The Boy Kings

Valley with gusto. Sometimes he would refer to himself and his wife as the “Brangelina of Silicon Valley.” His passion for Hollywoodizing things extended to work issues: When presented with conflicts between team members, he cheerfully cited his wife’s lesson in screenwriting class that all screenplays have a beginning, a fall, and a resolution. He would declare that the conflict was the fall and that we simply needed to work toward the narrative resolution in which all was resolved.
    “Just do whatever you think would help get things started,” Kai told me in one of our first meetings, with the relaxed managementstyle that he made into a hallmark of his brand. His zen approach reflected the cherished valley idea that we, the employees of a successful startup, were all so brilliant that we already knew what to do and if we didn’t, we knew how to figure it out.
    In order to put me, a nonengineer, finally, in the coveted, unscripted position of doing whatever I think needs to be done, it was necessary to create a position for me on the engineering team, the site of all creativity in Silicon Valley. The newly created position didn’t even have a name. “What would you like to be called?” asked my newly hired manager, a distinguished-looking older man with friendly, twinkling eyes, Hassin, who reported to Kai. He was a localization ringer from eBay, who had been in the translation business a long time. Localization is the industry term for internationalization and is thought to be more sensitive to non-US countries, since, unlike internationalization, it doesn’t imply that the United States is the center. Alas, the term never seemed to stick at Facebook, as our team had already called itself the i18n team. I decided on internationalization product manager, since product manager seemed to be the term that, for the few women in engineering, was both authorizing (working with product was the highest status role Facebook had) and non-threatening (it made no claim to actually engineer anything, so the engineers’ technical sovereignty remained untouched).
    I was finally in the driver’s seat, in the engineering office, the place where the boys raced around on ripstiks and ran the entire show: Facebook, social networking, and the new social media industry. The freewheeling, fecund world of engineering was kind of its own self-fulfilling prophecy: When you were an engineer, you could make things be any way you wanted them to be.“Welcome to engineering!” Mark’s admin instant messaged me as I was getting set up at my new desk, with a smiley face tacked on. It did feel a bit like being handed the keys to the kingdom.
    • • •
    Getting Facebook translated into languages other than English was an obvious move, and the need to extend the network to the world was something I always believed in. The best and most natural use of the product’s virtual scrapbooking had always seemed to me to be keeping up with good friends who lived in distant places. When you were living near your friends, seeing them seemed like a better option for keeping in touch than posting on a social network but, when you were living far apart, a social network could always help you stay up to date.
    Unlike the Platform management role with its schmoozy developer politics, I felt no qualms about working on translation. For one thing, I was finally able to work on the real Facebook product for the purposes of serving all of the users, as opposed to serving only developers. Developing the Facebook product, which, by January 2008, 60 million people were using, was what engineers lived for. When you advanced or created a feature and launched it, one minute there would be nothing, and the next minute there would be something, a new Facebook interface ready to receive new users, their data, and their relationships to each other. I had spent too much time with engineers, seeing their excitement and thrill at launching new features, not to want my own taste of the creation moment. Thrax had joked one night to Sam and me as we prepared to launch internationalschool networks in the fall of 2006, “Are you excited to spread your seed?” I guess we were. Each new network did feel like a product of our loins, there for our decision to lend it life, that night.
    The best moments at Facebook always had this intensely potent feel to them: the power to create a world. I knew that feeling of power because, in launching schools, I felt it too. Once a