This was a new kind of online connection, one with real names and pictures rather than usernames and avatars. And it felt okay to put your real information up there—and your hobbies, favorite films, and relationship status—because Thefacebook (renamed Facebook the next year) was limited only to college students, and only at a few elite campuses. It had originated at the most elite one of all, Harvard, where a preternaturally focused nineteen-year-old named Mark Zuckerberg had launched the site out of his dorm room one month earlier. (The dorm room was rapidly supplanting the garage as the mythic birthplace of iconic Valley brands.) One month in, Facebook had nearly ten thousand users at Harvard and Stanford alone.17
Facebook was the latest entry in a great wave that rose up after the tech bust: social networking. These companies popped up in dizzyingly rapid succession in 2003 and early 2004, a speed and frenzy unmatched since the blossoming of the first microcomputer companies out of the homebrew scene a quarter century earlier.
Longstanding habits of networked connection now had a technological accelerant, as bandwidth grew and users could create jazzy custom pages to accompany their online personae. Los Angeles–based MySpace had a million users at the time of Facebook’s launch; online dating had become the decade’s new singles bar. The Valley already had two popular and growing social networks, Friendster and LinkedIn, which had attracted blue-chip VC backing and distinguished themselves from their rivals by requiring people to use their real names. Despite sky-high valuations, however, no one had figured out how to make real money on the social networking phenomenon. And it was hard to shake the icky feeling that many people had about sharing their lives with online strangers.18
The college students of the early 2000s had fewer qualms. They had grown up doing homework on a computer and sneaking late-night hours in the chaotic social world of Internet chat rooms. They file swapped on Napster until it got shut down; they added HTML flourishes to their MySpace pages. Still, Facebook started as a college kid’s side hustle, a vehicle for the silly, ephemeral musings and gossip of his fellow students, who presumably would move on to more serious things after graduation. In those early months the site’s server space was paid for by a wealthy roommate and, at one particularly cash-strapped point, by Zuckerberg’s parents. It seemed unlikely to become the next world-changing tech company.19
That was, of course, before Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates moved to Palo Alto, secured money and mentorship, and became the runaway start-up success story of the decade, fodder for countless magazine cover stories, books, and one big-studio Hollywood film. Tech investors (and tech journalists) were perpetually seeking the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg fit the bill—extraordinarily driven, far-seeing, his technologist’s eyes on the prize even before he reached the legal drinking age.
Facebook soon expanded from college campuses to high schools, then opened its gates to the world. It turned out that people over the age of twenty-one also liked to share party pics and quotes from their favorite movies, and the stunning rate of growth never slackened. By the end of 2006, the elder generation of tech and media giants—Microsoft, Yahoo!, MTV, AOL—were descending on Facebook’s University Avenue offices in an eager horde, desperate to get a piece of the company and its young, educated, affluent market. Zuckerberg unnerved and impressed his advisors by turning most of the new suitors down, including Yahoo!’s offer to buy the company for $1 billion. No thanks. Silicon Valley’s latest star entrepreneur had decided he’d make history on his own.
THE SOCIAL NETWORKS
Google and Facebook were the biggest, but not the only, tech success stories in the first years of the new millennium. Joining them were other online phenomena that leveraged the Internet’s speed and market penetration to build new online communities. They included a raft of social news aggregators like Reddit, whose blend of customized news feeds and passionately opinionated comment threads anticipated what Facebook would later become. Volunteer moderators powered these forums, just like the BBSs that came before them. An army of passionate volunteers also ran Wikipedia, a nonprofit online encyclopedia that by 2018 became the fifth most-visited destination on the Internet, behind only Google, YouTube, Facebook, and the Chinese search giant Baidu.20
The common thread binding all these enterprises, large and small, was that the content on their sites came from users, not journalists or scholars or “experts.” Internet media had already derailed the music industry, and now it took down traditional print journalism as well. Newspapers had gamely put their content on the Web, for free, and now they competed with thousands of blogs and online outlets in a brawling battle for users’ attention. Even new ventures by more established tech companies couldn’t get traction. Wikipedia’s surging growth helped kill off Microsoft’s exquisite and expensive encyclopedia project, Encarta; the algorithmically curated Google News outpaced the all-purpose headlines provided by Yahoo! and AOL.
There was now so much content surging around the Web that it made Alvin Toffler’s predictions of “information overload” seem quaint, and large quantity did not necessarily mean higher quality. The changes also encouraged a growing tribalism in a nation already fractured by war and economic insecurity, by race and gender, by faith and politics. People rallied online around a common interest or cause. They also came together because of their opposition to or outright hatred of something or someone else.
In the early days of social media, there was great hope that the new networks would cure divisions rather than increase them. In 2006, Time magazine, reliable bellwether of the zeitgeist, had a surprising choice for person of the year: “You.” The year’s story, wrote Time’s correspondent, isn’t just “about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. . . . It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will change the world, but also change the way the world changes.” This was the great hope that so many in Silicon Valley had held for so long, the thread winding through Community Memory and Homebrew and the WELL, the thing that propelled the Liza Loops and the Terry Winograds and the thousands who flocked to watch the Man burn in the Nevada desert every September.21
All of that wide-open empowerment floated upon the loose, fragile, unpredictable framework of the commercial Internet. This was a system that the political debates of the early 1990s had ruled would be “liberat[ed] from Second Wave rules,” as Esther Dyson and her collaborators put it in 1994—meaning that it was as lightly regulated as possible. The extraordinary new generation of thinking machines channeled the spirit of Mitch Kapor’s Jeffersonian Internet: an independent, decentralized forum of many voices. Their designers remained resolute in their commitment to not take sides. As these powerful tools reached into the worlds of media and politics, however, sides would have to be taken.22
HEAD OF GROWTH
Facebook was a little more than five years old when it moved into a building on the fringe of the Stanford Research Park that once had housed part of Hewlett-Packard. The platform’s growth had left all its competitors and predecessors in the dust. An expansionist, earnest, set-the-defaults-to-public spirit reverberated through the campus. By connecting the world through software, and doing so at massive scale, the company was accomplishing something the Valley had been trying to do for generations. Posters emblazoned with the company’s de facto motto adorned the walls surrounding Facebook’s expansive open-plan bullpen: “Move fast and break things.”
Mark Zuckerberg remained in charge, owning over 24 percent of the company and controlling three of its five board seats. The Valley’s Internet-era inner circle had become funders and close advisors. Peter Thiel had given Facebook its first big investment back in 2004 and was a board member. Marc Andreessen was a mentor as well, meeting Zuckerberg regularly for hash-and-egg breakfasts at a local diner. Star executives had joined from Yahoo! and Google, including Sheryl Sandberg, who became the company�
��s chief operating officer in 2007. Gone was the hyper-macho culture of earlier Valley giants like Intel and Sun; Facebook’s top people were a tight and friendly team, passionate about the value of their product. “Technology does not need to estrange us from one another,” declared senior executive Chris Cox, well-known around the company for the upbeat speeches he delivered to new hires. “In the grand scheme of things, communicating with each other changes everything.”23
Chamath Palihapitiya was one of the techno-optimists in the C-suite by then as well. He’d known Mark Zuckerberg since Facebook’s earliest days, when he was still at AOL, having become the youngest vice president in the company’s history. Although failing to persuade his bosses to buy or invest in a little company helmed by a twenty-year-old who liked to wear shorts and flip-flops to business meetings, Palihapitiya brokered a deal that allowed Facebook to feature AOL’s wildly popular instant-messaging service (which Zuckerberg and his team already used religiously). Soon after, Palihapitiya moved to Palo Alto for a job at the Mayfield Fund, the VC firm founded back in the late 1960s by Tommy Davis and Stanford’s Bill Miller. He and Zuckerberg became regular dinner companions.
Zuck’s cool intensity smoothed out Chamath’s hyperkinetic style. “I’ve never met anyone at such a young age who would truly listen,” observed Palihapitiya. “He doesn’t need to talk a lot.” When the young CEO suggested that the former media executive come to Facebook, it was an easy decision. Palihapitiya had been wanting to return to start-ups for the better part of the decade. He felt out of place in the country club of old-school venture capital. Here was a great opportunity to switch gears, and he might make a couple of million dollars on the way. His job title—Vice President for User Growth—spoke volumes about where Facebook’s priorities lay. “There is so much accidental tourism in great things in life,” Palihapitiya later reflected, and he had hopped on the tour bus at exactly the right time.24
In 2007, Facebook opened up its network to third-party apps, bringing in games and quizzes and other content to its newsfeed, and allowing developers to tap into the treasure trove of knowledge about users’ connections and likes that Facebook called the “social graph.” In 2010, Facebook announced “Open Graph,” which connected a user’s profile and network to the other places she traveled online. It wasn’t just a social network atop the Web anymore. Facebook had remade the Web itself into something, as Zuckerberg put it, “more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware.” The company allowed academic researchers to tap into its troves of information as well, underscoring its made-in-Silicon-Valley belief that freer and more transparent flows of information served the greater good.25
Facebook and its founder were remarkably young and relentlessly future tense, but Zuckerberg had a deepening sense of his place in Valley history as the company’s wealth and influence grew. In the new digs, he adopted Steve Jobs’s famous habit of holding “walk and talk” meetings, taking a prospective employee or business partner on a short ramble behind Facebook’s building, up a steep and winding path through the eucalyptus trees to a hill that loomed above. Although it wasn’t that high, the view from the top was sweeping, from Stanford’s sandstone and tile just to the north, across the haze of the Bay to the eastern mountains, and down south where amid the sun-dappled sprawl lay the birthplace of so many of the Valley’s iconic names: Shockley and Fairchild, Intel and Apple, Netscape and Google.
Zuckerberg would point out these sites, gesture to the building below, then turn to his companion to make his pitch. Facebook “would eventually be bigger than all of the companies” he had just mentioned, one recruit later recounted him saying. “If I joined the company, I could be part of it all.” Time agreed that the young CEO was making history, making him Person of the Year for 2010. “We have entered the Facebook age,” its reporter wrote, “and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here.”26
THE SOCIAL MEDIA PRESIDENT
Like generations of tech companies before it, Facebook owed its success not only to the talents of its creators but also to the historical moment in which it grew. The long-brewing distrust of government, dislike of traditional gatekeepers, and decentralization of American mass media accelerated rapidly in the post-9/11 era, aided by (but not solely because of) the Internet. Added into the already frantic spin of cable TV came the cacophony of online outlets and the you-may-also-like curation of RSS feeds and Google News. From Capitol Hill to town council meetings, political discourse divided into sharply partisan echo chambers; rural-to-urban migration and political redistricting sharply separated Americans by class, race, geography, and party. The age of terror and grinding war in the Middle East caused a longing for familiar realms of family and community, and it increased suspicion of foreigners and religious minorities, the “them” versus “us.” When real life felt terrifying, social media was a welcome retreat.
But Facebook and other social networks also filled a cultural void created by a half century of political liberation and economic dislocation, the vanishing of the bowling leagues and church picnics and union meetings that had glued together midcentury America in conformity and community. Social media became a more cosmopolitan town square, one that crossed national borders, launched new voices, and created moments of joyous connection that could morph into real-life friendships. It turned everyone into a diarist, a philosopher, an activist—even if that activism was merely clicking a “like” button.
Both Facebook and Twitter, a social platform originally designed for 140-word “microblog” status updates, became powerful mechanisms for political organizing and communication during the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements of 2011. Twitter swiftly gained a disproportionate number of African American users and “Black Twitter” became a powerful platform for both civic activism and cultural exchange; the most powerful racial justice movement of the century’s second decade, Black Lives Matter, began as a Twitter hashtag. And in the 2008 and 2012 presidential races, candidates used social networking as a powerful tool to reach sharply targeted groups of likely voters, as well as providing the ultimate free-media platform for unfiltered campaign messaging.27
Few did this earlier and better than Barack Obama. Like Mark Zuckerberg, the onetime state senator from Illinois had been a virtual unknown in 2004, shooting into the international spotlight because of his remarkable charisma, singular vision, and lucky timing. Silicon Valley power players had been searching for a new boy wonder in the wake of Brin and Page’s success, and they found it in Zuckerberg. Similarly, Clinton-weary Democrats who opposed the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq (and 2008 frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s vote in favor of it) found in Obama a fresh face and compelling voice.
Just as Franklin Roosevelt had done with radio and John F. Kennedy with television, Barack Obama leveraged social media more thoroughly and creatively than his political rivals, and he formed a close and convivial relationship with the Valley in the process. Google’s Eric Schmidt became an early donor and advisor. Chris Hughes, a member of Zuckerberg’s original Harvard team, took a sabbatical from Facebook to serve as Obama’s new-media guru, helping the campaign deliver targeted messages as cool and crisply designed as Web 2.0 itself.
Traditional direct-mail operations couldn’t hold a candle to inexpensive and viral Facebook pages; a well-turned tweet by the candidate reached more voters than any stump speech. Bill Clinton might have won the tech community’s votes in the early 1990s, but the new generation’s hearts and wallets were with Obama, the Unix to Hillary Clinton’s MS-DOS. As eager Stanford student volunteers swarmed the Palo Alto field office and tech executives lined up to give high-dollar donations, one reporter quipped that the Obama campaign had become “the hottest start-up in the Valley.”28
After entering office in 2009, the commander in chief became a familiar presence in town, holding town hall meetings at Facebook and LinkedIn, convening big-ticket fundraisers, and enjoying private dinners with t
ech titans. One CEO gathering at John and Ann Doerr’s Woodside home featured one of the most staggering assemblies of net worth in human history, with Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, and Steve Jobs all joining Doerr and Obama around the table.29
Back in Washington, the president pushed for wiring schools and reinventing bureaucracy with new software. He called on his tech allies and donors after the disastrous rollout of the enrollment website for his health care plan. Obama hired the nation’s first chief technology officer, beefed up the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and staged science-fair photo ops to encourage kids to pursue engineering. He hosted a Reddit Ask Me Anything (“Hey everybody—this is barack,” the president began), had millions of followers on Twitter, and hired a mind-boggling number of people who had once worked at Google. Obama aides, in turn, often made their way to Silicon Valley after their stint in public service was up.30
Toward the end of his time in office, in one final and important victory for the information-should-be-free crowd, Obama’s FCC sided with the Valley (and against telecom companies) on the hot-button issue of “net neutrality,” which prevented Internet service providers from blocking or charging higher prices for certain content. But it was tech’s great capitalists whom Obama seemed to admire and rely upon the most. He quietly conferred with Doerr, Schmidt, and others as he began to mull his post-presidency life, and at one point floated the notion of becoming a venture capitalist himself.31
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