Authors: Katherine Losse
Sitting there in the office in my usual uniform of worn jeans and cardigan, watching this new social order unfold, I felt that, as they say in Internet speak, we were doing it wrong. While having an office social scene was necessary, nobody really likes fraternities, with their macho attitude, hazing rituals, and beer-soaked party aftermaths. If we were supposed to be cool and California, calmly convincing people that it was okay to pass us their most private data on a daily basis, we would have to come across as less aggravatingly aggressive than a fraternity house.
Bringing employees together, in the life-as-work-and-work-as-life culture of late 2000s Silicon Valley, was a core business mission of any startup. It wasn’t enough to work there, you had to devote as much of your life to it as possible. At Facebook, being a startup devoted to virtual socializing, we couldn’t just work all the time. We had to have some kind of scene in which human stories could unfold, if only in the first instance to have something to document on Facebook. We needed to entertain each other.
This seemed to be part of the motivation behind the company’s various social perks, such as the happy hours, catered lunches and dinners, regularly occurring company parties (in which employees were bused to a venue, provided copious amounts of liquor, and photographed by professionals hired for the occasion), and the houses that had sprung up, such as TFB (the Facebook fraternity) and the house in Tahoe.
As the site’s user base nearly doubled throughout that spring, from 5.5 million users to ten, and everyone’s sense of responsibility magnified by the week, I had the idea, selfishly perhaps, that a pool house would be a better way to lighten up and bring us closer than a frat house. After all, what better way to establish good cheer and team spirit than around a pool, drinks in hand, sun shimmering off the water? “We should get a house with a pool,” I said to Mark one night that spring during the Friday happy hour. He flashed his characteristic look of askance approval, smiling, but looking half-away, as if to retain his sense of executive control. “That’s a good idea,” he said, pulling out his BlackBerry (huge by today’s standards) to dash off an email with the request.
I was stoked about the pool house. At that point in my life, I was in need of two things: an outlet for my revolutionary energy and a new career that would work out in a way that grad school had not. Throwing my entire lot in with Facebook (to the point, even, of moving in with my coworkers at a company pool house) could turn out to be perfect. My interest in the Hotel California had not faded a bit since the days when my friend Dana and I drove the highway to San Diego searching for it. What more perfect metaphor for American society, and its obsession with belonging, with scenes of darkness and excess, with cults that you fall into and find it hard to leave? It felt like America was right there with me, ripe for a new experiment in community spirit. And the pool house would be my Hotel California.
As we were moving into the summer house in Menlo Park, I placed a Hotel California LP on the mantel in the empty living room. I smiled to myself as I regarded it sitting there, with its picture of a classic Los Angeles hotel illuminated golden behind
palms, unnoticed by my colleagues milling around the house. In addition to the record and my clothes, all I brought to the house that day were a few books that I’d packed to help me make sense of this new scene about which I knew little. Joan Didion’s famous words from
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
were on my mind that afternoon as the sun set on our new house and I settled my things into my room. “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.” We, I felt that day, was me, a conglomerate of one, at the end of a line and the beginning of another, staking a claim to what I suspected would be a new gold rush.
Unlike the office with its domineering male energy, the house felt relaxed and cool, I thought with satisfaction, as I toured it in a denim skirt and flip-flops. A seventies ranch home of no architectural value, the house was solid—a little better, as most things are, for the wear and tear. The front yard sported
Edward Scissorhands
-like topiary bushes and a perfectly green lawn. As is typical in suburbia, the front living room sat in shadow behind closed drapes and went largely unused. The back den with the requisite seventies-porn-movie-style wet bar, stone fireplace, and sliding glass door to the pool, was where we would socialize. It was a little like being in
The
Brady Bunch,
without parents.
Mark’s room was across from mine, small and bare, but he didn’t stay there. He had a famously minimalist apartment nearby (he claimed to own no furniture and have only a mattress on the floor for a bed) but he kept the room as a social placeholder, coming
over with his friends or his girlfriend on the evenings and weekends to hang out. When he was at the house he invariably took up position under a Roman-looking tent by the pool, pacing back and forth while he mulled over the day’s business. In his sandals and shorts, with his hand sometimes raised to his chin while he mused, he looked every bit the part of a little emperor.
I remarked on this to Sam as we lay in our bathing suits on the pool deck that first weekend, surveying the scene. Since meeting at happy hour, we had quickly formed something of an alliance. Alone, we might just have been the odd employees interested in something besides accumulating mountains of data and power but, together, we were the weird kids who occupied the far edge of Facebook’s cultural map, composed mainly of Harvard fraternity boys, preppy Stanford kids, and other engineers of similar provenance. Sam and I claimed the pool as our de facto territory, given that we were more comfortable in swimsuits and in the sun than most of the engineers, and set up our towels on the deck in the afternoons to watch the goings on around the house.
Lucy, a petite, good-natured Stanford ex-cheerleader who had recently been added to the customer-support team, lived at the house and often worked on answering emails from the pool, her laptop perched precariously on the edge of the deck. Fiercely competitive (she made sure to win all sports competitions held at Facebook, like the yearly Game Day, which wasn’t very hard to do, considering that most employees weren’t particularly athletic), she made it a point to answer more emails than anyone else, even while half submersed in the pool in a bikini and turning a deep tan.
Maryann also often came to the pool in her bikini and set up
her towel nearby, tanning quietly behind big sunglasses, pleasant and reserved as always. She was unequivocally considered hot at the company. But, I sensed, the last thing you wanted at Face-book was to be the hot girl, especially if you weren’t protected, as Maryann was, by a close group of college friends who also worked there.
One day, one of the sales guys told me pointedly that I was hot, reminding me that I was surrounded by men who were in the habit of sorting women into hot or not-hot categories. Facemash, Mark’s first website at Harvard, was designed to allow viewers to rank the attractiveness of Harvard students’ photos. I wanted to be the cool girl, not the hot girl. The cool girl always has a chance of winning, because she has something beyond looks. As Stevie Nicks once said about her trip through the male-dominated music business, “I never wanted to be too pretty.”
At another summer barbecue, I overheard Mark talking with some engineers about whether it was better to date a girl for looks or intelligence. “I dated a model once who was really hot, but my girlfriend is actually smart,” he said, as if they were mutually exclusive categories. “Why can’t a girl be pretty and smart?” I asked him in front of everyone. “Why does it have to be one or the other?” The group went quiet for a second, seeming confused. I knew then that if you had to pick one in order to succeed at Facebook, smart, not hot, was the thing to be.
• • •
On weekend afternoons, there were usually some boys milling about the pool house with laptops or beers drawn from a keg that
was kept under Mark’s tent. Occasionally someone important—usually an exec or VC, who would pull up to the house in a blaze of Audi exhaust—came over to talk to Mark in hushed tones under the tent. “It feels like we are in ancient Greece,” I observed to Sam. There was not much for us to do at the pool house, though I found out later that, while he was pacing and we were sunning, one of the things Mark was mulling was whether to sell the company to Yahoo! for one billion dollars. I had a vague sense from the intense vibes during those days that something very serious was under consideration, but I didn’t think for a minute that Mark might sell the company and we’d all cash out and go home so soon: We had a pool house, a gathering mass of enthusiastic boys (and a few equally energetic girls), and the future to dominate.
One newcomer, who claimed a room on the opposite end of the shag-carpeted hall from mine, struck me as another kindred spirit like Sam, though at first I had no idea why. Tall and lanky, he didn’t have any visible muscle, just long boyish limbs. His face was pale and his hair paler, his eyes close together and set far back, hidden by a coy bowl of dishwater blond hair. I felt strangely, incongruously sure of him, having the unbidden thought as we talked by the pool on our first night in the house that he had a good heart.
My sense was that he brought a mysterious form of light, some spirit that we were all seeking, to the house. His name was Thrax.
A few months earlier, I was working at the office when someone sitting at a nearby desk said, “We’ve been hacked.” I looked over his shoulder at a Facebook account they were eyeing.
It looked like a MySpace page. That is, all the profile owner’s information was perfectly arrayed as they had entered it on Face-book, but the formatting had been tricked into rendering like MySpace, with shouting features of gaudy colors, floating text, and smarmy profile fields like “Mood” and “Who I’d Like to Meet.”
Dustin worked quickly to trace the hack to its source while the rest of us looked on at our screens in puzzlement. When he found the hack, or perhaps when it had found him (the whole point of hacking is not so much to break something as to get attention for breaking something, and so a hacker is not likely to rest long without telling someone, often the hacked, about the exploit), he told us the hacker’s name. Curious, I looked up his profile.
My first reaction to Thrax’s profile picture, of a bony college kid in an American Apparel T-shirt and a mop of emo hair, with red paint Photoshopped over his lips for effect, was that this kid wants attention so bad it’s painful. He looked like the kind of wiseass who wants to make you pay. For what, it didn’t matter.
At the time of the hack, Thrax lived in Georgia, attending a Southern college most of us had never heard of. However, he wouldn’t live in obscurity for much longer: Dustin hired him a few weeks later, on the theory that you want to keep your enemies close, especially when they can break your site. So, a few days later, Thrax showed up in the office, wearing the same skinny T-shirt and baggy jeans he had worn on his Facebook profile.
From the minute he arrived, despite or maybe in part because of his cagey, impudent gaze beneath his long bangs, there
was an almost preternatural aura of celebrity and inevitability about Thrax: The Harvard guys, who had made careers doing everything by the book, had been looking for this boy, long before they knew that this hacker savant from Georgia actually existed. At happy hour on Thrax’s first day in the office, everyone swarmed him, asking questions about the hack and about his strange provenance in a state far from all of our own. A few of the Harvard engineers, perhaps miffed that they would now have to share the spotlight, wondered if Thrax was just a
script kiddie,
a derogatory term for an unschooled kid who copies code from the Internet rather than composing it himself. From my vantage point in the office, watching, I felt a sense of bemused relief. Things are finally going to get interesting. The Harvard boys have some competition, and Thrax seemed to understand, if nothing else, how to create a mysterious, compelling character out of the bits of the Internet that he mastered with his oddly long, ghostly white fingers.
Facebook was waiting for Thrax and brethren to arrive because, unlike startups that build computer chips or enterprise software, the network is about two things: personality and stories. People and stories are what keep us coming to the site. Whether out of an instinctive need to keep tabs on our surroundings or as a way of fostering social bonds, it is human nature to want to know what is happening to the people in our circle and, with Facebook, we don’t have to bother to ask them. But, like any novel or film, a story requires characters and drama.
The Harvard boys couldn’t satisfy this need alone. Their knowledge of the Internet derived from books and computer science coursework, not the trolling, rule-free websites where
kids from the middle of nowhere honed their understanding of Internet warfare and developed well-known online profiles and networks of like-minded hacker friends. One of these friends, Emile, had worked with Thrax remotely (they lived in different states at the time) on the hack and, after Thrax arrived and was a hit at Facebook, the Harvard engineers tracked him down in Louisiana and asked him down to the office. When Emile showed up for his interview, it was the first time that Thrax, along with everyone else, had met him in real life. After some hand-wringing by the Harvard guys about whether any or all of these unschooled hacker boys from the middle of nowhere were just script kiddies, Emile was hired on, too. I liked Emile: Underneath all his trolling and half-shaved, half-long metal haircut, he too, I sensed, had a good heart.
Indeed, the hacker’s appeal for the valley’s legions of software engineers, business development execs, and money guys is not in what he makes (most hacks are by definition, technically shoddy, because they are executed quickly) but in the fact that you never know what he is going to do, what boundaries he will transgress. Silicon Valley imagines that the hacker’s moves are sylphlike, quick, and made under the cover of night, while rule-abiding citizens, powerless, are asleep. In short, the hacker is sexy, a dangerous, bad-boy version of the plain programmer at work in his cubicle. The hacker’s capacity to surprise—or in Silicon Valley parlance,
disrupt
—is fetishized in the valley as a source of power and profit for tech companies, Facebook among them, which considers its stated ability to “move fast and break things” a core company value. As Paul Graham, the valley’s revered hacker guru and founder of the prestigious seed-capital
firm YCombinator, put it while lecturing to valley entrepreneurs at what is called
Startup School,
“We don’t want people who do what they are told.” Or, as the startup enthusiasts on Graham’s Hacker News board counsel each other, “It is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”