The Boy Kings

a Western.
    As the Silicon Valley legend goes, the Five received their Facebook job offers while at a party. Their first reaction, allegedly, was to reject the offer. They assumed that the upstart Face-book couldn’t pay them enough or treat them as seriously as they were accustomed to being treated. The Five’s initial disinterest gave Facebook the drive to wage one of the first of many oedipal raids on an older company’s talent, in which Mark could prove that despite the company’s youth and scrappiness it could win the brawl for status. It seemed sometimes that, to Mark, battling a bigger competitor was almost as exciting as winning the war, as I would see again when, three years later, we turned our attention to the valley’s biggest behemoth, Google.
    Once the Five had been convinced to come to Palo Alto, they immediately wore, without flinching, the new label star programmer, not just a coder but a personality, a social leader, a celebrity center around which the valley’s attention can swirl. Jamie, who, unlike the other four, came from Amazon but was included in the Five, was the clear prize for this new celebrity model of Silicon Valley; he was tall, dark blond, handsome, and of very old money. He looked like a gentleman in the nineteenth-century portraits that hung on the wall in my seminar room at Hopkins. The other four guys weren’t as portrait-perfect as Jamie; they looked less like movie stars and unlike him, had not been the presidents of painfully elite Harvard final clubs, replete with invitation-only parties and secret rituals. However, in the race for status that Facebook was mounting, they had enough: They were from Harvard and they were programmers, whichmade them the valley’s version of good old boys. The Microsoft Five quickly established themselves as a new, explicit kind of fraternity: They called themselves Tau Phi Beta, or TFB for The Facebook Fraternity, complete with Greek letters, custom T-shirts, and weekly keg parties at the house they rented together.
    Sitting there in the office in my usual uniform of worn jeans and cardigan, watching this new social order unfold, I felt that, as they say in Internet speak, we were doing it wrong. While having an office social scene was necessary, nobody really likes fraternities, with their macho attitude, hazing rituals, and beer-soaked party aftermaths. If we were supposed to be cool and California, calmly convincing people that it was okay to pass us their most private data on a daily basis, we would have to come across as less aggravatingly aggressive than a fraternity house.
    Bringing employees together, in the life-as-work-and-work-as-life culture of late 2000s Silicon Valley, was a core business mission of any startup. It wasn’t enough to work there, you had to devote as much of your life to it as possible. At Facebook, being a startup devoted to virtual socializing, we couldn’t just work all the time. We had to have some kind of scene in which human stories could unfold, if only in the first instance to have something to document on Facebook. We needed to entertain each other.
    This seemed to be part of the motivation behind the company’s various social perks, such as the happy hours, catered lunches and dinners, regularly occurring company parties (in which employees were bused to a venue, provided copious amounts of liquor, and photographed by professionals hired for the occasion), and the houses that had sprung up, such as TFB (the Facebook fraternity) and the house in Tahoe.
    As the site’s user base nearly doubled throughout that spring, from 5.5 million users to ten, and everyone’s sense of responsibility magnified by the week, I had the idea, selfishly perhaps, that a pool house would be a better way to lighten up and bring us closer than a frat house. After all, what better way to establish good cheer and team spirit than around a pool, drinks in hand, sun shimmering off the water? “We should get a house with a pool,” I said to Mark one night that spring during the Friday happy hour. He flashed his characteristic look of askance approval, smiling, but looking half-away, as if to retain his sense of executive control. “That’s a good idea,” he said, pulling out his BlackBerry (huge by today’s standards) to dash off an email with the request.
    I was stoked about the pool house. At that point in my life, I was in need of two things: an outlet for my revolutionary energy and a new career that would work out