Facebook’s Beginning
The elite hacker stalks briskly through the cold evening air,
cradling a laptop, he bolts through the closing door into yet
another Harvard dorm building. He’s determined to overcome the
IP based security scheme which limits access to student’s personal
information by dorm. Blocking the flow of information is wrong,
instinct and the most powerful conviction scream within him.
Karel Baloun 35
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
31 Whenever I feel Old I run a marathon. It’s worked for me so far.
Scanning the walls, he spots his opening, the ethernet port with
an address inside of this dorm. Plugging in, he quickly grabs the
pictures and profile of all the residents. And moves on the the
next target. By day’s end, he’s ripped into his laptop enough
information to build interesting profiles for everyone at Harvard, a
Mark Zuckerberg Production, a gift to the Harvard community.
In late October, 2003, Facemash.com lit up Harvard. At random,
two matched pictures of Harvard students would appear, for a
basic hot or not comparison. The site only lasted a day or so
while pulling down 22000 hits from 450 people, so already the
seeds of Facebook were planted. Zuck apologized, and said his
“primary concern is hurting people’s feelings. I’m not willing to
risk insulting anyone.” as well as “I’m a programmer and I’m
interested in the algorithms and math behind it”.
The Harvard administration specified what privacy rules were
unacceptable, and in showing that a site like facebook could
overcome those complaints, he managed to create a site private
and safe enough that students could trust it. Over several days he
codes the initial version of thefacebook.com, powered by a
beverage-not-to-be-named32 and probably fun adrenaline.
Initially released on February 4th, 2004, thefacebook included the
essential picture, the list of personal attributes on the right, and a
list of friends. Notably, the item most interesting to his college
36 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
32 not coffee. don’t even think to bring the smell of the brew into the same room
as him.
audience, sex, is front and center: “looking for” and “relationship
status” to show what kind of relationship is available, and
“interested in” to confirm that it could be you. An early easter egg
enabled someone to message “sex?” from a mobile phone and if
yes, the reply would be the partner’s room number. Pretty hot,
huh!?
It worked. Harvard was hooked in weeks: In the first three weeks,
over 6,000 Harvard students joined. The earliest wayback
machine page from Feb 12, 2004 shows the original front page,
Harvard only33.
Facemash.com was repurposed around this time to show your
“Buddy Zoo”. Here’s how it worked, in the actual words of the site
on Feb 6, 2004. You can see how this foreshadows some of what
Facebook would become.
“Users submit their AIM Buddy Lists to the site. Then,
BuddyZoo runs all kinds of analysis on the data, letting
you:
* Find out which buddies you have in common with
your friends.
* Measure how popular you are.
* Detect cliques you're part of.
* See a visualization of your Buddy List.
* View your Prestige, computed the way Google
computes PageRank to rank web pages.
Karel Baloun 37
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
33 Facebook.com doesn’t have good coverage on the wayback machine, and
myspace.com blocks all (honest, well behaved) crawlers so has no coverage at all.
You can see how the site looked back until March ’05 under thefacebook.com’s
entries.
* See the degrees of separation between different
screennames.
* More features are still on the way. Check back in a
few days. “
Over the summer of 2004, Zuck and Dustin made the trek out
West, since here, in Silicon Valley between IBM, Cisco, Apple,
Stanford, Berkeley, Yahoo and Google34, is where everything hot
on the Internet happens. Facebook was already clearly going to
become big, since it had exploded across every Ivy league school
where it had been introduced, up to 2 million members. So Zuck
wanted investment and connections.
At this time Facebook was running on Zuck’s personal savings,
which he’d accumulated from doing various computer related jobs
since before high school35. Right when it wasn’t clear how the
bandwidth bill would be covered, Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal,
early investor in LinkedIn and fierce Libertarian, came in with a
saving angel investment, which he has said is the best investment
at current valuations he ever made. Perhaps he feels that way
because once, on his birthday, the facebook leaders arranged for
38 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
34 and my house and the hospital where i was born. three cheers for hometown
pride. I know that the Valley has more and more offshore competition, and that
many other tech hubs exist in America, and that centralization is decreasingly
necessary. I like Oregon.
35 Eduardo Saverin, a wealthy Brazilian student friend, put in a significant amount
of capital, but was soon removed, perhaps for not contributing in a working
capacity, as well as possibly for using the site traffic for his own side business
ends. Startups can have all kinds of convulsions in early stages.
him to receive hundreds of pokes and messages from beautiful
girls.
So how did Zuck and Sean meet, since this meeting was so
important to the future of Facebook? Which brilliant networked
headhunter set that up? In what fancy restaurant did they first
sketch their plans on a fine napkin and toast their success? Once
or twice they made actual plans to meet, back in Boston I think,
but those somehow fell through.
Sean met Zuck on the street in Palo Alto, in front of the rented
house he was sharing, completely by chance. Since Sean had no
clear place to stay at the time, Zuck let him crash at the house,
and as they talked their plan emerged. That management
recruiting strategy was not repeated. Perhaps this is why Zuck
and Sean could possibly think that a wooden chef outside the
office door could bring in a VP of Engineering.
Additional rounds of funding totaling over $35 million from Accel,
Greylock and Meritech Capital have ensured that Facebook has
sufficient cash for any existing plans and contingencies, and since
Facebook was clearly successful and more or less profitable, it
was in the drivers seat of all financing negotiations. Usually VC
get special protections on their capital and the company often
experiences heavy dilution, but not when multiple VCs are
competing to get in on the deal. The very evening Zuck closed
the initial funding round of $11 million dollars, and may have
even had the check on him as he was going to some fast food
joint in East Palo Alto, he was held up at gun point. The most
Karel Baloun 39
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
exhilarating and terrifying moments in his life happened within
hours of each other.
One important money saving characteristic of Facebook, through
some unknown combination of Zuck, Dustin and the other senior
executives, is that the leadership team knows when to pull the
plug on efforts that don’t fit the vision, and prunes the tree of
employees to ensure best allocation of resources. Even when
someone is good, I’ve seen a replacement part be tried out to see
if it would work better. While Noah, I and others could be seen as
personal casualties of this reality, this policy is best for both us
and for the company, as long as it affects so few people that the
ones remaining don’t think about it. In one all-hands meeting I
recall Zuck saying something like that anything less than full
commitment and dedication saps the focus and strength of
others. Plenty of misunderstandings may have happened, and led
to excellent, dedicated people being let off the train, but not
letting anyone go would be a bad company policy, which should
be firm against people just holding on for the ride. A company
vision is only as strong as the shared vision of the employees, and
any voices, or even thoughts, that don’t resonate with the leaders
really weaken the company.
Some companies lack a vision: even while the executives parade
out one vision after another, the employees just go about their
day without thinking about it or understanding it. Such
companies need visionary thinkers, creative minds AND need to
40 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
liberate these minds to do their magic, or inevitably the company
will not benefit and possibly those minds will be lost.
Facebook, on the other hand, has a very clear, powerful vision,
and since most employees come at it from the same place,
college, it comes as naturally as breathing air to them. I
personally think it would come naturally to a wider variety of
people, but I see needless risk to Zuck in testing out such a
theory. Until such a time that need variety around him to test out
and expand his vision.
Few hugely successful sites are created by a technologist, who
handles both the Product and Engineering. Zuck is one of those
rare talents who can do both, and he succeeded because he chose
a manageable problem, right in the center of his experience and
competency. He knew what he could do, and knew his own limits
well enough to find all of the right people to cover for him in
those areas. No one can do everything, or even be really good at
many things, so Zuck’s talent was to push his full ability on a
small but important problem, that he could solve by himself. Or
more precisely, if there were about 5 or 10 of himselves. He had
too much to do, but he could fully understand all aspects of what
he needed to do, right up to the point where he was objectively
very successful.
Zuck also successfully recognizes what he doesn’t know, and
finds the right person to tell him. He wastes no time with fools,
and can drill right to the point so fast it can hurt, but he listens
very well and is always learning. Zuck also keeps things simple.
Karel Baloun 41
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
When he does present at an all hands, usually there are like 2-5
totally simple slides, like a single bullet point (company goal:
grow site usage) or a two color pie chart (something i can’t tell
you about myspace). This really helps with the uniform,
understandable vision thing. On the other hand, I don’t know
how many diverse opinions Zuck hears, and I don’t know how
many in the company get to talk with him regularly. I don’t think
he had any takers when he introduced CEO office hours.
Google is notoriously engineer driven, and the business plan came
late, because VC were comfortable funding the people behind the
technology, and those people were able to build an excellent
search engine, and grow their leadership skills faster even than
they grew their company. Ebay’s creator Pierre Omidyar built the
first generation technology himself, but was quick to partner with
MBA holding friends to run the business parts of the company. He
continued to phase himself out, whenever he found people who
could do what he does as well as him. Finally he was just the soul
of the company, ensuring that is was consistent with his values
and core vision.
The Google founders acknowledged some limitations by hiring
Eric Schmidt as a super experienced CEO to be the prominent
adult in the room, but they still maintain a 2 to 1 majority in their
unique executive triumvirate. Noam Wasserman conducted
extensive research where he concludes that startup founders end
up either as kings OR rich, but rarely both. He notes that Gates
42 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
The elite hacker stalks briskly through the cold evening air,
cradling a laptop, he bolts through the closing door into yet
another Harvard dorm building. He’s determined to overcome the
IP based security scheme which limits access to student’s personal
information by dorm. Blocking the flow of information is wrong,
instinct and the most powerful conviction scream within him.
Karel Baloun 35
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
31 Whenever I feel Old I run a marathon. It’s worked for me so far.
Scanning the walls, he spots his opening, the ethernet port with
an address inside of this dorm. Plugging in, he quickly grabs the
pictures and profile of all the residents. And moves on the the
next target. By day’s end, he’s ripped into his laptop enough
information to build interesting profiles for everyone at Harvard, a
Mark Zuckerberg Production, a gift to the Harvard community.
In late October, 2003, Facemash.com lit up Harvard. At random,
two matched pictures of Harvard students would appear, for a
basic hot or not comparison. The site only lasted a day or so
while pulling down 22000 hits from 450 people, so already the
seeds of Facebook were planted. Zuck apologized, and said his
“primary concern is hurting people’s feelings. I’m not willing to
risk insulting anyone.” as well as “I’m a programmer and I’m
interested in the algorithms and math behind it”.
The Harvard administration specified what privacy rules were
unacceptable, and in showing that a site like facebook could
overcome those complaints, he managed to create a site private
and safe enough that students could trust it. Over several days he
codes the initial version of thefacebook.com, powered by a
beverage-not-to-be-named32 and probably fun adrenaline.
Initially released on February 4th, 2004, thefacebook included the
essential picture, the list of personal attributes on the right, and a
list of friends. Notably, the item most interesting to his college
36 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
32 not coffee. don’t even think to bring the smell of the brew into the same room
as him.
audience, sex, is front and center: “looking for” and “relationship
status” to show what kind of relationship is available, and
“interested in” to confirm that it could be you. An early easter egg
enabled someone to message “sex?” from a mobile phone and if
yes, the reply would be the partner’s room number. Pretty hot,
huh!?
It worked. Harvard was hooked in weeks: In the first three weeks,
over 6,000 Harvard students joined. The earliest wayback
machine page from Feb 12, 2004 shows the original front page,
Harvard only33.
Facemash.com was repurposed around this time to show your
“Buddy Zoo”. Here’s how it worked, in the actual words of the site
on Feb 6, 2004. You can see how this foreshadows some of what
Facebook would become.
“Users submit their AIM Buddy Lists to the site. Then,
BuddyZoo runs all kinds of analysis on the data, letting
you:
* Find out which buddies you have in common with
your friends.
* Measure how popular you are.
* Detect cliques you're part of.
* See a visualization of your Buddy List.
* View your Prestige, computed the way Google
computes PageRank to rank web pages.
Karel Baloun 37
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
33 Facebook.com doesn’t have good coverage on the wayback machine, and
myspace.com blocks all (honest, well behaved) crawlers so has no coverage at all.
You can see how the site looked back until March ’05 under thefacebook.com’s
entries.
* See the degrees of separation between different
screennames.
* More features are still on the way. Check back in a
few days. “
Over the summer of 2004, Zuck and Dustin made the trek out
West, since here, in Silicon Valley between IBM, Cisco, Apple,
Stanford, Berkeley, Yahoo and Google34, is where everything hot
on the Internet happens. Facebook was already clearly going to
become big, since it had exploded across every Ivy league school
where it had been introduced, up to 2 million members. So Zuck
wanted investment and connections.
At this time Facebook was running on Zuck’s personal savings,
which he’d accumulated from doing various computer related jobs
since before high school35. Right when it wasn’t clear how the
bandwidth bill would be covered, Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal,
early investor in LinkedIn and fierce Libertarian, came in with a
saving angel investment, which he has said is the best investment
at current valuations he ever made. Perhaps he feels that way
because once, on his birthday, the facebook leaders arranged for
38 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
34 and my house and the hospital where i was born. three cheers for hometown
pride. I know that the Valley has more and more offshore competition, and that
many other tech hubs exist in America, and that centralization is decreasingly
necessary. I like Oregon.
35 Eduardo Saverin, a wealthy Brazilian student friend, put in a significant amount
of capital, but was soon removed, perhaps for not contributing in a working
capacity, as well as possibly for using the site traffic for his own side business
ends. Startups can have all kinds of convulsions in early stages.
him to receive hundreds of pokes and messages from beautiful
girls.
So how did Zuck and Sean meet, since this meeting was so
important to the future of Facebook? Which brilliant networked
headhunter set that up? In what fancy restaurant did they first
sketch their plans on a fine napkin and toast their success? Once
or twice they made actual plans to meet, back in Boston I think,
but those somehow fell through.
Sean met Zuck on the street in Palo Alto, in front of the rented
house he was sharing, completely by chance. Since Sean had no
clear place to stay at the time, Zuck let him crash at the house,
and as they talked their plan emerged. That management
recruiting strategy was not repeated. Perhaps this is why Zuck
and Sean could possibly think that a wooden chef outside the
office door could bring in a VP of Engineering.
Additional rounds of funding totaling over $35 million from Accel,
Greylock and Meritech Capital have ensured that Facebook has
sufficient cash for any existing plans and contingencies, and since
Facebook was clearly successful and more or less profitable, it
was in the drivers seat of all financing negotiations. Usually VC
get special protections on their capital and the company often
experiences heavy dilution, but not when multiple VCs are
competing to get in on the deal. The very evening Zuck closed
the initial funding round of $11 million dollars, and may have
even had the check on him as he was going to some fast food
joint in East Palo Alto, he was held up at gun point. The most
Karel Baloun 39
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
exhilarating and terrifying moments in his life happened within
hours of each other.
One important money saving characteristic of Facebook, through
some unknown combination of Zuck, Dustin and the other senior
executives, is that the leadership team knows when to pull the
plug on efforts that don’t fit the vision, and prunes the tree of
employees to ensure best allocation of resources. Even when
someone is good, I’ve seen a replacement part be tried out to see
if it would work better. While Noah, I and others could be seen as
personal casualties of this reality, this policy is best for both us
and for the company, as long as it affects so few people that the
ones remaining don’t think about it. In one all-hands meeting I
recall Zuck saying something like that anything less than full
commitment and dedication saps the focus and strength of
others. Plenty of misunderstandings may have happened, and led
to excellent, dedicated people being let off the train, but not
letting anyone go would be a bad company policy, which should
be firm against people just holding on for the ride. A company
vision is only as strong as the shared vision of the employees, and
any voices, or even thoughts, that don’t resonate with the leaders
really weaken the company.
Some companies lack a vision: even while the executives parade
out one vision after another, the employees just go about their
day without thinking about it or understanding it. Such
companies need visionary thinkers, creative minds AND need to
40 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
liberate these minds to do their magic, or inevitably the company
will not benefit and possibly those minds will be lost.
Facebook, on the other hand, has a very clear, powerful vision,
and since most employees come at it from the same place,
college, it comes as naturally as breathing air to them. I
personally think it would come naturally to a wider variety of
people, but I see needless risk to Zuck in testing out such a
theory. Until such a time that need variety around him to test out
and expand his vision.
Few hugely successful sites are created by a technologist, who
handles both the Product and Engineering. Zuck is one of those
rare talents who can do both, and he succeeded because he chose
a manageable problem, right in the center of his experience and
competency. He knew what he could do, and knew his own limits
well enough to find all of the right people to cover for him in
those areas. No one can do everything, or even be really good at
many things, so Zuck’s talent was to push his full ability on a
small but important problem, that he could solve by himself. Or
more precisely, if there were about 5 or 10 of himselves. He had
too much to do, but he could fully understand all aspects of what
he needed to do, right up to the point where he was objectively
very successful.
Zuck also successfully recognizes what he doesn’t know, and
finds the right person to tell him. He wastes no time with fools,
and can drill right to the point so fast it can hurt, but he listens
very well and is always learning. Zuck also keeps things simple.
Karel Baloun 41
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
When he does present at an all hands, usually there are like 2-5
totally simple slides, like a single bullet point (company goal:
grow site usage) or a two color pie chart (something i can’t tell
you about myspace). This really helps with the uniform,
understandable vision thing. On the other hand, I don’t know
how many diverse opinions Zuck hears, and I don’t know how
many in the company get to talk with him regularly. I don’t think
he had any takers when he introduced CEO office hours.
Google is notoriously engineer driven, and the business plan came
late, because VC were comfortable funding the people behind the
technology, and those people were able to build an excellent
search engine, and grow their leadership skills faster even than
they grew their company. Ebay’s creator Pierre Omidyar built the
first generation technology himself, but was quick to partner with
MBA holding friends to run the business parts of the company. He
continued to phase himself out, whenever he found people who
could do what he does as well as him. Finally he was just the soul
of the company, ensuring that is was consistent with his values
and core vision.
The Google founders acknowledged some limitations by hiring
Eric Schmidt as a super experienced CEO to be the prominent
adult in the room, but they still maintain a 2 to 1 majority in their
unique executive triumvirate. Noam Wasserman conducted
extensive research where he concludes that startup founders end
up either as kings OR rich, but rarely both. He notes that Gates
42 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
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