Walking Into the Post 3Rd Floor Office on University Ave s1
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The Facebook Story by Noah Kagan of AppSumo.com and Okdork.com
All Rights Reserved ©2007
Walking into the third floor office of the Facebook.com on University Avenue in Palo Alto, California, I was excited to be working at the hottest young startup in Silicon Valley. I was not that nervous but more excited for the new challenges that were coming. I go to the first person I recognized from the interviews, Ezra (a Stanford graduate), and sit down at his desk. My new boss walks by reminding me we have a meeting at 1 pm. I am pumped to be here and working on such a hot product.
Ten minutes later my new boss walks by me and out the door and says he will see me after lunch. I am called into a meeting.
"What the hell is going on," goes through my head while I am in a room with another product manager, Ezra and a few other guys I don't know. Then it happens:
The Zuck walks in and everybody gets quiet. He looks flustered. This is the guy I see on TV and all over the internet. Boy genius, wonderkid.
"Who are you? Noah, got it. Uhhh, I just fired your boss!” said Zuckerberg.
I respond with "How do I avoid messing up as to not get fired?"
Everyone laughed but I was serious. And the answer was "Don't try to sell my company."1 Mark made it clear that that was not happening anytime soon.2 Zuck publicly says whenever asked, Facebook is being built for long-term success. Just like Google.”
He finished the meeting with saying he would figure out how things would be structured, that I should report to him for the time being and welcome to Facebook. That was my first 10 minutes. What the heck is going to happen for the next few months? I was excited and left the room. What next? I sat at the desk of Ezra and played with my new laptop…
How the hell did I get here?
1 Karel: When he heard the reason from me he said, “gee, I have as much ability to sell the company as you do”. But misunderstandings abound in a high stress startup environment, and his parting email was the most generous and positive I’d read. This reminds me, I forgot to send a parting email. Oops. Oh, and by the way, I don’t have any ability to sell the company, as you can ascertain from the fact that I own some Facebook equity and no real estate. 2 Karel: “And is still not happening.” Sitting bored in my cubicle of Intel I was browsing Facebook as I often did and checked out the jobs section. To my surprise they had an opening for a product manager. It was October and I was planning on quitting Intel in January to start my own thing. Most of the days at Intel were filled with sleeping in my cubicle, 7-8 hours of meetings and leaving the office exactly at 5pm. This was the place that parents with 2 kids and a mortgage spent the rest of there lives not a young ambitious person I thought. I had to make a change.
I was very nervous about what I was going to do and what my mom would say but I was looking forward to a new adventure. I didn’t want to work anywhere but submitted my resume to Facebook anyways. Who actually looks at those resumes submitted from the website? I wasn’t planning on hearing anything back.
Surprisingly 2 days later I get a call from Sandy, the temp recruiter at Facebook. She wanted to chat and I love to talk. We chatted about yoga, the college market and my past experiences. 5 minutes later I was scheduled to come into the office in a few days. Mental thought “dude I wasn’t expecting this, but maybe something good will come out of it.”
Driving up on my lunch break I did not know what to expect from a company where most people just thought Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz were the only employees. When I came in for my interview I was excited to talk about a product I was using and studying for so long. The office was a mess with cables everywhere, huge 24inch monitors on everyone’s desk, tons of movie posters just lying around and tons of young faces. It was cross between a fraternity house and an office. This was my kind of place. Come on, they had free soda, what more could I ask for.
In my interviews I was asked about why I wanted to work at Facebook, how I would fix/improve some new ideas they were working on (but later got killed) and what features I would like to see on the site. I didn’t get a chance to talk with Matt Cohler, VP of Strategy and one of the first employees. This became the usual as Matt is one of the busiest and most connected guys in Silicon Valley. Rumors are that he has it in his will a request to be buried with his Blackberry. (That was clearly a joke). I was in denial that I could get paid to work on Facebook. That is like someone telling a college student they can get paid for drinking beer and partying.
The interview was not that hard. Just some tough questions, No Google teasers, questions about my experience with HFG Consulting / Ninja Card / ComeGetUsed, what have I done with online product building and what I did for fun. I think a lot of the interview was to see if I was a culture fit. I went back for 3 different rounds of interviews and was given an offer. Two weeks from when it started I was working at Facebook. I was employee #30. In my mind I was thinking back to the dotcom days when employee #30 made millions of dollars and retired at 28 years old, I was just 24. A lot of the people who were hired after me were from personal connections, so I felt very lucky to have gotten in the old fashioned way.
The early days Sharing a desk and playing with my new Apple Powerbook G4 I was unsure of what to do. My boss was just fired and I guessed that maybe now I report to Mark. I tried to meet all 30+ other people in the office and see what everyone was doing. I found out that a project to show the latest trends on college campuses was in the works (Pulse), so sweet I can go play with that. Also, I realized how huge the Operations team was, 10 people, in order to make sure the site doesn’t go down. These guys wear army gear for fun and are on call 24/7, which I am sure their wives love. One of the most unnoticed things about Facebook is that the site is never down and one of the fastest sites to load.
Have you ever worked at a place and been disappointed with your co-workers? Within the first 2 days it was amazing to be working with people so much smarter than myself. Not to give myself enough credit but it was nice to be finally working with people on my level. That were super accomplished at a young age, know the internet and products very well and super cool. We went to dinner my first night on the job at Zao Noodles on University and I was nervous hanging around the CTO, product manager and some original engineers. They were all relatively nice to me but there was always that “Stanford feel” I call it where there is hidden arrogance which intimidated me.
Most of my time the next month was getting use to all the internal tools, building relationships with the employees and whatever Zuck wanted. “Noah we need to add location to the photo albums,” victory; as Zuck gave me my first real assignment. I worked with Nico the engineer on the quick task, double checked with Mark and BAM that new field was viewed by 3 million people the next day. Most people in the company don’t think about that. We sometimes forget that people really read the terms of service and privacy policy and let us know about spelling errors. Honestly, who is reading those? Receiving over 10,000 emails a day we are quick to hear of problems and fix them immediately.
Of course there were tons of great data tools and things to see how crazy amazing the traffic was: 75% weekly login rates, 90% monthly login rates of nearly 8 million people. For any site to gain that much stickyness is nearly impossible. And with every thing we launched 10s of thousands of pages of feedback would come pouring in. One thing you learn is to take it all with a grain of salt. Nearly everyone who sends in feedback is complaining or giving some MySpaceish request. You have to stick to your guns and see if any complaints continually boil up after a long period of time.
Growing at 15,000 new students a day we were on track for our world domination. Looking back over my old journals I realized a lot of my writing was about the crazy build schedules (nearly daily product updates), the awareness I was going to lose contact with a lot of my friends and I loved every minute of it.
The Child Revolution
When I worked at the company and even afterwards I always got the question of WTF do 150 people do all day. The majority of students on the site still think it is run by just Mark, Dustin and Chris Hughes chugging away in their Harvard dorm room3. They don't know that Facebook has received nearly $40 million dollars in venture capital money4, has executives from Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft helping run the show and nearly 150+ people help make everything happen.5
The supervision was fairly relaxed and the kids got to run the show. I almost think of the experience as Lord of the Flies meets Silicon Valley.
Former colleague Karel said that this island had no conch. Either you were around and got called to the meeting or not. Decisions are either top down mostly from Zuck or bottom up in that a developer just did it a certain way and that stuck. I don't think there was bad management due to it just more seasoning was needed to make the machine flawless.
On a few product features, wall-to-wall and add a personal message during friend request the engineers just made this during their free time and threw it on the site. All I can say is that Mark was Fing pissed off when he found these went live. As always, it was his site and everything needed to go through him.
It's pretty strange/uncomfortable/interesting to experience children as I will call them (including myself) telling Jeff Rothschild, the founder of Veritas (recently sold to Symantec for $13 billion) he is wrong or another way to do things. Don't get me wrong, the executives had clout and people respected them but the final say on everything came to Dustin or Mark. And in general their decision making was right on.
The Late Nights
So many times we worked until the wee hours of the morning. Hansen’s energy became our drug of choice to a close second of Red Bull and Starbucks Frappucino. God bless those stocked refrigerators and brave souls of Costco. The office really was a fraternity. Even the old office had Greek letters outside of it indicating Tau Beta Phi aka The Face Book.
In the “Frat House” the original building there was tons of graffiti all over the building. This was a total bachelor pad for the Facebook crew. There was a specific graffiti of a women shitting in the women’s bathroom that was removed when a VC investor had to use it one time. Bad news ya know.=) We got to work there occasionally during the day, on product release nights and on hack-a-thon days6. They had a patio on the roof where we would drink beers, smoke and just talk about our future. I do remember
3 Insert link to technorati on something where people are complaining about zuck, dustin and chris hughes 4 Link to blogpost showing they received 40 million 5 link to article showing mike Murphy coming to Facebook. And ones for owen van atta and chris Kelly. Also one for jeff rothshild would be good. 6 Yes, this was taken from Jotspot one of the original 24 hour work period on cool projects. Karel: For a while, people called the office “The Frat House”, for real. Then some chicks were hired and like totally spoiled the fun.
Luckily for me I was living with 7 other Facebook guys so we definitely took the work home with us. Going home we would chat about work life, play with pet projects that we would try to impress each other with and PARTY. You know it is bound to happen, our cult of people threw parties on the weekends and partying even at night when we went home. We are young, getting paid ridiculously well and definitely enjoying ourselves.
A Berkeley party consisted of red cups, sweaty claustrophobic areas and tons of girls. A party at our Facebook house was tons of good liquor / cheap beer, a big house to party at and tons of guys. It was almost the same thing as college except with older people.
Poker on Wednesday was just another excuse to party after work. Fortunately, Facebook catered these events with piles of Hefenweizen, pretzels, popcorn and chips with guacamole/salsa.7 Anyways, it would go on weekly for a mere $10 but a great chance to bond with the guys. And occasionally take the money of a female or two.
Boz was the poker professional who weekly loved taking all the other co-workers money. The beer got us loose and we chatted up a storm. The Colombian poker master, Soleio, was the best at bluffing and was a very smooth character. Dustin, our CTO, was a great player but I was always nervous to beat him for fear of my job. Aditya played very aggressive and seemed to love to give away his money.
The high school awards
Just like the
Checklist for working at a Start-Up If you work at a startup the best trait you can have is being flexible, bar none. I don't care how smart you are, you need to be able to move with the times, or with anything else.
Rock the cradle. So much of Facebook was young people. With the average age being 24 it was easy for them to get the product and the market. Facebook took many kids out of
7 Noah: If you don’t know I am addicted to chips and burritos. 8 TS is the director of Engineering and Karel and my direct manager. He was from Yahoo and was the guy who created Yahoo Mobile. school and got them working. I think with the founders dropping out it worked as an example for many aspiring techies to go work at the company.
Don't Complain. Get it done. Ask questions later. Challenge some things but for the most part do. The best people to employee in startups are people who do things without a lot of questions and get them done in a short period of time. Ever notice those employees who whine about a task or take forever to get a basic thing accomplished? Yes, they should not be working at a startup.
The Development Cycle AKA do it, again and again
Sometimes I forget what I worked on at Facebook. When you are at a startup you have to be ready to work on everything. There is no I can't learn or do that. It is shit, how will I learn how to code this page in a day. There were times when I could have asked an engineer to do something but that would take away from them doing something important. So I read some books, checked out things online and coded a lot of the help section. From my own personal memory and maybe of some interest to you, I helped create:
1. Mobile: An application so you can send/receive messages, get friends information and add friends on your cell phone. 2. Flyers: The self-service advertising system so students can post advertisements for their entire campus to view. 3. Search: When we started allowing people to add multiple networks the previous search system was not setup to handle that. Aditya spent 2.5 months developing the new architecture and I was brought on two weeks before launch to help make sure it was all delivered smoothly. 4. Help Pages: All submission forms, CS tools and ways to explain things to the user. 5. Corporate Network Stuff: This is the ability to add a corporate network to your profile and see other people who work at the same place as you. 6. Pulse: The Zeitgeist or most popular things on Facebook. 7. Status: The ability to let your friends know what you are doing and vice-versa. 8. A few projects that never got launched: Can’t legally talk about these. 9. A lot of maintenance stuff. Fixing spelling, working with CS on tools and overview of basic functionality.
There are many different philosophies of how to create products. The 37signals.com mentality is to build what you want, build it fast & fix afterwards. The old-school Microsoft approach of specify the details to a T, wait, meetings, process and then finally build. Facebook was a combination of the two.
1. Mark tells you what he wants. 2. Product Managers write up details on how it should work and get approval from Mark. 1. He says your stuff is shit every time and changes are made. 2. Mark is happy and we go to step 3.
3. Work with Engineers. They do most of the work since Facebook did an amazing job hiring self-starters. Some needed hand holding but for the most part the team is amazing and can work without a product manager.9
4. Incorporate customer support for testing and creating help material 5. Get another approval from Mark before it can go live. 6. Monitor feedback, bugs and identify what’s next for version 2.
So Noah what did you really do all day. Great question! Here was what I was responsible for. And what my typical day was like:
10:30am: Wake up Hungover. Normally, the night before was a late night of partying at the house and watching some show like 24, Prison Break or some other show. 11am: Head into the office. By now most engineers have arrived. I generally got in earlier on most days, say 10am. 11:15am: Check emails, blogs & chat with other early people. We would talk about what projects they are working on, the progress that is left and how things are going in general. 12pm: Grab a delicious catered lunch. These meals were amazing with a full salad bar, hot/cold entrees and a sandwich bar. Yes, I did gain about 15 pounds from working at Facebook. 12:45pm: Plan out shit for new features. This was a lot of direction from Mark on what he wanted. Making sure the engineers were informed and aligned on the right direction. Writing down and trying to finalize the way things should be working. 2pm: Meetings. Have a daily conversation with new clients, partners or internal teams. 3:30pm: Working with customer support on new stuff. Talk with Tom, the lead CS and other people about things that can be better and faster for CS tools. 5pm: Checking emails, testing new features. Most of the QA was done by the product managers, customer support and the engineer who created it. 7pm: Catered dinner, woot. Hung around with the guys in the lounge area and discussed life. 8pm: Research for new stuff we are doing. Talked with Mark/Dustin or other people about the way new features should be working. 10pm: Do a little bit of coding for bugs and help pages. Help coding on different parts of the site. Review the status on projects and help make sure there were no speed bumps in there way. 12pm: Go home and party;)
What does a Product Manager do? I seem to get that question and there is not a really great answer except "I make shit happen." No day is the same. Ever! No day requires
9 Karel: I need hand holding, but now only by my wife and kids. stuff I learned in college, except the partying and understanding the college students usage of the internet. A product manager's ONLY responsibility is to make sure the Product happens. So that can include: finalizing features, arguing aka discussing with Mark and he gets his way 93.4% of the time, making sure everyone in the company is informed, test the product, change it after reviews with Mark and monitor feedback/bugs when its launched.
In Memory
Sometimes focusing so much on the work we lose site of relationships with friends, co- workers and our own personal lives.
I met Dan Plummer when I came into the office and he was a weird guy. Let me rephrase that he was an ultra techie. He enjoyed studying graph theory, hardcore mathematical equations and bike riding. Dan was a pleasant guy that kept to himself. He worked on analyzing all that sexy, sexy data that we treasured so greatly. He loved data and Facebook sure had enough of it. People filled out tons of interesting information about themselves that we could study and produce great things with. I can’t legally talk too much about it since it’s not live yet.
One day while he was bike riding in the woods of Los Altos, a branch fell and killed him10. Dan was a serious biker who spent most of his free time riding. What a freak accident? How could this have happened?
“Hey, did you hear Dan died bike riding?” someone said. “Huh, shit,” was the most common reaction in the office. I think for all the young people in the office this was a huge surprise. Dan was well liked but mostly un-noticed in the office. There was a ceremony from one of his friends and afterwards everyone went back to work. It was almost as if he was washed away into the ocean without a trace. That kind of bothered me and I thought we could have spent a little more time commemorating Dan’s Life; A bike ride for him, a homepage announcement, something. I guess that is business and you have to get back to work regardless of the good times or the bad. It made me realize if I were to die there would be a very short-lived mourning time at Facebook.
What is left of Dan is an empty profile, Dan Plummer and a quote he left on December 11th, 2005 at 9:34pm:
“warm days and cool nights training in the Santa Cruz mountains. Not much rain…yet.”
(Picture of Dan)
10 http://cbs5.com/roberta/local_blogentry_005174134.html Dot Bomb Part Deux? Being a frugal person by nature seeing any waste or excess makes me raise my voice. Too little avail Facebook spent and spent. When I first arrived there were decent chairs, hardcore desks, 24 inch Flat panels for everyone and a Powerbook with your name on it.
After receiving nearly $40 million dollars in funding (yea we know it's a lot) the office underwent a multi hundred thousand dollar redesign.
(Try to get picture of the office.)
"I want the employees to have a great place to be in. That is also why we are located in the heart of downtown Palo Alto"
Paying $20,000+ month in rent was a pricey luxury to be able to work in a great location. Nearly $1,000 chairs each are a must for the whole office. I am use to working out of a dorm room (no start-up pun intended) and work with what’s available. Spending so much money on furniture seemed foreign to me.
Karel: Part of me feels that an attitude of penny-pinching really wasn’t appropriate for Facebook, since really, the one and only important thing was to grow traffic and to grow the site. Whatever could possibly improve productivity was money very well spent, because the company always had enough money, and the market opportunity was extremely time constrained. While Ebay for example always needed to be frugal to stay in business, Facebook really only should have been concerned about how to build products fastest. Rothschild, who once said that if he’d sold Veritas stock at the right time he’d have billions of dollars but didn’t see how that would change his current life, deeply understands frugality, so his early furniture purchases were extremely budget conscious, and good enough for me.
Noah: While I agree with Karel that worrying about money too much is a bad thing I feel there is a diminishing marginal return on money spent. It promoted carelessness and gave people the feeling that there was no urgency to work harder and faster. Don’t get me wrong people put in crazy hours at the office but when you are spoiled you never work as hard. I think paying for tickets among other things was just too much. That’s just me.
Did it help productivity? It is hard to say but I know that most people loved coming into the office everyday. I personally liked showing it off to friends since we had such nice digs.
The Laws of Facebook
1. Never. Say the word “user!” Mark would JUMP and hurt you if you ever said this. It was important to refer to them as people or students. 2. Fix it...NOW! Periods and commas are everything! Attention to detail, grammar and ease of use are the most critical things on the site. I even got an early Hanukkah present from Mark, the book Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. 3. Trust. Yourself. If you use the product it makes it easier to know what works best. Almost all engineers and the majority of the company is 24ish and use Facebook so its easy to know what they want on the site. 4. Retards. The majority of people want the site to be so many random things. Basically, never listen to the user. Receiving over 10,000 pieces of feedback a day hardly any of it was ever read by most. On a few occassions so many people would write in Mark would eventually order us to change it back. Most of the time we let them bitch. This made me realize that only the complainers write in and that people naturally resist change. Mark did really did care about the “students” but sometimes he knew what they really want. 5. Don't Suck. There was some Google envy, not envy but wanting to show that we are more techie or better. We tried to hire people that had offer letters from Google. Facebook jokingly made our slogan "don't suck." It wasn't official like our true saying "Domination." Which was toasted, said, shouted and always preached in the company. What did it mean? It meant what it meant. Asking Mark to define it meant we need to achieve domination in the social networking space.
Meetings on the ground (more)
Mark from the Beginning Naive. I guess is the best word from the start for him. The most amazing part of it all is his development. He has grown and developed so much in such a short period of time. (more. If you really think and want to say he is naïve, I think that’s fine, but you need to add a litany of other adjective to give it balance. I’ll add a footnote that I disagree. I think he Plays naïve, and uses it. That’s why he is or at least was so quick to say “I don’t know. Explain that.”
The Dangers of Your Information
Honestly most users don’t seem to think twice about what they post online. We saw so many naked pictures, people using drugs and things I don’t even want to describe. One of the great times at the office when you saw a group of guys gaggling around a monitor, you knew what that meant. Hot girls! There were some definite ones many people know like Jennifer Sterger from Florida State University11.
One of the problems with Facebook was that since you provide so much information you open yourself up to potential danger. There are some stories such as Sarah from Oklahoma University who explains “It's just a helpless feeling that someone can know everything about you.”12
Creating Facebook Search
11 http://www.jennsterger.com
12 http://www.oudaily.com/vnews/display.v? TARGET=printable&article_id=444ef41c51ee8 Realizing corporate networks were coming we had to improve search. Side note: Corporate networks are ONLY referred to as work networks since corporate is too… corporate. A brilliant programmer named Aditya (link to profile) from CMU developed the whole thing. How many engineers at Google does it take to work on their search? Probably 500+ would be my guess. Facebook which handles millions of searches a day had 1 guy.
He spent about 3 months working non-stop on the product. Specing out the features, developing the server structure, thinking about ever
No Limit Soldiers Leaving Intel and going to Facebook was a huge transition. My mom was quite confused why I would do a startup and leave the great benefits and name recognition of a large company. My grandmother now was completely lost about what I do all day.
The surprising thing about it was I received: a higher salary, more stock options and tons of ridiculous perks. This was amazing for myself who would have worked for free at Facebook.
At Facebook spending was never a thought.
All Parking Tickets were paid in full. Most people for the first few months were receiving 1-2 a day. I know the city of Palo Alto was definitely a huge fan of us Breakfast, lunch and dinner were catered by Grammercy Park Catering. One of the best. Definitely made Google food look pathetic
Karel: Oh god, Noah is just so full of shit here. Product people just couldn’t find their head if it wasn’t up their ass. Google has great food.
Any type of drink you can imagine. Except Naked Juice which was so delicious and only found for free at the Googleplex. Damn you Google Every engineer receives a blackberry, shit even people in customer support received a blackberry. These are $300 phones that have a monthly charge of $80-100. The company must have been burning $75,000 plus a year just on cell phones. All expense paid trips to Los Vegas. A $1200 dinner to celebrate the launch of Facebook mobile. That was definitely worth it. Happy hours! Literally every Friday we would be smothered with Wine, beer and framboise. A delicious French sweet beer, you should definitely try it. In addition, we would have deviled eggs, chips with salsa and guacamole, stuff mushrooms, beef, chicken, shrimp, bread and cheese and amazing other assortments handled by our caterer. It was a great time with many leaving home on their Friday quite buzzed. Karel: Most working people go home on Friday to their friends and family. Most of the younger employees (nearly everyone) stayed at Facebook with their friends who almost became their family. I wish I’d just once tried Framboise.
Purple Tie. At most companies they go out of their way to make it a great experience. Facebook tried to take it to the next level. The service Purple Tie is around at many companies and provides laundry, dry cleaning, photo development among other things. Most companies subsidize or just let you pay full price, that ain’t happening at Facebook. Everything was covered. Everything! We had to pay taxes on what we used but Facebook paid for all those services. I know people who were sneaking in friends and family clothing weekly. Who wouldn’t? Summer housing: Towards the beginning of summer Facebook announced they would be getting a house for up to 6 people to live at. This had an amazing pool, tons of rooms and a close distance to the office. It also had a rope slide by which one could swing down from one of the bedrooms and land in the pool. Winter Cabin. Facebook rented for 6 months a cabin in Lake Tahoe that anyone could use or bring friends to. Some crazy stories went down there which I don’t think I am allowed to share. Subsidized living. Anyone who lived within 1 mile of the office could get $600 dollars a month for living. A few of us were thinking to buy a place and put the money towards our mortgage;) Unfortunately for Mark and Dustin who live close to the office executives weren’t able to get the credit.
Karel: no way! I didn’t hear about this one. I should have rented a hole in the wall for sleeping at.instead of driving 100 miles each work day. On the other hand, the couch was enough, and I showered at the subsidized Health Club.
Why did they do it? Why did Mark want to spend so much money on making the employees happy? To the employees it was all about happiness. To Mark it was all about simplifying people’s lives. It was about making everything else less important and easy to do so workers can focus on work. To outsiders it was all about dedication and giving their life to the company. Less worrying about other things provides more time to worry about the important thing: Facebook.
The Investors are the Best off
If you gave me a $1 and I gave you back $5 how would you feel? Pretty darn swell I would hope. This was how every person who got to invest in Facebook and all the executives felt. They had 100+ young people dedicate 100 hours a week to the cause. They got everyone who loved the product to love work and give 110% of their live to making it succeed. The people at the top were the most fortunate were there money was being worked on and grown by the people at the bottom. I guess that is true of most companies. I am not saying people didn’t love working at Facebook, it probably is one of the best companies to work for but it was always a thought in my mind about how I am working Mark and the other executive’s money. POSSIBLY write more about this.
Company Parties Hanukkah Holidays: Surprisingly or not, the majority of the company was run by jewish kids. literally kids=) including myself most of the people were jewish which was strange to me in a valley that has so many asians.
"Just Remember this is a Start-up"
I was interviewing during the 5 million member party but did not miss out on the Christmas party. I can say it was a rather embarassing time for myself. I will get to that later. We had a bus take us to a fancy SF dinner, open bar and tons of great food. Everyone was looking sharp and it was quite a cool thing to realize many of the “adults” had significant othes and families they rarely spent time with. After enjoying the delicious chocolate fondue we all gathered around the projector screened and Mark gave a speech. He talked about the success of what we have done this year, the traffic the site was generating and how the prospects look bright for the future. Then just like a cult he recited the words everyone lived by:
“domination,” not a bad thing to be saying and it gave high hopes for the future. Then Mark’s sister showed a video they made while they were in New York. It was interviewing kids around the campus and it was phenomenal. They youth talked about their addiction to the site, tried to remember who the guy’s name on the bottom was (its mark zuckerberg) not zuckerby or mark zuck and even some dancing by the fabulous mark fadvelivich (look him up on Facebook) (link to him). The looks of everyone’s face would do whatever Mark told them including myself and dedication to the project/goal/company was way over 100%.
Afterwards everyone headed out to the Loft Hotel. A fancy San Francisco boutique hotel that is way overpriced. As most dotcoms do I heard the next day we ended up having a bar tab at this location alone over $10,000. Some rumors about bottles of Petron and Grey Goose being taken seemed fairly likely. Okay here is the embarrassing part. I hope my mom won't read this part. Basically, by the time I reached The Loft I was pretty wasted...
The next thing I remember was waking up in a gorgeous hotel room by my gorgeous gf saying we have to go back to Palo Alto. “How the hell did I end up in this great bed with quite comfortable sheets?” She had work in the morning and needed to leave right away. Anyways I somehow got into a taxi and awoke in the parking lot at Facebook. My gf drove back to my house and I passed out again. Waking up around noon I realized my gf was in my room, sweet, and that I had a hangover, good times. I asked her if she had fun and what happened later that night. She pointed to some papers on my desk. I got them, opened and shit my pants when I saw a $350 bill from the hotel. Then it dawned on me we took the taxi and that receipt was a smooth $120. That was quite an expensive night! Luckily I headed into work later that day around 1pm and noticed everybody looking hung over as well.
Karel: I missed this and all of the awesome parties, because I am a Family Man. But on the day after the party, I didn’t really notice anything different from other days, because many people roll in around 1pm daily, and often look hungover.
Privacy is Everything
Hearing how MySpace hired a Privacy Czar was just another saw blade cut to the other bloody leg of Facebook. Somehow Facebook got lumped together with MySpace on all the privacy concerns they are facing.
With outsourcing our PR and a new marketing person, Facebook was unable to differentiate itself from the giant beast of MySpace. Facebook was the step-child that got latched into privacy concerns and other issues related to MySpace. Little known fact was the amount of time and concern that Facebook put on improving privacy. At a startup priorities are very important and help drive what you can do with limited resources. Programmers at Facebook spent nearly 300+ hours developing and improving the privacy features for students. That is a heck load lot of time for a startup to be focusing on something. That is what bothered everyone since we worked so hard on it but got little recognition or usage by the students.
Most of the students didn’t use privacy features.
Communication
One of the most interesting things most students don’t realize is that Facebook is a tool to communicate with one another. What did people do before AIM? Who knows that time never existed. Facebook is the next level in communicating for students. Mark repeatedly said that
“Facebook is a communication utility not a social network.”
Facebook was not a tool for social networking or just tagging things on people’s walls. It was about sending messages, communicating things about yourself and reading things about other people.
The recipe for building a community
One of my personal interests in community building, maintaining The greatness of zuck mark zuckerberg! the man, legend, god and other opposite words used by some jealous people. When he speaks around the office you listen and definitely pay attention. Many young entrepreneurs say he is cocky or got lucky or whatever, but there is no denying he is a friggin genius. Mark created a cool mp3 recommendation program when he was young that was almost sold to Microsoft. LOOK up details on synapse? Or whatever he built with adam deangelo
Around the office everyone revered him similar to the Bill Gates of Microsoft. He speaks very slowly so you know every word is important. He definitely thinks on a different plane than most people. He does have his great quirks that were widely appreciated.
For his birthday all the guys wore Adidas sandals. Seriously, they need to sponsor that guy. he wore them with a suit, in the rain , during important meetings and probably during sex. The women all wore pictures of Mark on a t-shirt. mark also had some great motivational lines such as
"if you don't get that done sooner i will punch you in the face" he said with love and
"i will chop you with this huge sword" while he had literally a huge sword in his hand.
There is no question his heart, life and every moment is dedicated to Facebook and creating a tool that helps information flow and getting everyone connected.
As much as Mark hides from the spotlight you can tell he loves it. Mark is an anti-social person by nature, he doesn't party as much as you'd expect from the creator of Facebook. Mark is an anti-social person which just doesn't make sense from someone who created one of the largest social networks available. He chose not to wear any Facebook clothing or get the Facebook logo on the messenger bag everyone got for Christmas.
Mark is a minimalist. In his place is a bed, some clothes, Adidas sandals and a tea pot. At the office he had his own room which I called “The Matrix.” It was an eerily all white room with a white table, two white boards and white chairs.
**How do you pay the bills?**
Many new startups have a new type of business model called: nothing. They remember the old dotcoms and for some reason want to relive them. Focusing on unique views, retention and market penetration. This seems to be an ever popular strategy that most companies neglect creating a long-term and sustaining revenue generator. Facebook was different.
They never put ads all over the site like many other well-trafficked sites (eg myspace). That is speculation why an early partner, Eduardo Saverin was asked to leave since he didn’t get that concept and wanted to have banner ads all over the site Karel: another speculation is that he never did anything. Kinda like me, except he probably got a lot more shares for it.
Mark objected and as always he gets his way. The site was profitable from nearly the start. Here are the 3 major ways it brings in money.
1- Self-Service Advertising. The initial product was called announcements and allowed students to buy an advertisement that is shown to a certain percentage of students who login to the site. It solves a HUGE problem on campus where its hard to get everyones attention and flyering just takes way too long.
I helped create the latest generation called Flyers. The pricing is a $5 minimum for students at their campus and $50 for any business who wants to advertise at that campus. Students can choose templates to make there ad easier to recognize and can put a photo on the Flyer to make it more appealing.
2- Sponsored Groups. Any large company can sponsor a group on Facebook. They get to have a large membership base, great advertising and a chance to speak directly with their customers. Companies can customize their page, send out a few emails a month and have students nationally talk about things on a message board.
3- Advertising Networks. Companies like advertising.com and doubleclick.net have tons of advertisers that get placed on any of their partner sites. Facebook was a destination that had a lot of inventory (nearly 10 billion page views a month) and could handle showing tons of ads to the students. I think facebook sells these directly as well.
Bonus Ways #1: Some special partnerships occur on individual things that a company can sponsor or get placement on special promotions. Legally, I don’t think I can say much more about that.
For an advertiser Facebook is a dream in targeting the college market. Think about how detailed you can target your advertising. You could promote a new movie to a gay Southern Mexican that loves cooking and reading. Google is very good at helping you go somewhere else but Facebook has the exact person you are looking for. It is a very good opportunity that more companies are becoming aware of.
**Easter Eggs**
An Easter egg is a feature in a product that only the creators know about that anyone who uses can find. It is not easy and there are tons all around in Microsoft, Google and other sites (care to name some? I know that excel has a flight simulator). Naturally Facebook couldn’t be left out of copying what the old-timers have done. Here are the ones we know of:
(This is an awesome section. I think the useful ones can just be revealed here like this. Perhaps you want to make a game out of some of them, like give a hint and have people search for it. Someone will post the answer somewhere making it googleable, which is better than us spoiling ALL of the fun of these eggs.
1. Birthday Calendar: If you click on the center of the birthday box on the homepage it will take you to a page with all of your friend’s birthdays. This is really convenient instead of looking at only the upcoming ones shown. Nice work done by Jon (more on Jon) at our all night hackathon. 2. Petroleum: If you click on the word petroleum on the mobile.php page it will show you the quail of the day. 3. Quail: If you sms quail to Facebook Mobile FBOOK 32665 you will get the movie quote of the day. 4. Fire: Initially thought to be an Easter egg this gradually has become a part of the product. Fire is a mobile poke. You send a text message to Facebook mobile called “Fire (friend’s name),” and this has their status message on their profile turn on fire. The person can login and “extinguish” the fire. 5. Search: If you can use advanced search and find someone with at least 9 different categories you get a special message on the bottom of the page. 6. You can see all of the pictures of your friends. Go to my friends and try different things with the Show: dropdown. 7. ask bob for more of these things or slee.
**Hackathon**
Initially created by Joe Kraus and Ken Norton of Jot.com, this is an all-night coding adventure. Basically, people can do whatever they want that is not related to their every day work and should be able to be completed in one night. We heard about this and did the same thing which turned out to be lots of fun.
I personally created some internal graphs for our advertising platform. The [add a personal message] when you are friend requesting was completed in the hackathon. Not done in a hackathon but in similar style was the wall-to-wall and reply-to-wall feature on everyone’s wall. The friend’s game was started but not sure if its live or hidden from the real world. The NCAA tournament was scoped out and designed during the hackathon. It is a really long but extremely fun night. Most nights end with a late night breakfast (at BK or IHOP was it?) and tons of drinking. What more would you expect from a bunch of 24 year old guys?
**Day at the Office**
You have heard about our personal days at the office but how about everyone else that was working there. I will take a typical Thursday.
9am: Most customer support, admins and finance arrive and set up shotshop 10am: Executives come in and go back out to more meetings. Operations guys arrive and make sure the site is still running smoothly.
11am: Engineers start to slowly trickle in.
12:30pm: What we’ve all been waiting for finally happens. Whoopee!
1:30pm: Customer support is handling complaints, marketing is marketing, engineers are building, product managers are managing and ops guys are buying new things.
3pm: Meetings with boss, partners, others and discussions
5pm: Team meeting. Everyone gets together in the whole office, Mark gives a pretty touching speech and we go back to work
7pm: Dinner time. Whoopee II! Always delicious food served that includes roast beef, fish, pastas, gourmet salads, lasagnas
8pm: Back to working on projects. Sitting around someone’s desk discussing a new feature or the way the product should function.
11pm: Discuss with Mark if he likes the product and if it can ship on time. Argue, argue, accept, compromise, discuss and adjourn.
1am: Drunken party at someone’s house.
Karel: so that’s why the couch was available for me.
Sleeping on the couch when working at the office.
***Where did this all Start*** Back in the day a company created a website called sixdegrees.com. They wanted to track online how everyone was really within sixdegrees of you. Classmates was around before the site but the term social network is losely defined. A social network
Wikipedia has a great resource on the history of Social Networks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networking. What is really interesting is the Friendster, MySpace and Facebook revolution.
Friendster.com hit hard about 5 years ago and took off like a fire. It was the first time beyond AIM we could express opinions about ourselves online, identify our friend circle, learn new things about everyone and look for "new" friends. great resources on why friendster failed: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2006/03/21/friendster_lost.html http://business2.blogs.com/business2blog/2006/03/how_myspace_bea.html Friendster May get the last laught with patenting "social networking." www.boingboing.net/2006/07/07/friendster_patents_s.html
**Eating more than you Workout**
What does that title mean? That is how you would get fat. You eat more than you workout. This same concept goes for Facebook and all other social networks. You consume. You read profiles. You look at pictures. You see relationships. You analyze everything and yet you produce so little. The 80-20 rule of life is very true on Facebook. Most people have some information about their profiles but generally its 20% of the people that 80% of the people look at it. It is that hot girl from math class, that cute guy who lives in your dorm and that random person you always see around campus.
Karel: It’s also true that many of the people working at Facebook gain weight. The Facebook 20 or whatever it is.
Surprisingly, people put it ALL out there. Why people want everyone knowing everything about them. Why they care to share their favorite books, movies and quotes. Why they want all their personal photos viewed by so many random people.
I am still trying to grasp why. I have some guesses.
1. Go to any mall or rock concert and you will really understand. Everyone is different. Everyone is unique. Everyone wants to be a special butterfly. Everyone wants their own identity. We have that in the physical real world. We have our own clothes, hair style, attitude, personality and way we behave ourselves. Social networks help you replicate those feelings online.
Close your eyes (well not really) but imagine that someone told you there is a website where you “add friends,” view people’s personal information and you message them. It would sound pretty stupid or you’d wonder why the hell would anyone want to do that.
Well they want to have their online personality. They want something they can choose and dictate for their friends and society to see. They want the customized background showing their dark personality, they want to play the latest Last Days of April song so that people know they are into indie rock, they like having blog posts talking about their day or guy they thought was cute and they like posting all other information about themselves.
2. Control. One reason people enjoy using social networks is they choose what’s viewable, known, seen or what not. The people can choose who their friends are and they can choose their image very specifically. In the physical world you are sometimes defined by others, in this online world you are the God. You choose your profile picture and what people know about you. 3. Signal. There are two things that are never realized but are ALWAYS going on. You send out a signal and you receive signals. Similar to dolphin sonar beams, online you can send out a pulse about yourself and receive pulses about other people. More and more traditionally people are dating online. This is because you can find an exact person for what you are looking for. You can check their signal and see if it is something you want to bounce on.
**The future of Social Networks**
I have a few speculations about what will happen in the future of Social Networks
1. Verticals: More and more verticals will pop up to satisfy certain needs. We have already seen this with elhood for Mexicans, dogster for dog lovers and so forth. 2. Consolidation: Some social networks are just unnecessary or duplicates of others. They will get bought up or spit out. A social network is a very useful utility in certain applications. It is not needed for people who read books. Other tools like librarythhing.com where you can list your books form informal social communities around their book cataloging. More of these types of sites will become successful. 3. Failure: More copyat sites will fade away or the person creating will get bored since they have no traction. I created a tennis website called oneclicktennis.com, where it gives you matches to play at your skill level in your area for free (why is this site not accepting new members?). That is it. There is a social network called meshtennis.com, its looks is very Facebookish and its functionality is completely wrong. It will fail. It is for people to have profiles, document their rackets, view events and so forth. Most older people who are the ones playing tennis, want one thing: TO PLAY TENNIS. Yes there may be some good press but at the end of the day people just want to play tennis. They could really care less if they have “friends” online or that they are connected to 3,000 people. Think about it. 4. Adoption: The older generation now has no need nor understands what this whole social networking craze is about. They know a few things
- MySpace is everything. Beyond that they are clueless to the 1000s of social networks currently in production. - Social networks are evil. Seeing tales on the news and Dr. Phil even my mom is warning me about sexual predators. - Time. As you get older your time becomes more valuable and you become pickier with what you do. Besides browsing these social networks at work, mainstream America, wants to go do their hobbies, wants to eat dinner with their families and doesn’t want to be online.
Overall, the younger generation is much more inclined to share things, buy things online, trust people they don’t know well and try new things. This is evident by the amount of purchases online and # of people using the social networks. As this generation grows (generation C, for community) older they will bring along their traits with them. I don’t expect to see a steep increase in usage over my lifetime but I think it will plateau with people on these sites briefly maintaining them during the week. (more)
Noah Kagan’s 5 Predictions for Social Networks 2007
I was talking with Blake Ross who has done some amazing predictions and he suggested you have to end a book with predictions. Legally, there are certain short term projects that Facebook is doing that I can’t talk about. For example, Facebook was working on their API while I was there and just recently launched it. So I will give you my best guesses about what will happen with Facebook and social networks.
1- More social networks for niche’s will come out. Seen by the success of dogster.com there will be more networks for specific interests. I think ones with very strong affinities will succeed such as religion but others like a book social network will have a harder time. 2- Companies will get tired of MySpace and want their own communities. Nearly every single band has a MySpace page, how many of the bands really know their members? How many know their emails, demographics, etc…? Larger bands will start realizing they want a closer relationship with their fans and not rely on MySpace lasting forever. This will be true of other companies that want their own communities and direct relationships with their people. 3- Failure. Many will die off. How many social networks do people need? Will the fad of social networking and releasing all your information last forever? I don’t think so. I think there are way too many and people will be tired of putting their information everywhere. 4- Acquisition. One major social network with at least a million members will be acquired. A large, slow, old media company will pick up a social network in an effort of keeping up with the Jones’s. They will realize in a year or so that the return on investment is nothing. 5- Death. There will be a nationwide case of someone getting hurt or dying because of there information exposed on a social network. As I have said before many students don’t even think twice about the type of pictures, addresses or other things they list on social networks. This will impact greatly the privacy measures on all sites and student interests in the site will decline.