Zuckerberg searched the Craigslist classifieds and found a four-bedroom ranch house in Palo Alto, California, which he rented as a summer sublet. He decided he wanted to go out to California for several reasons. McCollum, with whom he was collaborating on Wirehog, had a summer internship at nearby video game company Electronic Arts, an industry giant that had created the Sims, Madden NFL games, and many other hits. Exeter buddy Adam D’Angelo was willing to come up from Caltech to hang out. But most of all it was the promised land of technology. “Palo Alto was kind of like this mythical place where all the techs used to come from,” he told a reporter a few months later. “So I was like, I want to check that out.”
In a critical recruitment effort, Zuckerberg convinced Dustin Moskovitz to join him on the trip to California. Moskovitz had already arranged a summer job in the Harvard computer lab as a user assistant, or UA. But Moskovitz had become indispensable. With his dogged work ethic and growing knowledge of coding, he was more or less managing Thefacebook’s day-to-day operation. Zuckerberg promised to pay more than he’d get in his UA job and convinced him the move would be good for Thefacebook.
Spokesman and Zuckerberg roommate Chris Hughes had already paid for a summer program in France and would only come out to Palo Alto when that was over. His middle-class North Carolina family didn’t have a lot of money and he was by nature even more risk-averse than Moskovitz, whose Florida family was fairly well-off. The more worldly Brazilian Saverin had his own reasons not to join the trek to Palo Alto, which appealed to him not at all. He headed to New York for the summer, planning to drum up more advertising business and to work at an investment firm where his father had connections.
Sean Parker was stressed out. It was a hot afternoon in Palo Alto, and he hated doing physical work. But his lease was up and he was short on cash. So here he was in June 2004 on the sidewalk in front of his girlfriend’s family’s house, unloading boxes from his car. It was, admittedly, a svelte vehicle—a white BMW 5-series he’d bought when times were flush. Parker too was a bit svelte. His curly blond hair was stylishly long. The slim twenty-four-year-old wore a fashionable and pricey T-shirt, which on this day was getting sweaty.
When he noticed a group of boys heading toward him he stiffened. His boxes contained expensive computer equipment. He didn’t like the look of these kids—all wearing sweatshirts with hoods up despite the heat. He thought they had a menacing air, maybe a group of hoodlums. But now the shortest one walked right up.
“Parker!” he said unexpectedly, with enthusiasm. “Sean—it’s Mark, Mark Zuckerberg.” Suddenly it all snapped into place. This was the guy he’d met for dinner in New York two months earlier. He’d said he was coming out to California for the summer.
Zuckerberg introduced the other four—all Harvard undergrads, not hoodlums: Thefacebook’s curly-haired co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, Zuckerberg’s Wirehog partner, and two skinny interns that Thefacebook had hired for the summer, Harvard freshmen Erik Schultink and Stephen Dawson-Haggerty. The five boys had been on a mile-long walk home from the grocery store, since they didn’t have a car. They were living in a house just a block away. Zuckerberg invited Parker to come over. A few hours later, the young entrepreneur walked to the Thefacebook house at 819 La Jennifer Way.
Sean Parker was about to become a major—if controversial—character in the Facebook story. He had a lot of Internet experience for someone his age. In 1999 he’d hooked up online with a guy named Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster, and then joined him in San Francisco to help launch the service that upended the music industry. Parker left Napster after just a year and co-founded his own Internet company, Plaxo. The venture quickly raised millions and began garnering hundreds of thousands of users, but Parker ran into trouble again with his financial backers. Plaxo’s venture capitalists didn’t like his casual approach to scheduling and deadlines, his iconoclasm, his insecurity, or his superior attitude, though they recognized he was scary smart. The investors didn’t much appreciate Parker’s rock-and-roll lifestyle, either. He would work weeks on end to accomplish some company objective, sleeping in the office, then not come in at all for days. Finally they booted him out. In the end they even hired a private investigator to document his alleged misbehavior.
Parker was among the growing number of Silicon Valley executives who were becoming convinced that social networking would become a very big business. In the fall of 2003, Silicon Valley venture investors had put a total of $36 million into four high-profile social networking start-ups—Friendster, LinkedIn, Spoke, and Tribe. In late March, not long after Thefacebook took over the Stanford campus in mere days, Parker sent Zuckerberg an email out of the blue. He played up his Napster bona fides and offered to introduce Zuckerberg to savvy San Francisco investors who understood social networking. He mentioned that he was acquainted with the CEOs of LinkedIn and Tribe, who had jointly purchased a key patent that might be important for social networks. Parker suggested that a meeting with them could help ensure that the patent wasn’t used against Thefacebook. Saverin emailed him back, and they arranged a dinner in New York.
In early April, Parker flew to New York for the dinner. He joined Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg’s girlfriend Priscilla Chan, Saverin, and Saverin’s girlfriend at a trendy new Chinese place called 66 in Tribeca. Zuckerberg was thrilled to meet a founder of Napster, which he considered one of the most important things that had ever happened on the Internet. And Parker was quickly impressed with Zuckerberg. At the sleek, Richard Meier–designed restaurant, the two fell into intense back-and-forth almost immediately, mostly leaving out Saverin and the two women. Zuckerberg sketched out his vision for what Thefacebook could become. It was an even bigger vision than Parker had expected. “He was not thinking, ‘Let’s make some money and get out,’” says Parker. “This wasn’t like a get-rich-quick scheme. This was ‘Let’s build something that has lasting cultural value and try to take over the world.’ But he didn’t know what that meant. He was a college student. Taking over the world meant taking over college.” Parker remembers thinking Zuckerberg seemed incredibly ambitious. “He had imperial tendencies.” Parker had to overdraw his bank account to afford the dinner, but he felt it was worth it.
When he ran into Parker two months later on the Palo Alto sidewalk, Zuckerberg had a strong and positive recollection of the New York meeting. Parker was one of the people who seemed to really understand what Thefacebook was doing.
Over dinner in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg witnessed the denouement of Parker’s months-long battle with his former backers at Plaxo. The six young men walked to a nearby restaurant, where Zuckerberg brought Parker up to date on Thefacebook and introduced him more fully to his Harvard chums. While they were sitting in the restaurant, Parker got a critical call from his lawyer. The news was bad. The Plaxo board had decided not to allow about half of Parker’s remaining Plaxo shares to vest. In other words, he was getting kicked out of his company and losing his chance to make any money if it later went public or was sold.
Parker was enraged. He was getting screwed. Thefacebook’s boys listened in awe and dismay. It became the theme for the night. Zuckerberg had little experience dealing with investors, though they had been approaching him regularly since about March, hoping to get a piece of Thefacebook. Hearing Parker’s story was chastening. “VCs sound scary,” Zuckerberg recalls thinking. It was a formative moment, and a critical one for Facebook’s future. Feeling for his friend, and thinking he might learn much from Parker, Zuckerberg invited him to move into the house with them. By September, Zuckerberg was calling Parker the company’s president.
Parker is a unique sort of entrepreneur, even for Silicon Valley. A precocious programmer and intellect, he is the son of a top U.S. government oceanographer. He spent much of his Virginia childhood beset by illness, devoting much of his time to reading and learning computer programming. In 1995 he became an intern at fifteen at Freeloader, one of Washington, D.C.’s first Internet start-ups. Several years later, in
1999, barely out of high school, he helped Shawn Fanning start Napster. The renegade peer-to-peer music-sharing service attracted 26 million users by its peak in early 2001. It was also the first big consumer service to demonstrate a fundamentally new sort of Internet—one where users connected directly to one another without a big company like eBay or Yahoo or Microsoft in the middle. But Napster almost immediately encountered an all-out legal assault from the big record labels. Parker, for his part, lost his job there in a management shake-up after little more than a year, when he was still just twenty. He got the company in trouble by openly discussing in emails—displayed in a court case brought by the labels—that what Napster’s users were doing might be illegal. Shortly thereafter, he and two friends formed Plaxo, which helped users keep track of email addresses and contact information.
Despite his lack of formal education and loose respect for business norms, Parker is a business intellectual. He could even perhaps be called a business artist, if those two words can be juxtaposed. On his own Facebook profile he calls himself “a twisted half-breed: a rational-aesthete.” He combines a subtle understanding of business history, economics, and behavior with an artist’s impatience, impulsiveness, and vision for a better world. Not that his actual vision is any good. His eyes are bad enough that if he forgets his contacts or his thick glasses he can need help getting around. He has a certain weightless quality, as if he were about to float off like Peter Pan, perhaps surrounded by one of his always-gorgeous girlfriends. (Lately he has settled into a long-term relationship.)
A voracious reader with a deep fascination with politics, the self-taught Parker may pepper an analysis of current trends with a reference to “the intentions of the framers” (the men who wrote the U.S. Constitution, that is). His Facebook profile includes quotes from T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, and Albert Camus. He likes to talk about things like “business externalities.” And if you show the slightest interest he will eagerly describe his theory on the history of media since Gutenberg. Most of all, he likes to talk, rapidly, intensely, and he likes to talk about ideas. What he brought to Thefacebook was both a practiced understanding of the realities of business and a penchant for philosophical argument that prompted Zuckerberg to refine his vision. Hanging with Parker wasn’t that different from jawboning with classmates in the Harvard dorms, except that the conversation now was all about making Thefacebook successful.
The boys quickly settled into a routine—sleep late, walk into the dining room, and get to work. The table there was piled high with computers, cables, modems, cameras, and trash that got stuffed among them, along with the requisite untossed bottles, cans, and cups. Zuckerberg slept later than most—he seldom got to work before afternoon, and usually worked well into the night. His typical garb in this office of sorts was pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. When they sat at their laptops around the dining room table on La Jennifer Way, it was eerily quiet. That’s because when they did talk to one another, they did it over instant messaging, even when they were sitting right next to one another. It let the others concentrate. Geeks like Zuckerberg and Moskovitz like to get deep into what is almost a trance when they’re coding, and while they didn’t mind background music or the TV playing, they couldn’t stand interruptions.
With Moskovitz and Parker, Zuckerberg had now put into place, consciously or not, an ideal team to bracket his own talents. Moskovitz is the kind of person every start-up needs—diligent, down-to-earth, versatile, and pragmatic. He took responsibility for keeping the service operating and setting up databases for new schools (with the interns doing much of the tedious work). If he had to, he’d work all night to keep the system up.
Parker, by contrast, was an experienced company-maker, familiar with the ways of the world. He specialized in networking in the real-world sense. He knew a lot of people in the Valley and understood how to get their ear. He was polished—spending money (when he had it) on nice meals, haircuts, and stylish clothes. He might occasionally cancel meetings unexpectedly after burning himself out at a party the night before, but he was a slick front man who could talk up Thefacebook, which was exactly what it needed. In Silicon Valley those who had heard of it still mostly thought of Thefacebook as a silly thing for sex-starved college kids. Parker’s big-picture vision helped give the service gravitas.
Having the two of them in place meant Zuckerberg could do what he does best—think about what Thefacebook should be and how it should evolve. Or, depending on his mood, devote his energies to something he wanted to use himself—Wirehog. Ironically, Zuckerberg was not a heavy user of Thefacebook. Nor, in fact, were any of its founders and early employees. This summer the interns, working with Moskovitz, started to gather data on how people actually used the site. They found that some users were looking at hundreds and even thousands of profiles every day. These were the users they were designing for.
When he wasn’t working on Wirehog, Zuckerberg was coding a feature for Thefacebook he also thought would be pretty cool—a way to get information out of the service using short messages, or SMS, from a cell phone. Way before there was a Facebook application for the iPhone or the BlackBerry, this was Thefacebook’s mobile interface. You could send messages with a person’s name to [email protected] and include special codes to get friends’ phone numbers or other information sent back to your phone. The only problem was that it was unwieldy for ordinary users. You needed to carry around a folded-up cheat sheet to remember how to use it. Cool though it was, it didn’t last long.
Parker moved into a room with a bare mattress on the floor. Zuckerberg later said that aside from his car, the only impressive thing Parker brought with him was a pair of “ridiculously nice sneakers.” According to Parker, here’s how Zuckerberg asked him to take on the president job: “Can you help us set up the company? We’re screwed right now.” Part of the deal, though, was a quid pro quo—Parker got to stay in the house; Zuckerberg and his friends got to share Parker’s BMW.
At least one adviser urged Zuckerberg not to hire Parker, saying his lax ways and dissipated lifestyle could taint the company. “He has a problem with women and rock ’n’ roll,” Zuckerberg’s more-experienced confidant said. But Zuckerberg was unmoved. He said he’d heard the stories, but that Parker’s experience and intelligence outweighed the risks. After all, Parker helped start Napster. Not only that, but he was a small investor in Friendster and a friend of its founder. He was already talking about The facebook as “the chance to do Friendster correctly.”
Thefacebook’s traffic had dipped now that college kids were mostly out of school. But Zuckerberg and Moskovitz were bolstering the site for fall, when they expected growth would resume in earnest. Some visitors saw their confidence as arrogance bred of upper-class Harvard privilege. “Even back then they were talking like they knew this was going to happen and they had the best thing in the world and they were going to dominate everyone,” says one slightly awed early visitor to the house. “They used that word dominate all the time.” Thefacebook would dominate its rivals, they said. In fact, much of it was bluster, with an added dash of the insouciance of youth.
Work would get intense in the late afternoon and early evening. “Everyone would be working and someone would say ‘Hey, I’m hungry. I wanna go get In-N-Out,’” says another frequent visitor, “and Mark would, like, pound the table and just say ‘No! We’re in lockdown! No one leaves the table until we’re done with this thing.’” Like dominate, lockdown became a part of Facebook’s lingo and lore that lasted for years.
Despite his baby face and general shyness, Zuckerberg was firmly and undisputedly in charge. Every page of Thefacebook included at the bottom a little tagline: “A Mark Zuckerberg production.” On the service’s “about” page, he was listed as “Founder, Master and Commander, Enemy of the State.” Moskovitz, by contrast, had the relatively ignominious listing “No Longer Expendable Programmer, Paid Assassin.” Saverin’s job was said to be “Business Stuff, Corporate Stuff, Brazilian Affairs.”
; Zuckerberg was beginning, fitfully, to show qualities of natural leadership. Says Sean Parker: “The leader of a company needs to have a decision tree in his head—if this happens we go this way, but if it winds up like that, then we go this other way. Mark does that instinctively.” He liked to have fun as much as any of his colleagues—in fact he could be a bit of a comic—but he also was determined to keep this ship moving forward. And he was more than happy to be the captain.
Not infrequently, in fact, he acted like he was captain of a pirate ship. When he started thinking hard about something or was debating an idea with one of the others, Zuckerberg would often jump up and start pacing back and forth around the room with his hands clasped behind his back. Among the few possessions he had brought out with him were his fencing paraphernalia, which he left lying in a pile not far away. Often he’d grab his foil and start swinging it through the air. “Okay, we’ve got to talk about this,” he would declare, one hand held behind his back, lunging forward with his foil. It got on Moskovitz’s nerves. “I’m the personality type where that would get me sometimes,” says Moskovitz. “It was a pretty small room. I’m like a cautious mother—‘You’re going to break something!’ But when he got into the mood he would do it for a couple hours.” Later Moskovitz and the others banned fencing from the house.
Behind the house was a nice kidney-shaped pool, and the triangular backyard was mostly paved. One night Zuckerberg and Parker spent a few hours standing around outside talking. Zuckerberg had his foil, and was waving it too close to Parker’s face for comfort. He found it very bad for concentration to have a fencing sword swing a few inches from his face every few seconds. “Do you think this thing is really going to last?” Zuckerberg asked at one point between thrusts. “I do,” replied Parker, wincing. “Unless we get outcompeted by somebody else or we don’t execute well or we let our servers fail like Friendster did, there’s no reason why this can’t last.”
The Facebook Effect Page 6
