# Facebook  ## Metadata - Author: [[Steven Levy]] - Full Title: Facebook - Category: #books ## Highlights - “I’m an engineer, like a lot of you guys,” he says. “And for me engineering comes down to two real principles: The first is that you think of every problem as a system. And every system can be better. No matter how good or bad it is, you can make anything better—and that goes for you whether you’re writing code or you’re building hardware, or your system is a company.” ([Location 192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=192)) - “There’s this fundamental thing that at an early age you looked at something and felt like: This can be better. I can break down this system and make it better. I remember thinking about that when I was young; it didn’t dawn on me until I was older that this isn’t the way everyone thinks of things. I do think that’s the engineering mindset—it may even be more a value set than a mindset.” ([Location 226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=226)) - Virtually every problem that Facebook confronted during its post-election woes had been a consequence of two things: the unprecedented nature of the mission to connect the world, and the consequences of its reckless haste to do so. ([Location 366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=366)) - Those great tech companies were very much based on the idealism of their founders, but now are viewed as part of a Faustian bargain: the wonders they deliver have come at a cost, to our attention, our privacy, our comity. And now we fear their power. ([Location 373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=373)) - “If you were going to say no to him, you had better be prepared with a strong argument backed by facts, experiences, logic, reasons,” Ed Zuckerberg once told a reporter. Mark, he said, was “strong-willed and relentless,” a description that many coworkers and rivals would certainly endorse. ([Location 480](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=480)) - when Zuckerberg played games on computers, they indulged his world-building imagination. One of his favorites was called Civilization, a popular series in the genre of “turn-based strategy games.” The idea was to build a society. He kept playing it even into adulthood. ([Location 489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=489)) - One night he demanded that his parents take him to Barnes & Noble to purchase a guide to writing C++, a key computer language for creating web applications. “He’s ten!” recalls Ed Zuckerberg. When the acolyte coder discovered that a book explicitly targeted to “dummies” lacked key information, Dr. Z hired a tutor. ([Location 493](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=493)) - Note: This was LITERALLY me. I wanted to program games so I bought C++ for dummies at 10 years old. But I couldn’t figure it out and I gave up. Moral of the story - if your kids show interest in something, go the extra mile and get them a tutor for it - As Mark later told an interviewer, “I’d go to school and I’d go to class and come home. The way I’d think about it was, ‘I have five whole hours to just sit and play on my computer and write software.’ And then Friday afternoon would come along and it would be like, okay, now I have two whole days to sit and write software. This is amazing.” Later he would remark that from all this programming, “it reached a point where it went into my intuition. I wasn’t really thinking that much about it consciously.” ([Location 499](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=499)) - Every fourth-year Exeter student took a course in Virgil’s Aeneid, and later in life Zuckerberg would cite some key lines, using them to inspire his Facebook workforce. Recounting the plot to a reporter in 2010, he would note the resonance of Aeneas striving to build a city that “knows no boundaries in time and greatness.” ([Location 590](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=590)) - The combination of doing fascinating work with the instant feedback of a huge base of users transformed the way D’Angelo thought about his programming projects. After this, he told himself he would only work on projects that could have an impact on the world. “I think it had a similar effect on Mark,” he says. ([Location 785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=785)) - Throughout his young life, Zuckerberg has always worked on projects, jumping from one to the next. But when he returned from summer break for his sophomore year in Kirkland House, his activities seemed to become more intense than ever. As soon as he plopped down at his desk, he began churning out increasingly ambitious new ideas. But as they piled up, a theme emerged: Nearly everything he did involved connecting people in some way. ([Location 815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=815)) - Course Match had taught him a very useful lesson: “People have this deep thirst to understand what’s going on with people around them.” ([Location 832](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=832)) - Zuckerberg’s friend Andrew McCollum, who also took the course, says that it was an innovative way for Zuckerberg to disrupt the typical means of group preparation, and was nothing insidious. “Mark thought it was inefficient to organize a study group and get together in the library. Why don’t we make a tool that can let people collaborate more easily to do the same thing? That was his general approach—how can you use technology to let people collaborate and remove constraints of time and space?” ([Location 949](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=949)) - He viewed this new site as the culmination of all the projects he’d been working on previously. The common thread of all those projects, Zuckerberg would later explain, was his belief that with the Internet we now had the means to more efficiently share information, but people weren’t building the tools to make that happen. Building such tools would help push the world to that efficient place. “That’s a really good thing,” he says. “So I built these little ones like Course Match and Rome of Augustus. Facebook was kind of like the master one, because it was, like, everything about the people that you cared about.” ([Location 1038](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=1038)) - He drew lessons from each of his previous projects. From Course Match: the ability to know the sections where your friends were enrolled. Facemash: people really wanted to see stuff about their friends. Rome of Augustus: people would gladly provide you content for free. ([Location 1043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=1043)) - Tags: [[blue]] - sociologists and start-up gurus would endlessly analyze what happened at Harvard in February 2004, painstakingly deconstructing the forensics of the lightning that Zuckerberg had bottled. “In the Ivy League, where very few incoming freshmen know more than one or two people, the [physical] facebook is really a key piece of infrastructure,” says danah boyd, who was a sociologist in her early twenties at the time, and one of the first to understand that a new era in social science was being born right on her computer screen. “Zuckerberg made it interactive. It had a slight social stalking element too. It was addictive. And the fact that you could see only people on your network was crucial—it let you be in public but only in the gaze of eyes you want to be public to.” ([Location 1142](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=1142)) - Tags: [[blue]] - seeing Thefacebook adopted so quickly on campus, Moskovitz wanted a larger role, which would mean he’d have to actually do some coding. He undertook a crash course in programming, buying the PERL for Dummies book and staying up all hours to teach himself. He was unfazed when Zuckerberg informed him that the site was built not in PERL but modern languages PHP and C++. No big deal—Moskovitz would learn those too. He had an unbelievable propensity for work; eventually people would refer to him as the Ox—a nickname that gave short shrift to his intelligence and organizational skills. He quickly figured out how to mimic Zuckerberg’s work, and became a master at executing the tasks required to move Thefacebook into new campuses. ([Location 1169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=1169)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Intelligence, relentless work ethic, and knowing when to seize an opportunity can take you far - The ConnectU team had drawn its plans in the belief that success in the Internet world came from thinking up a good idea and moving it online, taking advantage of digital’s superpowers. That had been the theory in the first wave of Internet start-ups, a movement that had crashed ignominiously when the inflated values of companies like Pets.com exhaled like punctured balloons. But the next wave of successes were start-ups whose founders were technically minded. They often referred to themselves as hackers. Their ideas were only starting points for a product that they would rush to release and then iterate to excellence. By the mid-2000s, the way to glory did not involve hiring people like Mark Zuckerberg as cheap labor to code up the concept you brainstormed with pals at your finals club—it was driven by the Zuckerbergs themselves. ([Location 1249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=1249)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “My goal is to not have a job,” Zuckerberg said. “Making cool things is just something I love doing, and not having someone tell me what to do or a timeframe in which to do it is the luxury I am looking for in my life.” ([Location 1311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=1311)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Parker would later comment to me about how he was struck with Zuckerberg’s obsession with concepts of power and dominance, constantly citing books of ancient Greek and Roman conquerors. He could erupt in bursts of bravado, bounding around the place with his fencing gear, annoying subordinates by thrusting his foil inches from their faces. ([Location 1405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=1405)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When Saverin discovered that he had signed documents that essentially cut him out of the company, he was outraged. Zuckerberg gave his justification to a friend on Instant Messenger (again, unearthed by Business Insider): I maintain he fucked himself. First by completing none of his three assigned tasks. He was supposed to set up the company, get funding and make a business model. He failed at all three and took the offensive against me with no leverage. That just means he’s dumb. And now that I’m not going back to Harvard I don’t need to worry about getting beaten by Brazilian thugs. ([Location 1635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=1635)) - Tags: [[blue]] - That month he painted the word FORSAN on the wall near his desk. It was a reference to a famous passage in the Aeneid, “Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit,” where Aeneas addresses his lost and battered troops, saying, “Someday perhaps, remembering even this will be a pleasure.” ([Location 1713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=1713)) - Tags: [[blue]] - But it was Mark Zuckerberg who kept control, with the biggest stake of all. “Whether it’s Peter Thiel or Sean Parker, these people thought they were manipulating Mark,” says one early Facebook employee. “But Mark saw Sean as a useful tool to do the job that sucks the most—fundraising. In hindsight, it was genius that Mark convinced Parker to raise all the money for him.” ([Location 1916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=1916)) - Tags: [[blue]] - ZUCKERBERG CARRIED A notebook. In 2006, the year that put Facebook on a course for greatness and infamy, you would have seen him in the Palo Alto office, head down, scrawling on an unruled journal in his crabbed, compact script, sketching out product ideas, diagramming coding approaches, and slipping in bits of his philosophy. Those who visited his one-bedroom apartment, with its mattress on the floor and a kitchen that never saw an egg boiled, might spot a stack of completed notebooks. Zuckerberg was no longer doing much coding, but he’d use those notebooks to convey a detailed version of his product vision. The method compensated for his interpersonal shortcomings. When Facebook engineers and designers would roll into the office in the late morning or early afternoon they would sometimes find a few photocopied pages sketching out a design for a front end or a list of signals for a ranking algorithm. The pages didn’t necessarily end the conversation, but often opened one up, as recipients would use them as a basis for collaboration with their boss. ([Location 1921](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=1921)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Carry notebooks around and sketch out ideas. Again like DaVinci, many topics are mixed together here - Allowing entry to all, by simply providing an email address, was the obvious solution. You would be able to network with everybody—friends, relatives, colleagues—because everybody could be on Facebook. Still, Zuckerberg initially felt that new users would have to be rooted in some network. If people weren’t rooted to a community, it would be much harder to know whether they were who they said they were, or just tricksters like you found all the time on MySpace. That level of trust was key to Facebook’s success. ([Location 1974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=1974)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: He knew his differentiator and didn’t want to dilute it - In designing Open Reg, he posed one final question to himself. “What makes this seem secure, whether or not it actually is?” ([Location 2000](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2000)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The home page was wasted space—people would quickly abandon it and go to their Friends page, to see who had updated their profile. Then you would painstakingly click through each of those to see what was different. The Facebook logs showed that a huge number of people actually went through their friend list in alphabetical order to make sure they were on top of new activities. “This is how all social networks worked at the time, but this felt very inefficient,” says D’Angelo. “Everyone is spending so much time clicking around on those profiles.” Zuckerberg’s solution was the News Feed. The information that was now buried on profiles would be distributed directly to your friends, like a newsboy tossing papers onto the front porch. With Facebook, the news would hit on your front page. ([Location 2007](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2007)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What sold him on Facebook was the speed with which the company pitched product. At Microsoft, when Boz had come up with a great feature idea for the release of a product, users would not see it for more than a year. At Facebook, you could put ideas into production within hours. And then there was his former student, Zuckerberg, who was shockingly bold in his ambition. We are going to connect the world and be this global fabric! Zuckerberg told him. Can you imagine what that would be like? Bosworth was hooked, and from that moment he became Zuckerberg’s loyal lieutenant. ([Location 2063](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2063)) - Tags: [[blue]] - a page later he is sketching out what seems to be a grand vision for Facebook. He calls it “The Information Engine.” Using Facebook needs to feel like you’re using a futuristic government-style interface to access a database full of information linked to every person. The user needs to be able to look at information at any depth . . . The user experience needs to feel “full.” That is, when you click on a person in a governmental database, there is always information about them. This makes it worth going to their page or searching for them. We must make it so every search is worth doing and every link is worth clicking on. Then the experience will be beautiful. ([Location 2094](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2094)) - Tags: [[blue]] - While the News Feed showed the user what was going on with their friends, Zuckerberg also envisioned a second feed that would tell friends what was going on about you. That feature, the Mini-Feed, would live on the profile page, taking up as much space as the Wall. “When someone arrives at someone else’s profile, they need to feel like they know what’s going on with that person and who that person is,” he wrote. In reverse chronological order, it would reveal all your Facebook “events”—who posted a picture about you, whom you friended, what changed in your relationship. “The idea is to present a log of each person’s life, but hopefully not in a creepy way,” wrote Zuckerberg in his notebook. “People should have control of what displays in their event stream and they can add and remove things, but they shouldn’t be able to turn them off.” ([Location 2116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2116)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Zuckerberg seemed nonchalant about MySpace’s huge lead in users. He saw the NewsCorp purchase not as a threat but as a validation of the worth of social-media companies. The Facebook team believed that MySpace wasn’t a technology company, and didn’t have the rigor that came from focusing on products. ([Location 2147](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2147)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The commitment to stay independent reflected Zuckerberg’s belief that Facebook was now on a mission—to connect the whole world. He had the tools in place: the News Feed and Open Reg. They would take Facebook into another dimension. All he had to do was ship. ([Location 2228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2228)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Zuckerberg was untroubled. He had already come to the belief that user objections are a transitory distraction. If you just kept your head down and ignored the noise, people would get over it, and in a couple of weeks it would be like the outcry never happened. “He ([Location 2250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2250)) - Tags: [[blue]] - AT 1:06 A.M. Pacific, News Feed went live. A good portion of the entire Facebook workforce, clad in regulation hoodies and jeans, joined the News Feed team at the 156 University Avenue office. No Facebook product had even been close in terms of the time and effort this took—more than six months. Zuckerberg had built the original Facebook in not much more than a week. What’s more, News Feed was a new direction for the company, a new and perhaps addictive way to share personal information. It was as if the company’s raison d’être were embodied in this single product. ([Location 2259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2259)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Meanwhile, Sanghvi and her team were looking at the logs and finding something amazing. Even as hundreds of thousands of users expressed their disapproval of News Feed, their behavior indicated that they felt otherwise. Users were spending more time on Facebook than ever before. It was a validation of the entire concept. She went to Moskovitz and told him that turning off the News Feed would be a bad idea. ([Location 2303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2303)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the last months of 2006, and into 2007, Facebook’s flat numbers began to rise. “Within a week of launching we’d gone from probably fewer than ten thousand people joining a day to sixty or eighty thousand people joining a day, and then it grew quickly from there,” recalls Zuckerberg. Open Reg allowed billions of users to flock to Facebook. And the News Feed would keep them there, making the site as totally consuming for everybody as it was for college kids when Thefacebook first appeared. ([Location 2344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2344)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Morin kept talking to Facebook. One day in the fall of 2006, Moskovitz visited him at Cupertino again. Wouldn’t a social operating system be amazing? Morin asked him. Moskovitz point-blank stared at him. This was what they were talking about at Facebook all the time! You need to come to Facebook now and do this, he told Morin. ([Location 2380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2380)) - Tags: [[blue]] - After endless whiteboard sessions, Fetterman’s original idea of just an API evolved to a much broader undertaking, where the apps would not be on someone else’s website but Facebook’s, living on pages that were called canvases. Users would learn about them through the News Feed. “We said here’s a canvas inside the trusted blue-and-white borders where you could build whatever your dreams dictate,” says Fetterman. ([Location 2423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2423)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The difference between plan A (Fetterman’s original API) and the new plan B was that the latter positioned Facebook as not just a platform but an operating system. This was the pinnacle of Silicon Valley’s pyramid of value. If you owned the OS, you had your own little monopoly. The most successful OS of the previous era was Microsoft’s Windows, which a judge had determined was in fact a big monopoly. While many Silicon Valley leaders still viewed Microsoft as the industry’s Darth Vader, Zuckerberg admired Bill Gates’s company. The Windows system was unbeatable because a huge majority of PC users had computers that ran it. To reach those customers, software programmers had to write their software in Windows. Zuckerberg came to imagine Facebook as the social equivalent of that. Just as Microsoft owned the desktop world, Facebook would own the social world. ([Location 2426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2426)) - “We don’t own the social graph,” Zuckerberg would explain to me later that year, going slow so even a mainstream journalist might understand this dive into network theory. “The social graph is this thing that exists in the world, and it always has and it always will. A lot of people think that maybe Facebook’s a community site, and we think we’re not a community site at all. We’re not defining any communities. All we’re doing is taking this real-world social graph that exists with real people and their real connections, and we’re trying to get as accurate of a picture as possible of how those connections are modeled out.” ([Location 2504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2504)) - why did the Platform instantly surpass Facebook’s most optimistic guesses? The secret turned out to be that the News Feed was a more powerful engine of distribution than even Facebook suspected. Less than a year after its introduction, Facebook was still tinkering with the algorithms that determined the ranking of possible stories on people’s feeds. The developers were way ahead of them. In order to popularize their products quickly, they had been experimenting in techniques, sometimes dicey ones, to take advantage of the peccadillos of various platforms. They also understood human nature well enough to know why people click on some things and not others. Some had already mastered the mysterious art of “going viral” on MySpace and other networks and knew just what to do to exploit it for their own gains—and the detriment of Facebook’s users. ([Location 2545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2545)) - Pincus would attend things like the parties Zuckerberg had on his birthday. “I was the non-Harvard, non-Facebook person there,” he says. Pincus was in awe of how relentlessly the younger man could soak up knowledge. Zuckerberg was a learning machine. ([Location 2586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2586)) - “If you can get a friend to bother ten friends to get one more user on your app, you’re very happy because you got one more user,” says Josh Elman, who joined the Platform team in 2008. “Facebook, though, has nine other people who’ve just gotten bothered.” Definitely not the revolution Facebook had in mind. ([Location 2614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2614)) - “At one point we were eighty percent of their API usage,” says Pincus. “At our peak with them, we were sixty percent of their app DAUs [daily average users]. And I heard that by the time they went public, we were something like twenty percent of Facebook’s overall revenues.” Facebook was so dependent on Zynga at that point (its 2012 IPO) that the prospectus listed it as a business risk. ([Location 2694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2694)) - Nonetheless, tensions still remained, and as smartphones became ubiquitous, Facebook’s platform became less valuable to Zynga. “It was clearly all going to be mobile and it didn’t matter anymore,” Pincus says. In 2012—three years before the five-year timeframe of their contract ended—the two companies renegotiated. Zynga would no longer be a Facebook-first partner. It was a symbolic moment of the dashed dreams of Platform. ([Location 2697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2697)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the short term, at least, Facebook was motivated to let the carnival continue. Because if all the developers writing Facebook apps left the Platform, there would be a lot less traffic on Facebook. “What was in it for us was very simple,” says Dave Morin. “It was creating more time, and more inventory [for ads]. One of the things about Facebook that’s always been very straightforward is, we create experiences that are highly engaging, the business model is ads, and so the more engaging, the more ads, right?” ([Location 2722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2722)) - Tags: [[blue]] - By then, it hardly mattered, because developers had found a much better operating system—two of them, in fact. Apple and Android had created their own development platforms for their mobile phones. Developers quickly understood that mobile was the best place to build their businesses. Facebook’s original ambitions for Platform—a thriving operating system where developers would write original apps that ran inside Facebook—were over. “Unfortunately, mobile just completely undermined the entire system and basically relegated the platform to irrelevance,” says Facebook’s head of partnerships, Dan Rose. ([Location 2763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2763)) - Tags: [[blue]] - We’re trying to enable people to share everything they want and to do it on Facebook. Sometimes the best way to enable people to share something is to have a developer build a special purpose app or network for that type of content and make that app social by having Facebook plug into it. However, that may be good for the world but it’s not good for us unless people share back to Facebook and that content increases the value of our network. So ultimately, I think the purpose of the platform . . . is to increase sharing back into Facebook. ([Location 2782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2782)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Now Facebook would stop the practice, not to serve users but because it did not want to give away data to developers for nothing in return. This was not a friendly message to share at a developers conference. So Facebook came up with the idea to announce the change as if it were motivated by concern for user privacy. The move would fit in with a set of privacy features already planned for release. One executive dubbed the PR tactic “the switcheroo.” ([Location 2805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2805)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Kendall recalls the ad business then as stumbling along, taking in maybe $20,000 a week. He knew, and everyone else did, that eventually Facebook would have to create a unique and innovative product, as Google did with AdWords, its wildly successful self-service, auction-driven scheme that put relevant ads next to search results. The guy who had headed that product, Salar Kamangar, was a hero to business schoolers. Kendall dreamed of being Facebook’s Salar. ([Location 2849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2849)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Some of the idealists in the company were upset that Facebook was joining with . . . Microsoft? In 2006, Microsoft had the double whammy of being associated with evil and being stupid enough to squander its viselike grip on the software business. Dave Morin, who had just joined Facebook at the time, stomped into the Cloud Room and griped about it to Zuckerberg. The boss’s answer floored him: We don’t want to spend a single resource here working on advertising, he told Morin. It’s not something we care about. “Microsoft wants to build an advertising business here,” Zuckerberg told him, “and so we’re going to give our inventory to them and they’re going to pay us. How great is that?” ([Location 2862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2862)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “What worked on Facebook was learning about my friends,” Kendall says. “And so learning about products and services through the lens of my friends seems like it should work, especially if the ads have pertinent, relevant information about my friends.” ([Location 2882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2882)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Facebook was going to change its current ad system to be less about how many people saw the ads and more about targeting them to the right people. ([Location 2891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2891)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Another component, called Pages, would allow companies and other entities, like rock bands, to have profiles of their own, something previously forbidden by Facebook’s policy of allowing only people to have accounts. Pages would act like storefronts, billboards, or even websites within Facebook. They would be like the Yellow Pages, while the Profiles would be like the White Pages. ([Location 2901](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2901)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Microsoft’s famous co-founder, Bill Gates, was no longer CEO, but as executive chair he took an interest in Zuckerberg, who was being called the next version of him. The two would eventually become friends, with Gates offering lessons from his experience. Gates acknowledged their similarities—both were Harvard dropouts forming a paradigm-busting software company. But Bill Gates V.2? Not so fast. “Mark never wrote as much code as I did—that’s the most important thing. Put that in your book!” Gates tells me, joking but maybe not joking. Furthermore, “And if Steve Jobs was sitting here he’d say, Hey, Mark never designed a beautiful-looking goddamned thing, so how can you talk about him as any successor of me?” (Joke? Probably joke. Bill is a card.) ([Location 2940](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=2940)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was a strategy that characterized Sandberg’s later approach to the workplace: with sufficient preparation and diligence, one could always bag the A+. Even the most intransigent problem could be defeated with hard work. ([Location 3056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3056)) - Tags: [[blue]] - for the next decade of mega-growth, as the company faced unprecedented issues because of its mind-boggling scale, Facebook essentially had two organizations: Zuckerberg’s domain and Sheryl World. And in no way were those equal. Zuckerberg headed engineering, the product side, not only because he was better at it but because he felt it was the heart of the company. Still, it seemed like a no-brainer at the time. It would take him more than a decade to understand what a mistake it was. ([Location 3108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3108)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was obvious to Sandberg that Facebook’s business would be advertising and everything else a rounding error. But not everyone at Facebook was comfortable with the idea, especially among some of the younger people who thought that ads sucked and Facebook should do something less . . . smarmy. Even Zuckerberg wasn’t all in—after the Pandemic event that fall Rabkin told him that he needed to hire more people. Five engineers were way too little to scale into a billion-dollar system. Google had four hundred! “Well, how many do you think you’ll need to build the best system in the world?” asked Zuckerberg. Rabkin mustered up his courage and said . . . twenty. “It seems like a lot—let me think about it,” said Zuckerberg. Rabkin says it took a couple more years before he had twenty engineers on his ad product team. (Today there are hundreds, just like Google.) ([Location 3168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3168)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Zuckerberg understood that. As always, he was focused on the long term. If Facebook was indeed going all in on advertising, “Mark knew correctly that the race to get the real product right and to internationalize the product and encourage sharing, and all of that was much more important than early monetization,” says Mark Rabkin. As always, product was his interest—what new ads should be invented now that Facebook was set on its monetization path? ([Location 3215](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3215)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the Like button’s conquest of the web was wildly successful for Facebook, and could be viewed as the revenge of Beacon. While Beacon shared personal data it received from websites with other users on Facebook, the Like button let Facebook use that data for its own purposes, largely to build its profiles of users and power its advertising. Facebook had learned that going beyond its borders to augment its monetization would be transformative. Later, Facebook would take the further step of buying information from data brokers. What was once “blasphemous” to its chief privacy officer was now Facebook’s business as usual. ([Location 3294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3294)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In 2005, Palihapitiya quit AOL—one takeaway from his experience there, he later said, was that “most people at most companies are really shit”—and ([Location 3339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3339)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Palihapitiya came offering a solution: a high-energy team with a long leash whose focus would be accumulating and keeping users. He felt he had identified the North Star of Facebook, the most elemental aspect of how it defined its business and its financial health. And that was the concept of the Monthly Active User. Other Internet businesses counted how many people were on the site each day, or how many had signed up in total. But monthly was a better indicator, because someone consistently on the service for a full month was likely there to stay. Thus the number took into account the “churn”—how many people were leaving Facebook. Palihapitiya proposed to be utterly obsessive about MAUs—to look at every part of Facebook’s business in light of this metric, to learn what can drive MAUs, to fix things that don’t increase it, and to build new parts of the company to boost MAUs even higher. ([Location 3392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3392)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Some early Facebookers contend that email scraping was the single most valuable factor in helping Facebook grow when for the first time it found itself competing not in closed networks but in the world at large. ([Location 3443](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3443)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Palihapitiya saw himself as more worldly and pragmatic than the idealistic and largely homogenous workers at Facebook. He had a sort of contempt for the charmed lives they led. The way that he saw it, the Facebook hiring process rewarded the kind of people who spent their lives making checkmarks on life-achievement boxes—astronomical test scores, Harvard or Stanford, enviable internships. You could see it in their Facebook feeds, as each post seemed to unlock one more level on a video game. But the problem with those box-checkers was that they were locked into following predetermined courses. The idea of going off course, abandoning the neatly arranged checkboxes entirely, didn’t fit their mental model. They couldn’t handle it. So Palihapitiya undertook to mess with their minds, doing psychological tricks to rewire their brains so they wouldn’t be so fixated on validation and affirmation. Calling his team a circle was part of that—an attempt to jar them out of the idea of a hierarchy where the most important person sat at the head of the table. The idea was to empower anyone on the team. ([Location 3474](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3474)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It is vital for developers of social networking sites to encourage users to contribute content, as each individual’s experience is dependent on the contributions of that person’s particular set of connections. It is particularly important, if rather difficult, to encourage continuing contributions from newcomers. ([Location 3521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3521)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The data-driven, take-no-prisoners DNA of Growth, the Palihapitiya way, is baked into all those initiatives. Palihapitiya left the company in 2011 to start a venture capital fund. (Investors included Facebook, and several of its current and former employees, though not Zuckerberg.) In his farewell memo, he said that the journey was all about winning—everything else comes in second, he said—and warned Facebook folk to be alert to spot “the company you don’t know,” whose big ideas might displace you. ([Location 3760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3760)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Understanding how Facebook was a hacker company helped shape the four values that they ultimately presented to Zuckerberg. It was like showing him a mirror. Focus on Impact. Be Bold. Move Fast and Break Things. Be Open. ([Location 3820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3820)) - Tags: [[blue]] - WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU WEREN’T AFRAID? While “Move Fast and Break Things” seemed to emerge from Facebook’s cortex—speed was the tactical advantage that set the company apart—this challenging query mined its heart. By adopting it as one of its unofficial mottos, Facebook was expressing not just an approach to business, but a path to self-realization. In work and in life, fear was the enemy. Do it, the slogan urged. What’s the worst that could happen? ([Location 3847](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3847)) - Tags: [[blue]] - From Zuckerberg on down, everyone believed that Facebook’s edge came from its speed and risk-taking. Going slow would mean death. ([Location 3865](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3865)) - Tags: [[blue]] - one of Zuckerberg’s top engineers, Blake Ross, began to work on a feature called Questions. It did exactly what Quora proposed to do. The engineers at Quora found Ross creating so many accounts that they banned him as a spammer. When Questions launched in July 2010, many thought that Quora was doomed. How could it compete with Facebook’s 500 million users? But Questions did fade away, and eventually Facebook dropped the feature. Ultimately, it could not match the passion of two founders who had built a start-up around the concept. ([Location 3903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=3903)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “Our attempts at explaining what we were building were often met with blank stares, and we peaked at around 1,000 users.” The founders noted that photo sharing, which was envisioned as a slideshow in the app, seemed to be the most popular feature. ([Location 4779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=4779)) - Tags: [[blue]] - a couple of years of experience in buying companies had given Zuckerberg a playbook for big acquisitions, which he would put to the test with Instagram. The first principle was direct involvement from Zuckerberg himself, flattering and smothering his quarry with attention. The second was a promise of independence. Co-founders were promised that they would continue to make the creative decisions for their companies—it was their genius that made them so attractive to Facebook!—with Facebook providing all the dull stuff like infrastructure, security, office space, and marketing. ([Location 4849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=4849)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Spiegel had reason to be cautious. When Facebook bought Instagram earlier that year, most people were stunned at that billion-dollar price tag. Not Spiegel. He thought that the Instagram guys had made a catastrophic mistake. Sure, Facebook’s infrastructure might make scaling the product easier. But he didn’t respect Facebook’s product sense. ([Location 4909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=4909)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Koum made sure WhatsApp ran not only on Apple and Android, but on other handsets popular around the world even if they belonged to a generation of devices that were seen as being eclipsed by smartphones. Most American companies didn’t bother with them. Ignore the United States, Koum would tell Acton, everyone in the world is using Nokia phones! “That gave us huge growth potential in Latin America, Central America, India,” says Acton. ([Location 5086](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=5086)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In contrast, the first contact from Facebook came in 2013 from Mark Zuckerberg himself. Like so many things at Facebook, it sprang from the Growth team. Though WhatsApp had been decidedly under the radar, especially inside the United States, Facebook deeply understood how popular it was, because of the private data its subsidiary Onavo had been stealthily gathering for years. In a sense, flagging WhatsApp for attention justified the entire price of the Onavo acquisition. ([Location 5115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=5115)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going to let that happen. The Onavo numbers told him that WhatsApp was becoming a global powerhouse, possibly blocking Facebook’s own messaging efforts around the world. It had 450 million users, including 40 million users in India, 30 million in Mexico. In some countries, it had two-thirds of the market. Only two years earlier, Zuckerberg had shocked the world with a billion-dollar bid for Instagram when the company was closing a round for half that valuation. Now he was prepared to spend much more for WhatsApp. When Koum and Acton told him that they demanded that he value their company on a level with Twitter—which at the time was around $20 billion—he didn’t flinch. Which was shocking. WhatsApp back then had only around fifty-five employees. Most Americans had never heard of it. ([Location 5135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=5135)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The second demo clinched it. In the space of a few days, Zuckerberg had concluded that virtual reality was not merely a cool potential feature, but something way larger. It was the next platform. Missing this would be like missing out on mobile. Zuckerberg was only two years removed from what he had considered a near-death experience when Facebook almost screwed up that pivot. Virtual reality, he figured, might be ten years out, but here was a company that was building the foundation. If Facebook owned it, and poured in money to make it happen, Zuckerberg not only would be ready for the next big paradigm shift. He would own it. ([Location 5218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=5218)) - Tags: [[blue]] - She saw the phenomenon as inevitable given Facebook’s growth and advertising practices. The company had marketed itself as an influence machine—Reach your audience, change their hearts and minds, and sell them your T-shirts. But there was no fundamental difference between commercial persuasion and political persuasion. Facebook, she felt, had built an engine to push propaganda. ([Location 5468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=5468)) - Tags: [[blue]] - While previous blowups at Facebook had been centered on discrete missteps—the News Feed, Beacon, the Terms of Service debacle—the post-election crisis struck at the essence of Facebook itself. All the decisions made in the name of growth, commerce, and a single-minded push toward sharing had created an unhealthily addictive system vulnerable to bad actors. ([Location 5839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=5839)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “This is kinda my thesis here,” he said. “That there’s this infrastructure that needs to get built for our society and civilization to reach the next level and transcend the current tribalism that we have of ‘we’re a bunch of countries,’ to really feeling like we are a world that can get things done together.” ([Location 5848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=5848)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The drawbacks of such a system were best expressed by former Google interface engineer Tristan Harris. He had earlier taken his own employer to task for addictive techniques. Essentially, his argument was that the traditional methods of maintaining attention—well known in television and even serial novels—had reached a new dimension of toxic addictiveness with the digital tools and artificial-intelligence breakthroughs of the twenty-first century. He considered News Feed and other “infinite scrolls” the worst offenders, Facebook being the worst of the worst. In the United States, around one-fourth of all mobile Internet time was Facebook time. In some countries it was even more. To Harris, these products were not just addictive distractions but an existential threat to humanity. While the movies portrayed the threat of artificial intelligence as Terminator-style robots pursuing us, what we really should fear, he argued, was Mark Zuckerberg, whose algorithms were overwhelming us with irresistible digital junk food. The fake news controversies raised the stakes even higher, manipulating our impulses to check out sensational and destructive content. ([Location 6091](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=6091)) - Tags: [[blue]] - like Facebook itself, CZI is a reflection of its co-founder’s belief in the engineering mindset. CZI’s distinguishing feature is an effort to create the digital tools to attack the problems he and Priscilla were addressing. It competes with tech companies, including Facebook, to hire software engineers and AI scientists. ([Location 6239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=6239)) - Tags: [[blue]] - His observations of Internet behavior had convinced him that people were gravitating toward services without the drawbacks of the News Feed. “Private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication,” he wrote. “Many people prefer the intimacy of communicating one-on-one or with just a few friends. People are more cautious of having a permanent record of what they’ve shared.” ([Location 7725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=7725)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Since the premier open platform was the Facebook Blue franchise, that might have presented a problem for Zuckerberg. Fortunately (for him) he owned three other communications platforms besides Blue. He also owned what he believed would become the dominant platform in the century’s third decade, the VR company Oculus. And was bringing all of them under tighter control. Zuckerberg had actually been preparing for this shift for the last year. While all the headlines had been about scandals and elections and earnings, he had been quietly changing the company. ([Location 7731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=7731)) - Tags: [[blue]] - no one used it. “Like, literally no one had any idea what it was for,” he says. “What is this Stories thing?” Spiegel did not panic. When Snapchat itself first launched, it had been a flop. “That’s always the challenge with new ideas,” he says. “It takes time for people to change their behavior.” That is what happened with Stories. After a few months, the graph that showed the rate of pickup roused itself from the basement and began to take the satisfying trajectory of an S-curve. ([Location 7883](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=7883)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Systrom has never denied that his Instagram Stories feature is essentially the same idea as the original Snapchat product. But he resists the idea that his team simply swiped someone else’s concept and slapped it onto Instagram. “You can view it one of two ways,” he says. The first, he says, is that while Instagram was growing, someone else changed the world with a competing product and the company needed to react by copying that product. The other view, which he embraces, is that Instagram’s own success was so vast and dramatic that it overstepped itself, and created a natural gap that needed filling. By Stories. ([Location 7888](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=7888)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Actually, Zuckerberg had done a considerable amount of thinking on the subject. He had been outraged in 2014 when Facebook learned, via Edward Snowden’s leaks, that the US government was snatching its communications from Facebook’s data centers. Zuckerberg also had an emotional bias toward encryption. If his own early communications—the IMs and emails regarding ConnectU when he was at Harvard—had been encrypted, he might have been spared embarrassment. ([Location 7943](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=7943)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “For years, the company has been so rotated towards these town-square products that when you say, now we’re going to lead with the living room, it creates conflict,” Zuckerberg tells me. “Some of the best people at the company looked at this and said, ‘I’m not here for this.’ This is a deep cultural evolution, and I don’t have the answer or even understand the complexities of how this will play out. But it’s going to be a multi-year thing.” At least now with members of his inner circle installed in the services he wanted to integrate into Facebook, he could work through the process of melding operations without the impediment of possessive founders. ([Location 8155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=8155)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Maybe it was a mistake to distance himself from the policy issues that would cause Facebook so much trouble. Maybe he pushed the Twitterization of the News Feed too far. Maybe he was so busy growing Facebook that he was late to realize the importance of monitoring content. But a worse sin, he believes, would have been timidity. “I think a lot of people would be more conservative and say, Okay, this is what I believe should happen but I’m not going to mess with it because I’m too afraid of breaking something. I am more afraid of not doing the best thing we can than I am of breaking the thing that we currently have. I just think I take more chances and that means I get more things wrong. So in retrospect, we have certainly made a bunch of mistakes in strategy, in execution. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re probably not living up to your potential, right? That’s how you grow.” ([Location 8321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07V8CL7RH&location=8321)) - Tags: [[blue]]