Zuckerberg was entering one of the most productive periods in his life. A few weeks after I met him, he would lay out a ludicrously ambitious vision for Facebook. In a journal with unlined 8-by-10 paper, he sketched his mission and product design and explored how a tiny company might become a vital utility for the world. In detail, he described features called Open Registration and Feed, two products that would supercharge his company.
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As a kid growing up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, a bedroom community north of New York City, Mark Zuckerberg loved playing games. One was a PC-based strategy game called Civilization, with the tagline “Build an empire to stand the test of time.” Gameplaying stoked a desire to learn programming. His parents, a dentist and a psychiatrist, hired a coding tutor.
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He was an avid Latin student, developing a fanboy affinity for the emperor Augustus Caesar, an empathetic ruler who also had an unseemly lust for power and conquest. Zuckerberg still indulged in games; his favorite was a successor to Civilization set in outer space called Alpha Centauri, in which players chose to lead one of seven “human factions” to control the galaxy.
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By the end of 2005, Zuckerberg had somehow pulled off millions in financing—his early mentor Sean Parker got things rolling with an introduction to Facebook’s first big investor, Peter Thiel. He gathered a team of experienced advisers. “Whether it’s Peter Thiel or Sean Parker, these people thought they were manipulating Mark,” surmises one early Facebook employee. “I remember in hindsight thinking how genius it was that Mark convinced Sean Parker to raise all the money for him … Mark saw Sean as a useful tool to do the job that sucks the most,” that is, fundraising.
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Zuckerberg was no longer doing much coding; he was focused mostly on the big picture. The notebooks allowed him to work out his vision in detail. When Facebook engineers and designers rolled in to the office, they would sometimes find a few photocopied pages from the notebooks at their workstations. The pages might contain a design for a front end or a list of signals for a ranking algorithm. He was still finding his way as a communicator, and the pages often opened up a conversation between the recipients and their boss. They also imbued Zuckerberg’s thoughts with a kind of inevitability. The printed page can’t be deleted or altered, or forwarded in infinitely duplicable digital form. Whiteboards appeared in abundance in every Facebook office, and employees couldn’t survive without excellent dry-eraser skills. But a Zuck notebook carried the sanctity of a papal decree.
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He did verbally accept the offer, but then Yahoo CEO Terry Semel made a tactical error, asking to renegotiate terms because his company’s stock had taken a downturn. Zuckerberg used that as an opportunity to end the talks. He believed that the two products he wrote about in the Book of Change would make Facebook more valuable.
The executives who had urged him to sell would either quit or be fired. “It was just too broken a relationship,” Zuckerberg says.
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After Zuckerberg rejected Yahoo, he turned to the launch of the key products he had outlined in the Book of Change. After almost eight months of intense preparation, News Feed launched in September 2006.
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Zuckerberg became comfortable as the ultimate decider on all things Facebook. Sam Lessin, a Harvard classmate who later worked as a Facebook executive, says that multiple times he was in a room where Zuckerberg made a decision that conflicted with everyone else’s opinion. His view would prevail, and he would be right. After a while, people came to accept that a Zuck decision would turn out to be the wise one.
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I wondered whether he found the role of wartime CEO more stressful or more fun?
A Zuck silence. Sauron’s gaze.
“You’ve known me for a long time,” he finally said. “I don’t optimize for fun.”
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Not long before the July 4 holiday in 2019, I met with Zuckerberg at his home. The person who sat across from me on the couch couldn’t have been more different from the 21-year-old I’d met 13 years before. He had sat with presidents and autocrats, been ripped apart by legislators, amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune, started a family, and was financing, through an enterprise led by his wife, an effort to cure all diseases by the end of the century. His company had done the unprecedented: bound almost a third of humanity in a single network. Now he was trying to mitigate the damage.
In another sense, though, he felt an urgency to maintain the optimism and creativity he had in 2006, when things fell easily to him and he could change the world by leaving photocopies of journal pages next to the computers of his developers and designers. He was determined not to let Facebook’s attempts to fix itself hamper its ambitions for even greater power.