The Boy Kings

beginning, though, and we have so much more to do. I also want to make a couple of announcements. One is that Kate Losse, who began in Customer Support in 2005 and has since contributed to the Platform and Internationalization teams, is going to be taking on a role as Writer . . .” This isn’t hard, I thought. You just need to sound like everything is easy, like everything happens as it should. At Facebook, I remember thinking at various points along this journey, the world is simple.
    When I wasn’t writing for Mark, I was watching the comings and goings of executives and visitors, wondering what decisions were being made that I would have to quickly catch up on and write about. I paid particular attention whenever unfamiliar and important-looking new businessmen came to the office, as that usually meant that some deal was going down that would haveto be announced to the company later, such as when a group of Russians rolled in with the vague, almost fake-sounding name Digital Sky Technologies and invested in Facebook in May 2009. Mark’s days were made up of constant meetings, whether with businessmen in blazers or Facebook product engineers, streams of young men in jeans and tight T-shirts marching nervously in and out of his office on the hour, laptops in hand. I was invited to attend his weekly executive team meetings, but only to, as Elliot told me, absorb Mark’s thoughts.
    In the first executive meeting I attended that January, Mark, Elliot, and Sheryl discussed the Twitter threat. Mark, who was usually sanguine, was quite nervous about the speed with which Twitter was picking up users and press, beginning in 2009 with about 7 million user accounts and rapidly hockey sticking, as rapid growth is called in the valley (up to about 70 million users by the end of 2009). Twitter threatened to be a faster, simpler, more efficient way of posting information to a wide public. As it turned out, the hunger for social media was big enough to accommodate both Facebook and Twitter, along with a host of later apps like Instagram and Foursquare that provide slightly different variations on ways to post and distribute to an audience.
    I listened to Mark and Sheryl discuss the threat and what could be done to stop it, and whether it was something to worry about. At points I wanted to chime in, and began to do so, but saw Mark and Sheryl’s displeased looks and quickly realized that I wasn’t really supposed to speak. This was a power and a status game, after all, and even the highest executives were playing. Everyone in their place. So, I just listened, staring out at the rooftopsof Palo Alto and playing with a loose piece of rubber on my Vans. We will be fine, I thought, Twitter doesn’t have any native pictures; it’s just text. Facebook, as the boys taught me, was all about the faces: the pictures, the video nation, mapping a world.
    Eventually, after a month or so, once I had supposedly absorbed enough of Mark’s ideas and mannerisms, I wasn’t invited to the executive meetings anymore, but I didn’t mind. I had begun to realize that aside from the blog posts that I was occasionally called on at midnight or seven in the morning to write, I didn’t have much to write. Around then, many early Facebook employees’ jobs, like mine, had become mainly to serve as the trusted, familiar faces of the company, and sometimes, in the boys’ case, to serve as a research and development arm for our culture, which the company was so intent on preserving.
    For example, on a designer’s birthday, his friends rented sumo fat suits and held wrestling matches in the yard, posting hundreds of pictures on Facebook, which showed up in all of our News Feeds due to the heavy activity of people liking them. This is what in Silicon Valley is called a proof of concept, proving via the metrics, which in this case are high numbers of likes, that sumo suits at parties are a cultural hit. So, at the next Facebook company party, the party planners rented the same suits and made sumo wrestling into a company party game.
    By the same logic, when Thrax wore an American Apparel track jacket to work, Facebook bought one for everyone in the company to wear. For years, some people wore them every day, walking around in matching jersey track jackets like an enormous high-school sports program. In this way, Facebook (and increasingly, the valley’s) fascination with what was cool couldmake for a certain kind of career strategy: If you had the