Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (23 page)

The first shows that wanted to use our branding were mostly crime dramas, which would associate Facebook with grisly murders or stalkers. As lucrative as the placements might have been, it was very important to us that our brand not be perceived in this context, and we turned down all these offers. The shows would inevitably go with some rip-off site, such as MyFace or Facester.

There were many exciting opportunities we said yes to, though, and before we knew it, Facebook was at the center of pop culture. That’s when the celebrities came calling.

Back in the mid-2000s, it was far from clear that Facebook was going to become the dominant social network in the world. We had quickly cleared Friendster, but we were still second to MySpace, which was ferocious about attracting celebrities to its platform. Kids of that era were still being called the “MySpace generation.”

So, with my colleagues at Facebook—Dave Morin, who is the current CEO of Path, and Chris Pan—we assembled a crack, ad hoc A-team to get celebrities to use Facebook. We made it our mission, on our own time, to be Facebook evangelists to the celebrity community. This was how I ended up spending a day at Ashton Kutcher’s house, explaining what a Poke was (answer: we still don’t know), and found myself in the basement beneath a Britney Spears concert, conceiving a merchandise line of classic Britney costumes that would be sold on the site as virtual gifts for charity.

There was a lot of internal debate within Facebook about whether we should be focused on celebrities or not. Some people in the company thought working with celebrities was a waste of time. Others felt celebrities were a big driver of cultural influence and should definitely be a priority. Others just thought Ashton Kutcher was cute and wanted him to visit Facebook; they didn’t really care if he joined the site or not.

As much as we wanted to change the world by connecting its people, we were still running a company, and celebrity endorsements were incredibly valuable promotion and marketing. Not only that, but because of what Facebook and social media were doing to pop culture, celebrities were already starting to come to us.

We took a bit of a stealthy backdoor approach. And then, in 2009, we watched, rapt and jealous, as Ashton Kutcher and CNN got into a literal popularity contest to see who would be the first to receive a million followers on Twitter, a novel new social network and rival. That race pretty much catapulted Twitter’s entire business. Nobody questioned our little celebrity squad after that, and we were encouraged to sign big names.

Even though he played a dopey guy on television, Ashton Kutcher was a visionary when it came to understanding the power of social media as a broadcast medium, on par—or potentially on par—with the television networks of the day. In 2009, he was quoted as saying that he found it astonishing that one person on Twitter could have as large a voice as an entire media company, and that if he beat CNN to one million followers, he would ding-dong ditch Ted Turner.

So, not only did Ted Turner get his bell rung, Ashton now has over fourteen million followers on Twitter. Broadcast power like this is historically unprecedented. The guy who played Kelso on
That ’70s Show
has a broader platform, and direct access to more people, instantaneously, than any newspaper in the pre-Internet age.

It wasn’t long after Ashton set the bar that celebrities came streaming into Facebook’s office by the dozens, always tailed by very nervous-looking publicists. It was during that era of incredible growth at Facebook that Kanye West jumped up on a table in our cafeteria to freestyle some lyrics. We later took a photo with Kanye in front of one of our conference rooms, which we had lovingly renamed the “Imma Let You Finish” room, after he infamously interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech with that line at the
MTV Video Music Awards
. When
SNL
star Andy Samberg came to visit Facebook HQ, he dressed like Mark for a day and confused a few engineers. And at one point, I was about to ask the random dude sitting at my desk to go away, when I realized it was Keith Urban. Then I had to tell Keith Urban to find another place to sit.

Every celebrity who visited our headquarters or took advantage of our platform understood that social media had completely changed pop culture. The concept of a polished, packaged celebrity image was no longer available. People expect you to have a social media presence, and to have access to you via it.

Sure, people could always have joined celebrity fan clubs. But, beyond the fact that fan clubs always feel a little weird, social media is a different beast entirely.

Moreover, the definition of “content” was changing. Just as “news” was going from something Walter Cronkite once told you to something your friends shared with you, “content” was going from something professionally produced to a five-second clip recorded on a smartphone or a passing thought tweeted while on the can.

Of course, not everyone with an iPhone is an immediate media mogul, a kind of mini Rupert Murdoch with a data plan. But the point is things are complicated. The social-content sphere is important, but so are the movie studios that still produce movies and the TV studios that still produce TV. Instead of the Internet surpassing traditional media platforms, it’s being incorporated into it, along with all of its quirks and challenges. And the content producers and celebrities need to adapt. Because clearly most people already have.

Back when I was in high school at Horace Mann, I was something of an outcast for being a “geek,” which is now cool. School kids in America and around the world are now almost as keen to be the next Steve Jobs as the next Michael Jordan. It really is incredible. One mom, according to the Internet, named her baby “Hashtag,” an Israeli couple named their daughter “Like,” and an Egyptian couple named their newborn “Facebook.”

The most popular movies and television shows now have plotlines that revolve around technology and the people who use it. From
The Big Bang Theory
to
The Social Network
to
Shark Tank,
nearly everything that shows up on television today has a tech-focused element to it. Plus, you can’t watch a TV show, a commercial, or even a viral video on the Internet without seeing a hashtag, Facebook URL, or Shazam logo.

Pop stars are angel investors. At last count, the ranks of celebrity venture capitalists included not just Ashton Kutcher, but also Lady Gaga, Jay-Z, Justin Bieber, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, and Kim Kardashian. It’s not rare anymore to show up at a tech-centric event such as Y Combinator Demo Day (where new start-ups are demo’d for the first time) and see Ashton, M. C. Hammer, and will.i.am speaking on a panel or sitting in the audience. Hardly a day goes by without a celebrity paying a visit to the Twitter office to try the bacon plate or stopping by the Googleplex to play on the beach volleyball court.

Tech is the new pop culture. Geek is the new rock star. And the tech community should leverage its pop culture cachet for good.

I recently participated in a small roundtable discussion with White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett about the best way to get girls and women interested in learning to code. Silicon Valley’s culture is often dominated by men, so the tech community really needed to find a way to increase the participation of women in this area. The guys on the panel seemed to think that the way to go about it was to make coding a mandatory subject in schools. I disagreed and suggested that the best way to get girls to code was to make it cool in pop culture and the media.

This isn’t to say that girls will only do something because it’s cool or sexy, or that if you want women to get involved in technology, all you really have to do is sparkle up a few MacBooks. (Though, if you want to sparkle a MacBook, by all means sparkle away.) It means that both the technology and entertainment industries have a role to play in providing positive, tech-centric role models for girls. Make coding cool, show how it changes people’s lives, and the kids will code.

This was why, when MTV came to us and wanted to do
Diary of Facebook,
a behind-the-scenes special on the company, I insisted that we not only feature our engineers, but also bring in people from the outside world whose lives had been changed by Facebook and have them meet the programmers on camera. By connecting the human and technical dimensions of technology, we could help show the tangible impact that technology has in the lives of real people. So, we brought in an Army veteran who, while deployed, was able to see his son being born via Facebook video chat and had him meet the engineer who had built that application. We did the same for people who managed the adoption of their children via Facebook messages, along with a few other amazing examples.

When the real-world impact of a job is clearly demonstrated, people feel far more invested in the work. As Adam Grant demonstrated in his recent book,
Give and Take,
when students who worked in a university call center were exposed, even for ten minutes, to the stories of the individuals whose scholarships their work helped fund, these students were on the phone with alumni 142 percent longer and increased donations by 171 percent.

Telling the story behind the work is essential to humanizing it and making it relevant and important. When pop culture can do this for the world’s coders, programmers, and underappreciated sysadmins (systems administrators), we will see more women, and more everyone, working in technology to foster change in the world.

Content Matters

Every year or two, Facebook hosts a social media developers’ conference known as F8. At these annual events, Facebook announces new developments and invites anyone who is building their business on top of the Facebook platform to meet the team and hear about announcements firsthand.

About a week prior to the April 2010 conference in San Francisco, the volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in Iceland, sending into the atmosphere an ash cloud that grounded almost all air traffic in Europe. About a fifth of the people who were supposed to attend the conference could no longer come.

Facebook went to work. We had to solve this problem. It was obvious that we could try to live-stream the keynotes, but I didn’t think that was nearly enough. Instead, I set out to create a mini media company online. Working with our engineers, I helped create “F8 Live,” a platform that would broadcast on three channels at the same time, three different feeds from around the conference, including all the keynote sessions and a series of hosted interviews with developers. This way, people stranded by Eyjafjallajökull would feel as if they were actually attending the conference. We even made a point of filming the breakout sessions and taking gratuitous pictures of the food.

At the end of the day, a hundred and fifty thousand people tuned in to the conference online, which is really pretty incredible when you consider that it was a super-technical conference and there were far fewer than a hundred and fifty thousand people who had been stranded and unable to attend.

This experience got me thinking. We were starting to innovate new ways of making technology and media work together. But why were we doing this only during the developer conferences? Why weren’t we doing something like this all year round, like a kind of Facebook TV channel?

What would a TV channel look like, built entirely on top of Facebook?

A few months later, at a late summer all-night Facebook hackathon, I got a chance to test my idea. Instead of “F8 Live,” what if we called it “Facebook Live”? We had so many interesting people, celebrities, top executives, and politicians constantly coming through the Facebook office—why not put some of those visits to use on our very own Facebook broadcast channel?

The following week, the president of the Sports Illustrated Group came to visit Facebook, and I interviewed him, asking for his ideas about the future of sports, tech, and media. It was an interesting conversation, and I wanted to do more.

Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of resources available for this project. So, I duly commandeered what looked like a broom closet, fixed a sign to the door proclaiming “Facebook Live,” and went to work securing interviews.

I had a lot of fun in the ensuing months. While “Facebook Live” was still only a very small passion project, alongside a very busy day job leading the consumer marketing team, it nonetheless started to pick up some very real traction.

America Ferrara came to promote her new indie film.

Then, one day, Katy Perry’s manager, Glenn Miller, called, asking if Katy could come on “Facebook Live” to announce her new concert tour. Katy had gotten her start online, and they had been searching for an innovative new way to launch her tour. So, in January 2011, Katy Perry showed up in a pale-blue lace dress and sky-high heels for a tour of the campus, a taste of Nacho Wednesday, and a “Facebook Live” broadcast with yours truly.

Our online conversation was a lot of fun. Katy answered tons of fan questions that streamed in on my laptop during the interview, and she announced the North American leg of her California Dreams 2011 world tour on Facebook, before anywhere else. Her tour sold out within minutes, and her “Facebook Live” appearance generated a lot of press attention.

Once the Katy Perry interview happened, “Facebook Live” was official and there was no turning back. Mike Tyson was a lovely gentleman, who told me all about his beloved pigeons. Pee-Wee Herman inspired mobs, clamoring to get a glimpse. Linkin Park band members wore full-body Facebook logo costumes. Kanye West played his new single at top volume and talked about the origins of his diamond teeth. One day it was Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry, and the next it was Conan O’Brien.

Snoop Dogg was supposed to do an interview once, but he slept through it, for hazy reasons. He later posted a video, in which he said to me, “Randizzle, when I come back to the Bay, we have got to play.” I’ve got to say, that was quite a day.

Things were getting crazy. I was a long way from Dobbs Ferry. And yet I knew there was further to go.