The Boy Kings

reps out on a scheduled break, typed to Thrax, “I can’t talk right now. I’m at work and this conversation is being projected.” Only at Facebook, I thought, hoping the rookie reps hadn’t read the conversation, but not feeling that bad about it if they did. They would get used to the work environment’s weird and seamless mixing of personal and professional soon enough, I figured. At Facebook, to repurpose the old feminist saying, the personal was professional: You were neither expected nor allowed to leave your personal life at the door.
    While I had become inured to (and sometimes enjoyed)the antics that went on at work, I was still worried about what would become of me at the company. Teaching customer support wasn’t the worst job, but it was far from a passion, and it continued to be frustrating to watch the engineers celebrate themselves and their increasing stature in the valley when I was still part of the lower caste, barely making ends meet. The dissonance that I felt daily flew in the face of what Silicon Valley says about itself—that it is a meritocracy, that it values intelligence and creativity, that everyone has a fair shot if they just work hard enough. This was true only if you were technical, and even that may not always be enough: In the age of the social network, who you knew and who your friends were became increasingly important, too. I decided to give myself a late August deadline: If there wasn’t any movement in my career by that point, I would take my vested Facebook stock and strike a new path elsewhere, however difficult that might be.
    I said as much to Thrax as we sat in the parking lot of Fry’s Electronics on a Sunday morning. We had stayed up all night watching movies at Sam’s house and then, after a walk around Palo Alto where we passed a church and toyed with the idea of going inside for the service (we decided against it, since we were dressed in jeans), decided to drive around. Driving around with engineers in Palo Alto almost always involved a trip to Fry’s Electronics, so they could check out any new technical products that might have been released in the past week. I never minded going, because the store itself is a strange and fantastic monument to the Wild West. The aisles are decorated with bales of hay and statues of figures like Annie Oakley, who poses with a gun on a bale piled with Linux manuals. I could entertain myselffor a good hour observing the Western decor while engineers poked around at newly released televisions and video games.
    Back in the car, a Justin Timberlake song came on the radio and Thrax confessed that he liked it. Pale indie guys weren’t supposed to like Justin Timberlake in 2007. “That’s cool, I like Justin Timberlake, too,” I said. In the same confessional spirit after our sleepless night, I added, “I applied to new jobs this week. I can’t keep going in CS forever.”
    “Oh, no,” Thrax said gravely, going silent for a minute as the Timberlake song finished on the radio. “You should be a product manager,” he mused.
    “Yeah, I know, but Mark doesn’t want anyone who isn’t technical to be in engineering anymore.”
    “Oh, right,” he replied, knowing as I did that this decision, like anything else at Facebook, was only really up to Mark. In that sense, we were all just along for the ride.
    “Whatever, let’s go to In-N-Out,” I said. When all else failed, in California, you could count on a good animal-style, protein-style grilled cheese (my usual In-N-Out order) to make things feel, at least momentarily, better.
    • • •
    “I tell everyone I meet that I can read their entire lives in one minute,” Chamath Palihapitaya said by way of introducing himself to Facebook employees when he was hired as vice president of product marketing and operations in July 2007. He was a high-stakes poker player and ex-AOL Instant Message executive Mark was bringing on board, it was surmised by the tech press, toinject some much-needed business savvy into the organization. Chamath was young, brash, and masculine in style but, unlike most Facebook engineers, he had experience managing a company.
    For his first couple of months, Chamath observed operations and interviewed employees to find out how things worked. My meeting with him came in early August. We met at Coupa Café on Palo Alto’s Emerson Street, where laptops sat on every table and startups were the topic of most every conversation. Over cappuccino, Chamath