition, selling sex to get publicity. It turned out, after we monitored it for a while, that this Facebook group was the first purposely designed as a viral marketing scheme—once the group had 100,000 members, its creator used it to promote a new music Web site. This scheme worked because, while what Facebook was offering users was a connection to their friends, what it offers marketers is the greatest viral distribution mechanism yet invented. In real life, you had to talk to someone to tell them you liked something: Here you could simply click a button, “join group,” and Face-book would tell everyone you know.

Some college kids in the group saw that Facebook employees had joined it to monitor them, and started asking us questions on the group wall. They wanted to know what it was like to be us, employees of the site they spent all their free time on. Thrax, naturally, was glad to trumpet our riches for them: “This bacon-wrapped shrimp tastes delicious, doesn’t it, Kate?” he posted on
the group’s wall, and then a few minutes later, “I’m going to come up to your floor for another piece of steak.” The college students visibly salivated in their comments after Thrax’s posts. I felt a tinge of guilt, recalling my mother saying, “You should never brag,” but that sentiment seemed archaic, out of place.

The new product that we had been testing all summer and that would launch soon that fall, the News Feed, would become the most efficient way yet of distributing evidence of one’s good fortune—pictures of how much fun you were having or some new thing you had bought—to all your friends. So, as we monitored the group, I could imagine the students’ envy as they regarded us, these extravagant Silicon Valley clowns eating catered meats while supporting the site they used to flirt and procrastinate. In truth, the shrimp wasn’t that tasty—in the early days, the caterer always overcooked and oversalted everything for the tastes of boys used to fast food—but the people watching us didn’t know that. On Facebook it all sounded, and was, impossibly rich, like we were having the time of our lives and, sometimes, I think we were.

Living within the mile meant you were all-in, willing to compromise all other aspects of your life in order to remain fully available to Facebook. Some employees still chose to live in San Francisco, which gave them the option of spending time with non-Facebook employees, but that seemed like a suspect choice to those of us within the mile, whose lives revolved around the company.

While I had begun my job at Facebook with a wait-and-see, month-by-month attitude, the increasing fun and excitement encouraged me to deepen my personal investment in the
company. Now that the summer house was coming to an end, I decided to go all-in and move within the mile.

I found a room in a rambling, tree-shaded house full of Stanford graduate students that felt a bit like an army barracks for academics, with thin carpet and nothing in the way of luxuries. The shower, to my unhappiness, was shared by five people. At eight hundred dollars, it wasn’t cheap, but after taxes, the subsidy made it a bearable three hundred dollars per month. By this time, I was getting used to the unreal economics of Palo Alto, and my time in Baltimore had made me an expert at hacking my way through poverty: Pay rent and loan payments first, eat as cheaply as possible, preferably home-cooked meals, buy practical clothing on deep discount at Loehmann’s or Neiman Marcus Last Call. There wasn’t money for much else.

So, by necessity, instead of, as in Mark’s case, by choice, my room was furnished with just a mattress on the floor and a laptop. It felt almost good to live a spartan existence in the midst of Palo Alto’s sunny plenty, undistracted by anything but our digital mission. There was a masculine, military purity in this lifestyle that wasn’t natural to me but that, like almost anything, I could play at for a while. Next to our project of connecting everyone in the world via what felt like an email system on steroids, enhanced by photographs and auto-fed updates, everything else was expendable, frivolous. And since Mark’s minimalist aesthetic, expressed on his Facebook profile as a wish to “Eliminate desire for all which doesn’t really matter,” coincided with my financial means, I decided I would adopt a minimalist lifestyle, for lack of other options.

The role model for what it meant to be fully committed
to the mission was Dustin, who had been working tirelessly to keep the site up for over two years, never complaining, always on call, always, improbably, keeping his cool (Dustin’s hard work paid off: He is now, famously, the world’s youngest billionaire). I joked with him that he was the Bodie—the hard-working, street-wise young thug on
The Wire
—of the founders, hoodie up, working around the clock from his desk to secure our digital
corners,
which, in this case, meant launching new networks, monitoring traffic flow, identifying issues, fixing bugs. “Dustin a soldier,” I said, echoing the voices from
The Wire,
whose accents I remembered from Baltimore. Dustin, ever modest, didn’t answer, but the dark circles under his eyes some days did. As exhausted as he often looked, I admired his wholehearted dedication and thought that if they would only let me, I would be a soldier, too. I trusted Dustin, because of his dry wit and warm humility, honed no doubt by having worked at a burger stand in high school, more than Mark, whose blankness verging on haughtiness inspired only curiosity in me, so I never doubted that soldiering for the cause of Facebook, if not for Mark himself, was just.

• • •

Despite my energy and ambition to help the cause, there was no way to be a true, ’round-the-clock soldier on the customer-support team. We clocked hours on a time sheet and suffered the power trips of our recently hired head of customer support, Andreas. He was an oily, artificially tanned man who had made a career in the insincere world of corporate customer service, which
made him a surprising hire, given Facebook’s ideals of youthful, modern efficiency. He seemed to have been hired because the powers that be—VCs and executives—wanted a mature adult to manage customer support, rather than the twentysomethings we were (they trusted youthful nontechnical employees much less than youthful engineers). Andreas didn’t understand how Facebook worked or the byzantine site rules that we were charged with enforcing, but that wasn’t really his job: His job was simply to be the person assigned to be in charge of the hourly workers, like Foucault’s baby in the panopticon. His power was simply in the fact that he was there, watching, even if that simply meant playing around on Facebook all day while Jake, Maryann, and I managed the Customer Support Team in practice.

Andreas hadn’t attended college and seemed threatened by the fact that the team was composed mostly of newly minted Stanford grads. As customer support grew, he began pressuring us to hire the least educated people he could find. One day he asked me to interview someone who hadn’t gone to college, whose resume was heavily misspelled, and whose only previous experience was working at Pizza Hut, and seemed disappointed when the person turned out to be far too unskilled in typing and writing to hire.

Customer-support employees had the least amount of power in the company, so if we wanted to escape our lowly and maligned position, we had to hack our way through and around Facebook’s hierarchy one way or another. Anyone with a shred of hustle did this. There was a handsome Italian boy on our team who did next to nothing, clocking in hours he never worked, but showed up at the office just enough to smile, dark-eyed and
long-lashed, at Andreas, who let his shiftlessness slide. None of us blamed the kid. It was all in the game, and in some way, everyone was playing.

The game of building kingdoms that executives from Mark down seemed to be playing reminded me of a quote from
The Wire,
“The king stay the king, unless he a smart-ass pawn.” I grew more obsessed with
The Wire,
the deeper I found myself falling into Facebook’s game (on weekends, I would sometimes watch an entire season and try to use it as inspiration to game Facebook’s system and better my career). Someone suggested that Thrax could be Omar, the stickup artist in
The Wire
who robs drug dealers (because his MySpace hack was kind of the Internet equivalent of a stickup) but that didn’t seem quite right to me. Omar had a Robin Hood politics to his piracy. He stole partly to redistribute the drug dealers’ wealth to the neighborhoods they fed on. In high school, Thrax had been a pirate for piracy’s sake: He had wanted to transfer media (movies, music, episodes of
I Love Lucy,
a show he openly adored) over to his servers just to have it, in the event that he might want to watch it someday and also, because having gigabytes of data at hand was part of how hackers proved their status to one another. The more media he could pirate and store on his copious hard drives, like digital stash houses, guarded by firewalls instead of guns, the better. “I’m kind of obsessed with piracy,” he would say to me, later, as if even he knew this drive to accumulate data was a slightly odd, excessive pastime, a new kind of drug.

The minimalism that Mark espoused extended in my case to a minimalism of people. Without money to go out in Palo Alto (and with very little to do there if I went), I had to be selective
about what I did and with whom. The Harvard guys were less careful with money, because they didn’t need to be. While not typically flashy, they liked to take limos to party in the city or go wine tasting in Napa. Photo albums of these trips would always show up on Facebook afterward, full of pictures of engineers in dress shirts and ties lifting champagne glasses and rolling around on the floor of the limo, smiling with glee. I went on one Napa limo trip and, a week later, upon receiving my three-hundred-dollar share of the bill from one of the Harvard engineers, I realized that I would I have to find other ways to have fun.

So I was lucky to have Sam and Thrax as friends; their less fancy upbringings made them frugal by habit. Sam rode his bike and the bus everywhere; his apartment was furnished with a couch and the dartboard that he brought from Massachusetts in homage to the bar games of his family’s working-class hometown. That fall, his sister Micaela, a clever bioscientist who dressed for the beach in short shorts and flip-flops regardless of the weather, moved from Massachusetts to live with him while she looked for work. Her social hallmark was that she proudly carried a six-pack of beer in her purse at parties, just in case the hosts hadn’t supplied enough, and the Facebook engineers whose parties we went to were duly impressed and chastened: Micaela had outmanned them.

So it was that our social life in Palo Alto consisted of hanging around at our apartments playing games, like Scrabble or darts, or watching movies and, because our Facebook friends were always there, the office. When there was nothing else to do, we could always run around the empty office after midnight, tinkering with the toys and games the boys had accrued and lolling
around on the body-sized bean bags that are Silicon Valley’s furniture of choice. In many ways, the atmosphere of our lives that year was like an oversized preschool.

One night, after drinking on the office roof, Sam, Thrax, Justin, and another self-taught engineer, Isaac, who had been hired over a year earlier to help Mark and Dustin code until he was let go a few months later, played hide and seek happily in the dark office, amid the desks and monitors and warren-like rooms filled with blankets and video screens. During our game, I hid under the catering table obscured by the folds of a tablecloth, like Eloise at The Plaza. Thrax eventually found me because, as you do when playing hide-and-seek in childhood, I gave myself away by giggling when he came near. But, given the circumstances, how could we not laugh? We were, technically at least, adults, crawling around on the floor under computers in some of the most expensive square footage in America, waiting until our boy emperor decided it was our turn to be king. This sense that we were part of a developing royal court was bizarre, and I think accounted for the mirth everyone often felt around that time. In pictures from this period, tagged for posterity, we are almost always laughing, our faces contorted as if we can’t believe our absurd good fortune. Mark never took part in these games, preferring to sit at his desk in the deep corner of the office, face illuminated by the glow of the screen. He was playing a bigger game.