The Boy Kings

right look and played the right games, you could play all the way to the bank.
    • • •
    In the late spring of 2009, we moved to a new, sprawling campus in an old Hewlett-Packard building. Mark’s desk was purposefully positioned in the building’s dead center, on the lower floor, nearly underground. He called the building a bunker. We were starting to dominate the social media game completely now, to Mark’s sometime chagrin. While he wanted to win, he preferred us always to be in a state of emergency, on lockdown, so that we had to devote ourselves entirely to the company and its mission.
    Sometimes, when people didn’t feel stressed enough, he called official lockdown periods, during which employees were required to work on weekends and late into the night. Lock-down periods were often called when some new, other social product, like Foursquare or Tumblr, came on the scene and we needed to mount some serious resistance by incorporating a version of it into Facebook’s feature set, like the Places product (Facebook’s answer to Foursquare, which was eventually superseded by general location tagging similar to that of Google+ or Twitter). Whereas, in 2006, the social network field consisted only of MySpace and Facebook (and a dwindling Friendster), by 2009 and onward, the social application field was becoming increasingly crowded, as many more entrepreneurs and programmers and investors got into the game.
    The catch for Facebook was that the more successful we became(and we were still, despite all the competition, dominant), the more likely employees were to be distracted by money and the new pastimes it enabled: fine dining, bar hopping, five-star vacations, expensive cars. In this sense, winning the game completely was a bit of a curse, because as our user numbers climbed quickly to 250 million in July 2009 and 350 million in December 2009, early employees had less incentive to work constantly, and more leeway to play games and party earlier in the night instead of waiting until the dead hours of two in the morning to socialize like we used to. New engineers were being hired all the time to take up the slack of bug fixing and code development from employees who had been there longer. The Facebook product itself made staying on task difficult: With the steady stream of pictures flowing down our pages, how could we be expected to focus on anything but planning our next photo opportunities and status updates? Looking cool, rich, and well-liked was actually our job, and that job took a lot of work.
    Late that summer, employees were invited to sell up to a quarter of our stock to Digital Sky Technologies, the Russian group who had invested in the company. The Internet whispered that some of their money came from a Russian mobster with a violent past. However, when the stock sale was announced at our weekly All Hands, no one asked if the Russians’ money was clean and any questions that even skirted around the topic of who they were and where they came from got what is called a hand-wavy answer in Silicon Valley: a brushed off nonanswer at best. Transparency may be Facebook’s business, but there were some things that no one wanted or was allowed to know. One way or another, the Russians cleaned up on their investment:Five months after we sold our stock to them the stock had tripled in price, and one of the investors had purchased a $30 million mansion in Silicon Valley.
    With the new rush of money came not just new activities but increasing power and attention. Celebrities like Katy Perry and Tyra Banks stopped by regularly to take tours of the office with Mark, and employees would stop what they were doing to take pictures and post them to Facebook. All of Facebook’s Hollywood dreams were coming true.
    Like any power mogul, Mark’s desk in the bunker was surrounded by the work stations of people he liked and had fashioned as his closest deputies. At his pod were Schrep, the engineering director, and Chris Cox, the product director, both affable white guys with friendly faces. Sheryl kept a neat desk next to mine, a few feet away from Mark’s pod. Her desk, as cool and efficient as she was, held a conference phone and digital pictures of her children and husband. She spent her time either in meetings with high-powered executives or on the phone with them at her desk, which I couldn’t help but overhear. I admired her firm yet dulcet phone voice, which could be both decisive and quiet at the same time.