Facebook, as portrayed in Kate Losse's book The Boy Kings is a case study of Silicon Valley culture in the twenty-first century. In many dimensions, Facebook is an impressive achievement that has taken years of engineering work. As I write this, Facebook has a billion users, spread throughout the world. Ms. Losse was involved in the birth of some of Facebook's first overseas networks and was the program manager for the internationalization effort. Facebook has defined social networking and has changed the way many people interact.
Along with its impressive achievements, the Facebook described by Ms. Loose can also be seen as an exemplar of many of the things that are wrong with The Valley.
In 1956 William Whyte wrote a book titled
The Organization Man
. In Businessweek, David Leonard writes that The Organization Man was "A critique of society as much as business culture, the book diagnosed groupthink--a term Whyte coined--in the suburbs as well as the boardroom, and became one of the century's most influential pieces of commentary." Although Facebook claims that their ethos is "move fast and break things", what they have created in many ways mirrors the corporations of their Grandfather's generation.
Corporations in the 1950s expected conformity and so it is with Facebook and many other Silicon Valley Companies. I once spoke to a start-up that was building a "App" for the Apple iPhone which, they claimed, was going to change the world (an iPhone App, really?) The actual nature of this change is rarely stated but everyone is supposed to buy into the idea that they are doing transformative work.
From the beginning, Mark Zuckerberg has believed that Facebook has a mission that will change the world. The mission of connectedness and "transparency" (where all your information is public). The "mission" is something that employees are supposed to endorse or at least never openly question. At one point in the book Ms. Losse recounts a conversation she had with a manager who said that one of the people in his group didn't "get" the mission and he was going to have to fire her. Facebook employees are expected to be enthusiastic users of Facebook, displaying their curated public personas.
In the 1950s large corporations mostly employed white protestant men. Women were usually secretaries and the idea that a women could run the corporation would have been considered outlandish.
As Ms. Losse describes Facebook, the culture is similarly homogeneous. Almost all of the engineering staff is under 30 and male. Mark Zuckerberg famously said:
"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," he stated. If you want to found a successful company, you should only hire young people with technical expertise.
"Young people are just smarter," he said with a straight face. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't know," he answered. "Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family." In the absence of those distractions, he says, you can focus on big ideologies. He added, "I only own a mattress." Later: "Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what's important." [quote from Venture Beat, March 2007]
When Zuckerberg says "focus on what's important", he means focus on "the mission", focus on Facebook. The Organization Man was expected to have a family and a supportive wife - Facebook in Losse's book had dispensed with this. Facebook provided a living allowance so that staff could live near Facebook, all the better to dedicate their waking hours to the Company.
The claim that Silicon Valley is a "meritocracy" where anyone can succeed based on their skills and intelligence is being exposed for its hollowness. Ms. Losse describes in detail what she sees as the gender discrimination of the "Boys" who run Facebook. Facebook doesn't value work outside of engineering and jobs occupied by women at Facebook, like Product Management and customer support are seen as lesser work. The exception to Facebook's engineering stratificaiton seems to be Sheryl Sandberg, who appears to be so brilliant that she's in her own category.
Kate Losse's Facebook is hardly alone in populating engineering with young men. As an exercise, look at the web pages of any number of start-up companies. Many of them have team pictures. Most of these team pictures look so similar that it is difficult to tell them apart. You will see few women and even fewer people over 40 years of age.
Age and gender discrimination are sometimes justified on the basis of "cultural fit". Ms. Losse describes the Facebook engineers as "Boys" who are still riding around on stake boards and going out after work drinking. Most people grow up and leave these things behind. As they mature, their engineering and system design skills mature as well. But this is lost on Ms. Losse's Facebook and most Silicon Valley companies where experience is discounted.
Kate Losse is a good writer and the book is an easy and enjoyable read. Her book is not only an account of The Boy Kings, but also of her journey with Facebook from a small company to a globe spanning social network. She is good at describing some of her inner self. She seems to have a taste for rocker boys. But at Facebook the rocker boys are software engineers. She has a long friendship with an engineer she calls Thrax. In most of her relationships she substitutes the curated intimacy of Facebook for real world intimacy. It is not until the end of the book that she finally has sex with Thrax, although they have danced round it for years.
There are a few strange omissions. Losse starts out as an hourly employee. At some point she must have become more of an official employee with stock options, but it's never clear when this happens.
At another point she mentions to Zuckerberg that Facebook should get a house with a pool. He agrees and they rent a house which the engineers and support staff hang out in. Losse apparently moves into one of the rooms, but she never comments on this arrangement. For example, was she expected to clean up after the engineers who, no doubt, left pizza boxes and beer bottles scattered around? What was it like living in Facebooks early hangout house?
I never got the feeling from reading the book that Losse burns with any particular passion. The closest she comes is her love of travel. But transience is an interlude, not a life. Hopefully Facebook, with its various pathologies, will not be the defining event of her life.
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