Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (3 page)

I knew that I wanted to do something meaningful with my life. I wanted to do something that would have a big impact—on the kind of scale to touch a lot of people’s lives. I wanted to do something that would let me reach my full potential. And I was still convinced that I wanted to do something creative and connected with the arts and entertainment.

A few months later, I left Ogilvy. I was ready to move on, but I didn’t join Facebook just yet.

Instead, I took a job at Forbes. I was offered a role producing a really intense TV show called
Forbes on Fox,
during which four older guys would yell at one another about the economy for sixty minutes every Saturday at five in the morning. Sitting in the control booth, I’d worry about one of them having a heart attack and do my best to ignore the shouting. Still, I was excited for the chance to work with Steve Forbes and figured that it would be an interesting experience.

At the time, it felt random, but little did I know that this brief foray into television and video production would open so many doors for me and shape and define so much of my career to come.

After my first show, Steve Forbes offered to take me out to breakfast. I tried to contain my excitement as we left the Midtown studio.
Where did übermillionaire Steve Forbes eat breakfast?
As it turns out, I didn’t have to contain my excitement for long. He took me to the nearest restaurant—a Wendy’s inside the Forty-Seventh Street subway station—which I quickly learned was his go-to spot, post show filming.

“Order anything you like!” He beamed. “Even biggie size.”

During an hour-long discussion about the Yankees, I remember thinking how cool it was that such a successful, accomplished businessman had remained so down to earth.

A few months passed. My brother reached out to me again to join him at Facebook, now operating out of a house in Menlo Park.
Interesting,
I thought.
It’s no longer The Facebook. He’s making progress.

“Why don’t you come out and see what we’re building?” he asked.

I hesitated. “Maybe,” I said. “Let me see if I can get a cheap ticket.”

Mark was decisive. “I’ll get you the ticket. Just come.”

And so I did.

First Days in California

A couple of days after Mark’s call, I flew to San Francisco for the weekend. As promised, he had taken care of my ticket, booking me on a JetBlue flight that landed late in the evening. A driver waited for me in the arrivals lounge at SFO, holding a sign with my name on it. And then I was whisked away in a black sedan, down to Menlo Park. I was awed by the novelty. I had never taken a car service before.

And there I was, half an hour later, on a dark, remote street, thousands of miles from home, in front of a nice, unassuming suburban house. It really didn’t look like the secret headquarters of a future technology empire.

I walked up the path and knocked on the door.

Mark answered. “Hey! You made it! Come meet the guys.”

We walked into the next room. You could tell this was a really nice house, perfect for a family and just begging to be filled with tasteful fittings and good furniture. But all those thoughts vanished at the sight of the living room.

The lights were off and the room was dark. The only light came from the half dozen computer monitors clustered around a crowded table in the center of the room. And there, working off a tabletop overflowing with empty drink cans and plates of half-eaten takeout, were four very disheveled guys.

“Guys, this is Randi,” said Mark.

There were grunts of acknowledgment and a couple of waves. All of them were intently focused on their screens and wired in with their headphones. Introductions had to wait until a little later when we went out for dinner at the Dutch Goose, a local dive bar.

I remember being slightly shocked at first by the general grunginess of the lifestyle of Mark and his team. The house and the bar summed it up perfectly. The food at the Dutch Goose could be charitably described as semi-edible, but the vibe was energetic and fun, and the beer flowed freely.

That night, Mark started laying out the full scope of everything the team was working on. And I remember just how serious and passionate he was.

“We’re going to connect everybody,” he said.

Over the next few hours he talked more about the features they were building and their plans for campus expansion. Mark has always talked fast; it helped catch me up on the details quickly. The rest of the team were mostly content to listen in, knock back beers, and talk among themselves about the current items they were coding.

Mark completely blew my mind, and the awesomeness of the Facebook vision was immediately clear to me. Over the next couple of days, I found myself viewing that grungy lifestyle with a mixture of awe and respect. A group of guys all living in a house together coding around the clock didn’t sound like fun to me at first. But these guys had such an incredible belief in their work and an amazing laser-like focus, I couldn’t help but be reeled in by it and by them. I realized that I was literally watching the American dream play out right in front of my very eyes, one Red Bull at a time.

They
were
going to connect everybody, I thought. And then I sat back and watched them code. It was insane. It was brilliant.

But my true aha moment happened when I was invited to join a meeting about some key Facebook marketing materials. The point of the meeting was to solidify some of the visual design features for Facebook—the general look and feel and color palette. This was amazing. I was a fly on the wall in a meeting to decide how a network for five million would look. A debate was going on. I leaned in to pay attention.

And then suddenly everyone was staring at me. “Hey, Randi, you’re the marketing person. What do you think?”

Ten years of a career I hadn’t yet had flashed before my eyes. It would honestly have taken me a decade at Ogilvy to even be invited into a room where a conversation like this was taking place, let alone be given the chance to be a decision maker.

I cleared my throat. “Well, here’s what I think.”

No one interrupted or laughed at my opinion. After I had finished laying out my views on my preferred shade of blue, along with a few other marketing ideas, the debate resumed—with me included.

I can’t even remember how that debate concluded. My overwhelming memory is that my heart was soaring. In that moment, I realized just how amazing Facebook was as a career opportunity. I knew I had to take it.

On the final evening before I flew back to New York, instead of spending it at dinner, drinking, or trying to be useful while the guys coded, I spent it sitting in Facebook’s new official office, located above a Chinese restaurant in downtown Palo Alto, negotiating my starting salary with my brother. We sat across from each other at his desk while he decided a salary and stock-option grant for me on a napkin.

“How about this?” He slid the napkin across the table.

The stock was good. But why go for equity over real money? I crossed out the stock options and bumped up the salary. I passed back the napkin.

Mark gazed at it for a moment, then made a decisive gesture across the paper. He scribbled for a moment and handed it back.

He had rejected my numbers and restored his original offer.

“Trust me,” he said. “You don’t want what you think you want.”

I didn’t recognize it at the time—I was twenty-two years old and all I saw was a chance to make more than the biweekly check of $900 I currently earned—but I sure as heck recognize it now.

Years later, I would stand in the entrance hall of my home, pouring my heart out to my brother about how I was ready to leave Facebook. But on that fateful summer evening in 2005, in the quiet calm of the empty Facebook office, a new chapter of my life was about to begin.

Today, people often ask me, “Now that you know what you know, what would you go back and change?” It’s a silly question. I don’t know if they expect me to impart some holy wisdom or if they expect me to admit to some grave screw-up I made along the way. Usually, I just crack a joke and say, “I would have asked for more stock.” It always gets a laugh from an audience, but every time I say that, I think about that evening negotiating with my brother, my
younger
brother, and how he looked out for me, even though I was too young and naïve to recognize it at the time.

With the important contract details safely concluded on the napkin, it was time to start imagining my new life. I grinned the whole flight back to New York.

“You’re looking happy,” said the old lady sitting next to me in my economy seat.

I beamed at her with such intensity I think I slightly scared her.

I was so excited about this new life direction and career path that I deluded myself into thinking that everyone back in New York City would be over-the-moon thrilled for me, that balloons and cheering parties would await me at LaGuardia Airport.

Well, I was in for a bit of a brutal awakening. My teammates at work told me I was making a horrible mistake and throwing my career away. Brent, who I was now dating, had just given up his dream job in San Francisco to be with me in New York. He wasn’t exactly pleased. Over a long, tearful dinner at Mr. K’s Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, we discussed what this could mean for our relationship.

My mom was excited for me. It’s secretly every mom’s dream that her kids work together. She encouraged me to take this terrific career opportunity and supported my pursuing my dreams. But she also pointed out that I had a good thing going with Brent and told me to put real effort into a long-distance relationship. She had taken a real shine to Brent. After the first time she met him, she had called me to say, “Randi, do not f*** this one up.”

Now, as I prepared to leave for a new life in California, and at Facebook, my mother called to give me one last bit of friendly career advice.

“Randi, good luck in California. Do not f*** this one up.”

chapter 2

THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

A
nd so I came to California and to Facebook.

I officially joined on September 1, 2005. But it was a few more weeks before I was in the office full-time. After hurriedly wrapping things up in New York, I still had to transfer my life to the West Coast.

Soon enough, I found a Craigslist posting for a room in a house in Menlo Park with three grad students, which didn’t sound
too
shady. The location was perfect, and that was enough for me. Without seeing it in person, I took the room.

If I had been starting any old job at a more conventional company, the experience of uprooting my life and adapting to a new life in suburban California might have been more daunting. Besides Mark, I barely knew anyone in the SF Bay Area. At Facebook, I didn’t have a team and was one of only a few non-engineers. Our offices were pretty modest—the usual start-up digs—and located above that sketchy but surprisingly good Chinese restaurant and a deep-dish pizzeria.

But I never felt lonely or bored or out of place. I arrived at an amazing time. Shortly after I joined, we celebrated reaching five million users. Investor Peter Thiel threw us a party at the Slanted Door, a fancy Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco. I remember sitting at the table in that small, happy group, feeling we were on top of the world. Five million users! How could it get better than that?

Even if I had wanted to stress, I didn’t have the time. From the moment I stepped through the door on my first day, I was rushed off my feet. The company was only a few dozen people, so the arrival of one new person was a substantial increase in capacity. Everyone wanted a little bit of help. Just a small favor. Pretty please?

I was not opposed to being bribed with cupcakes.

I pitched in wherever needed. I relished the chance to experiment with my role and live the start-up experience. In the early days of a start-up, it’s not uncommon to hold many jobs and wear many hats. Toward the end of my time at Facebook, I joked that I had worked on every single team except the IT help team. For a few months, my business cards listed “samurai warrior” and “ninja” as my title, because I was working on so many different teams it would have been confusing to simultaneously list them all on one card.

As a non-engineer, I was given non-engineer stuff to do. In the early days, I had a hybrid marketing–business development–sales role. We weren’t doing much “traditional” marketing at that point, so I was supporting several other teams within the company. Facebook was still only available at American colleges and universities, and the site was succeeding so well within this market that it was doing a pretty excellent job of marketing itself. In fact, my total marketing budget for the first year at Facebook was about a hundred dollars, which I used to print up T-shirts for students when we filmed a video on the NYU campus. And I probably overpaid.

Most of my first year was spent working with the sales team, helping build larger marketing packages and campaigns that they could sell to companies that wanted to reach students on Facebook. I helped put together our first back-to-school campaign, building a back-to-school hub with companion ads. It was the biggest sales and marketing program we had done to date.

Because the company was small, we worked all the time. Days bled into nights and into weekends. Hours at the office turned into hours hanging out at someone’s house or The Old Pro, our favorite bar in downtown Palo Alto. Colleagues became close friends, and several “Facebook couples” arose.

The early team felt an intense closeness—the kind of bond you form when everyone works together toward one unified goal. I knew that it would probably be a fleeting experience and that one day we would all go our separate ways, but it was awesome at the time. Facebook was our job, our community, our social lives—our lives, period. And I loved it.

We shared pride in the mission and proudly wore our finest Facebook swag—hats, T-shirts, hoodies. To this day, no designer handbag, bought during a moment of shopaholic weakness, has ever elicited as many comments from strangers as my old Jack Spade Facebook laptop bag.

In New York, it seemed everyone kept an almost religious separation between his or her career and social life. In California, it felt like the company was one huge family.

It wasn’t all roses, though. During that first year in the company, I faced two major challenges. First, I had to get used to the fact that while marketers and business folks ruled the roost in New York, in Silicon Valley they were the background noise. Out west, engineers are thought of as rock-star gods. Everyone else is barely a roadie. If you weren’t the one doing the coding, you had to shout pretty loudly to be heard.

Second, there was the issue of my being Mark’s sister. I worked my butt off, and I bled Facebook blue, but no matter how hard I worked, many thought of me as just the boss’s sister and assumed I was there only because of nepotism. One colleague even referred to me as “Zuck’s sis” for almost a year. I acquired a lot of new best friends as soon as they were hired and lost them as soon as they realized I didn’t have Mark’s ear on anything product related.

And I didn’t have it any easier from Mark, either. The first meeting I attended with him, one week into my job, he tore up a piece of paper that I presented to him, in front of everyone. I remember him walking past my desk in the open-plan office a few weeks later, saying hi to everyone except me. When I asked him about it later, he had this response: “You know, I never really thought about it. But I guess I sort of feel like I have to go out of my way to
not
be friendly with you, to show people you’re not getting special treatment.”

Thanks, bro.

One of my colleagues, a few years later, summed it up well. “You know, Randi,” she said. “I’m sure being Mark’s sister opens a lot of doors for you, but I don’t envy your situation. Women in technology already have to be twice as good as their male colleagues to get to the same place. But you have to be three times as good. And
even then,
people are still going to question your success.”

The benefits of my last name far outweigh the negatives, and it’s definitely opened lots of doors for me. But open doors alone don’t get you anywhere unless you do something once you walk through them.

From the moment I joined Facebook I knew I had a long road ahead of me and was existing beneath a very big shadow. There was a chance that no matter what I did I would never be more than someone’s sister.

I was twenty-three years old when I joined Facebook. As a Harvard grad living in New York, I
felt
like I knew it all. But I was still a baby, and there was clearly a lot I didn’t know about navigating the politics of a new workplace.

I got my first taste of the limelight when a well-known tech blogger, Robert Scoble, wrote an article about me called “The First Sister of Facebook.” I had reveled in the spotlight my whole childhood, doing theater, music, and singing a cappella, and I found this attention addictive. I celebrated my newfound status in the Valley, created parody music videos and posted them on YouTube, and developed an exaggerated reputation for enjoying a cocktail (or three) and grabbing the microphone to sing at pretty much any event that would allow it.

My go-to song at Facebook company parties was “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence, in which I would duet with my close friend Chris Kelly. One of my finest contributions to Facebook company culture was when our employee cover band, Evanescence Essence, for which I was the lead singer, won the first ever in-office version of
American Idol,
“Facebook Idol.” Our motto was “Evanescence has two hit songs, and we do
both
of them.”

Because I was young and new to Silicon Valley, and I had never experienced this type of company culture before—where your coworkers are your friends, family, and community—I made the mistake of treating my colleagues more like college dorm mates. It was an easy mistake considering how many waking hours we spent together and how close we felt, but I started to believe that I could just let my hair down and be my true outside-of-work self way too early on. In reality, though, I was still making my first professional impression on everyone and should have held my cards a bit closer to my chest.

Maybe you can get away with being a fun-loving person as well as a respected professional if you’re a guy, but I’m not sure that’s true for a young woman. One of my most respected mentors took me aside and said, “You know what, Randi. Because you’re a woman, they’re only going to talk about you in one light in the press. Do you want to be the brains behind Facebook’s marketing strategy? Or do you want to be Mark Zuckerberg’s ridiculous sister who sings?” The honest answer is that I wanted to be both. I wanted to live in a world where you could be a successful executive
and
have hobbies and interests that made you more than a two-dimensional person.

If I had to do it all over again, I’d have kept my head down and focused on work those first few years and let people get to know the work I was capable of before they got to know my “creative side.” Knowing what I know now, I basically did everything that I would advise a young woman going into the workforce
not
to do.

In spite of my flamboyant behavior, I had some loyal champions inside the company. Thanks to them, I eventually found myself in a series of roles that played to my interests, my passions, and my creativity, plus enabled me to leverage my outside-the-box thinking and my love of the limelight to best benefit Facebook.

At first, Mike Murphy, the affable head of the sales team, took me under his wing and made it his mission to give me projects that I could own and shine with and use to shift perceptions of myself within the company. One of my favorite early memories at Facebook was planning the back-to-school campaign with Mike on the back of a napkin. (Students could assign fun superlatives, such as “most likely to succeed” or “most likely to live in Kansas,” to their Facebook friends, while also viewing great deals from some of our very first advertisers.)

At start-ups, a lot of work gets accomplished on napkins.

Then, in mid-2006 Facebook brought in a head of business development, Dan Rose. One of the first major deals Dan signed was a multimillion-dollar media partnership with Comcast, Facebook’s largest to date.

One day not long after he had arrived, Dan came to my desk. “I hear you’re pretty creative and like to work with the media,” he said. “Want to come work with me?”

Soon after, I joined the business development team to help negotiate and manage the Comcast deal. I worked with Dan for about two years, leading deals with media partners from Comcast to ABC News to CNN.

Over those two years, while the rest of the business development team was doing mergers and acquisition deals, striking partnerships and negotiating an investment from Microsoft, I specialized in developing partnerships for Facebook with mainstream media and television outlets. And when in late 2008 it was finally time for Facebook to have an official marketing team, I joined forces with two amazing women, Raquel DiSabatino and Meenal Balar, to create a brand-new group called consumer marketing, which is where I remained until I left Facebook.

Being asked to help create a marketing team from scratch at the current hottest tech company in the world was an incredible and humbling moment. Three years earlier I had been restless and frustrated in New York, dreaming of a day when I would get to really test myself and show what I could do. I imagined a time when I would get to lead my own team and develop my own plans—and then drive the change that I wanted to see.

In the summer of 2005, I had walked into a room of half a dozen engineers hunched over their computers. The empire that was Facebook in those days extended from the kitchen to the sofas in a single suburban house. But in the years since, those few guys had become several hundred employees, drawn from the best and brightest talent across the industry.

Pundits, the media, academics, celebrities, and the entire World Wide Web were constantly debating, criticizing, and pondering the future of the company and our impact on the world. In 2010, journalist and author David Kirkpatrick coined the phrase “the Facebook effect” to describe the unique role Facebook played in igniting global attention and support for causes and content. It was a concept that captured the zeitgeist perfectly. We were the future of friendships, dating, business, marketing, entrepreneurship, activism, philanthropy, and revolution.

Technology Is Not the End—It’s the Means

In Silicon Valley, it’s easy to end up with a narrow, tunnel-vision view of the work you’re doing and an insular perception of what technology means. It’s easy to get so focused on site data, product reviews, and industry blogs that even the smartest people on the planet, building some of the most world-changing products in all of history, often forget that there are actual human beings on the other side of the technology.

The Valley—by which I mean the entire tech industry in the Bay Area, including San Francisco—is at the forefront of all the major innovations currently taking place in connectivity. It’s where so many major technology companies are located, including Apple, PayPal, eBay, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and Yahoo! The result is a robust ecosystem for start-ups, investors, and tech bloggers. A place where fearsome rivalry for top engineering talent is constantly brewing, and companies compete to offer crazier and crazier perks to keep their current employees satisfied. And where the term “golden handcuffs” refers to people who would prefer to work elsewhere or start their own companies but are making so much money they often decide to just stay where they are. There’s no separation between work and play. If you live and work in Silicon Valley, you eat, sleep, and breathe tech 24/7. You read about it in the news, hear about it in the gossip at the coffee shop, and feel it in your friendships and relationships.