The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network by Katherine Losse

Author:Katherine Losse [Losse, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Facebook, Nonfiction, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781451668254
Google: s72NsJ91rCoC
Amazon: 1451668252
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2012-06-26T04:00:00+00:00

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As a woman and a customer support employee I was expected, for the most part, to follow the engineers’ leads, because we were a technical company and this implied that what we were doing required technical skills. The trouble was that I also embodied Facebook’s ethos of rebellion all too well, and there was no role available, at the time, for a woman who broke the rules. I did my job and accomplished my goals, but beyond that I didn’t feel compelled to fall in line. I knew that if I simply did everything I was told, I would not be of any interest to Mark, who preferred employees who were slightly dangerous, like the cyberpunk characters in the 1990s movie Hackers that he and many other engineers referenced often. I decided I would develop my own project, off the grid, and in a nontechnical capacity.

While Thrax was building Motion/Video, Sam and I stayed up late some nights to prepare and launch Facebook networks in other countries. First, I would have to gather all the metadata about university networks abroad (like the names of schools, their locations, and their web domains, which we would use to authenticate students as legitimate members of their school’s Facebook network). Then, Sam would run a script he had written that would build the networks and check for any issues before declaring them live and ready for registrations. Once the networks had been launched on a given night, usually around midnight or one o’clock in the morning, we would toast to our new territories. On the Watch Page, a page Dustin developed that allowed us to see how many Facebook users were registered in any given Facebook network, we would observe as users instantly began signing up for the new networks we had created. Next to the name of each network, a count depicting its number of users would steadily mount upward, first in the single digits, then growing into the hundreds. If we were doing really well, it could reach into the thousands overnight.

Building new networks abroad was fun and independently motivated, a very Facebook thing to do in the company’s developing corporate mythos of the self-starting employee, and good for the site’s growth. As such, our work was to be rewarded. However, as in any corporate hierarchy, any time people went around the rules at Facebook, it unsettled middle management. “You are doing an excellent job in customer support, but I’ve noticed that you are working outside the department,” Andreas told me in a performance review that spring, his eyes narrowing, wanting me to be afraid. He was more concerned with maintaining company hierarchy than, as the rest of us were, getting critical work done by any means necessary. It’s possible he didn’t stop to think that the networks abroad needed to be launched in order to build momentum for Facebook’s growth outside the United States. While Andreas didn’t understand this, Dustin did: One night, when I was hanging out with Sam at his desk on the engineering floor, Dustin tacitly encouraged us to launch more networks.

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