Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (4 page)

As I developed in my career at Facebook and came to better understand the Valley, I realized that it wasn’t the coding or the systems or the tools that got me jumping out of bed each morning. And it certainly wasn’t the corporate rivalry and endless battles to be number one. I cared about the people on the other side of the technology. I cared about what we could
do
with the tools and what the industry could do together. And, more than anything, I cared about the impact we could have on people’s lives, in communities around the world.

I knew that it was going to be an uphill battle to push people to see the humanity behind the tech, especially in a company and industry where engineers and data reign supreme. It was an uphill battle I was willing to fight. I could see Facebook’s incredible ability to strengthen friendships and connections between people. I was convinced that we had an opportunity to create value in even more ways, from education to art, and from science to business and community. The day President Obama came to Facebook epitomized all that I knew to be true about the power of connectivity.

But the moment when all these ideas first began to come together was earlier, in 2007—when I saw how Facebook could be used more for politics than Poking.

It was the summer of 2007, and the frenzy of the next year’s general election was about to kick off. It would be the first presidential election since Facebook and social media had exploded. And even though it was many months before their campaigns would begin in earnest, many of the would-be candidates had reached out to Facebook to help them set up public pages, which would go live when they announced their candidacies.

I suddenly found myself privy to all sorts of fascinating information. Because of all these candidate inquiries, my team and I had a good sense of who was planning to run for office, even before many major news outlets did. That summer, when pundits were speculating about whether Mike Bloomberg was going to run for president, I enjoyed the wry satisfaction of knowing that his team had not set up a public Facebook page yet, and even though I didn’t know for sure, I could guess that he was therefore not likely to be entering the race.

But there was something else I realized. Facebook was evolving from being a site just for college students to being an indispensable tool for everyone, including those who wanted to do something really important, such as influence the outcome of a presidential election. This was also an opportunity for Facebook to expand its audience and influence.

I knew we had to get more involved in politics, beyond just helping the candidates set up public profiles. When I began preaching internally about the importance of Facebook getting involved in an event that would dominate the next year and a half of mainstream media, I assumed that everyone would get the idea pretty quickly. A fair number of employees were excited at the prospect. But that summer the company was developing a complex new advertising system, set to launch before the end of the year. Advertising was the shiny, sexy project to be working on, because it had the undivided attention of Mark and the rest of the management team. This meant working on the ad product was a chance to impress the bosses and
maybe
even get face time with Mark, which was the holy grail of Silicon Valley geekdom.

My colleagues quickly lost interest in an election that was still over a year away.

At this point, you may think that the smart career move would have been to refocus, shift my priorities to align with everyone else’s, perhaps even play some “corporate politics.” And you’d probably be right.

Which means . . . I set off to work on politics on my own. For better or worse, I’ve always gravitated toward finding my own diamond-in-the-rough project that I can own and shape, rather than what’s shiny, new, and exciting to everyone else.

Luckily, I had the support of four friends and colleagues: Dan Rose, my old boss; Ezra Callahan, a fellow early Facebooker and influential product manager; Chris Kelly, our general counsel; and David Fisch, a leader on the business development team. They became my full and willing collaborators in this crazy scheme. Later on, Adam Conner and Andrew Noyes joined Facebook in Washington, DC, and became my partners in crime and lifelong friends.

Our first move was to team up with ABC News.

Our opening discussions took place as competing networks and tech companies began maneuvering to achieve their own vision of the first social media election. YouTube and CNN were the first to announce they were producing a debate together, which immediately launched a social networking arms race between the other networks. The news media were desperate to have their own Internet tie-ins for their shows and to find some novel, interactive element to engage younger, tech-savvy audiences.

It quickly became the Wild West. Grab your favorite social networking site and go! Television networks were announcing “integrations” with every possible Internet site under the sun, desperately hoping something would stick. We took a lot of calls from companies pitching half-baked partnerships, which we universally declined. We wanted to do something smart and unique that would really show off the value of Facebook’s platform.

And then we found someone who saw eye to eye with us. Over a three-hour lunch at Buca di Beppo in downtown Palo Alto with Andrew Morse and Paul Slavin of ABC News, as we consumed an inhuman amount of Diet Coke and a platter of meatballs larger than my head, we came up with the idea of holding a joint online-offline presidential debate before the primaries, which would be broadcast on ABC News and feature Facebook updates and polling results on-air. Additionally, we would develop a social politics app on Facebook that would allow users to discuss and debate election issues with one another, and ABC News would feature answers from the app during the debate.

This direction appealed to me because it was actually useful and it offered real and unique value. For Facebook, it was the perfect showcase for both our “News Feed” feature and our newly launched platform for applications. Whereas most early apps were games, this app would allow users to post their views on the most important topics of the 2008 election and see where their friends stood. And whenever they posted a viewpoint, it would show up in News Feed, so their friends would see it and be able to respond and engage in debates. For ABC News, it was a way to be young, fresh, and different from the competition. We quickly moved to sign a deal.

That part of the process, however, was a little more stressful—and memorable—than we had expected. I was working closely on the contract negotiations with David, my colleague on the business development team, and Julia Popowitz, on the legal team. Facebook had moved into a brand-new office in downtown Palo Alto. The electricity hadn’t even been turned on in the building yet, so we spent countless evenings using the light from our BlackBerry devices to pore over the dense, thirty-page contracts sent over from ABC. Negotiations also got so heated at one point that someone even had a brief heart attack scare.

Eventually, with the horror of negotiations over and the papers signed, the core team got to work. On the Facebook side, my colleague Ezra and I, along with a handful of engineers, focused on building the app. On the ABC News side of the house, we were introduced to two guys who would become our cohorts over the next year: Austin Vance and Bradley Lautenbach. They had just wrapped production on a show about YouTube and therefore were the de facto cool, hip, tech guys inside ABC News. This pairing was highly serendipitous, especially when you consider that five years later Bradley and I would go on to start Zuckerberg Media together. But sitting in a Houston’s restaurant in New York City, guzzling Arnold Palmers on a hot summer afternoon, all we could think about was how to disrupt politics by bringing “old media” and “new media” together.

Fast-forward to January 2008. Our U.S. Politics app had grown to a million users, which was a really big deal in the early days of the Facebook app platform. Hillary Clinton went head to head with Barack Obama in a debate held in between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. And right there, on-air, Diane Sawyer pulled stats and answers live from Facebook users. The team was exceptionally proud, and even more excited that the moderator podium was emblazoned with a giant Facebook logo.

There was something else I was excited about. The day before the debate, I did my first live TV appearance—on
Good Morning America,
no less. I was in New York with Ezra when the ABC team gave us the chance to attend a live taping of the show. I had never been on the set of a national morning show before (not counting the 5:00
A.M.
Steve Forbes show on Fox). Ezra and I woke up at the crack of dawn and headed over to the studio in Times Square, where we hung around on the set gawking at everything. As we were there to just get a backstage tour, and it was an ungodly hour of the morning, we were wearing our “Silicon Valley finest,” by which I mean Ezra was wearing a Facebook hoodie and jeans and I was only slightly more dressed up in a casual sweaterdress and slouchy boots.

The producer came up to us. “So, we have this segment on the show where we slot in local weather in a few places across the country, but anyone who doesn’t get the weather just sees the anchors bantering for a minute. Why don’t you and Ezra do the banter with us for that minute?”

Our mouths fell open.

It was three in the morning back in California. Facebook’s PR team was sound asleep, and even if they had been awake, it would have been impossible to get their blessing in time for the appearance. We needed to make a split-second decision. I glanced at Ezra. He gave me a knowing look, and we said yes. When would we get a chance to be on
Good Morning America
again? We went ahead and filmed our minute of banter.

Everything went well. Afterward, I took some heat from the PR team. But hey, sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission, right?

My confidence that we were really on to something only grew when Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s pollster, publicly declared that Obama’s supporters “look like Facebook.” He didn’t mean that as a compliment, but that Facebook was something young, inexperienced, and irrelevant. Shortly after, Obama won Iowa, with his surprise success largely attributed to young voters energized by social media. Now Facebook wasn’t just playing a part in shaping the presentation of the campaigns; it was influencing the campaigns.

My diamond-in-the-rough project was starting to look pretty shiny.

After the debate, we started hunting for something new. Facebook didn’t have the resources to keep the U.S. Politics app going, and ABC didn’t want to take it over from us. The app ended up being shut down and the code deleted, which was hard for me to swallow. It seemed a waste of a million followers and a lot of hard work. I was keen to develop something that was built to last.

That’s where Andy Mitchell at CNN came in. Andy and I had begun talking several months earlier when I had accepted an invitation from him to fly to St. Petersburg, Florida, to attend the second CNN-YouTube debate as his VIP guest. At the time, Andy had been trying to woo Facebook away from ABC News. Now I decided to try to strike up the conversation again.

Luckily, Andy was more than receptive, and we tossed around countless ideas with CNN. Should we do another debate? Should we do something with polling and stats? In the end, we opted to extend the social politics app into a full microsite on CNN, which people could log in to with our newly launched Facebook Connect button. The site would feature live debates between Facebook users on election night, and it would take what we had done with ABC to the next level. Even though people would be posting their thoughts on CNN .com, they would show up on Facebook, encouraging their friends to join them. This would be a showcase for Facebook Connect and a win-win for Facebook and CNN. How could it not be?

The folks at CNN were so excited they started blasting out television commercials to promote the microsite. Anderson Cooper even recorded a promotional video. This was my very first project under a new boss, and I desperately wanted it to be successful. Andy and I were both laying a lot of our professional capital on the line with this project.

Unfortunately, it was a big disappointment. There were multiple technical problems on both sides. On election night, people seemed to be on every other site
except
ours. You could almost hear the crickets chirping in the forums. The microsite was difficult to find on CNN’s website, and the Facebook Connect button did not provide a very compelling experience if nobody was there to connect. We had thrown away a huge opportunity to define the coverage of a momentous day.

But then from the jaws of defeat came victory.

That same week we had a “hackathon” at Facebook, an event that happened every few months, when people stayed up all night, working on passion projects, and then presented their projects to the entire company the next morning, followed by a pancake breakfast. I know it doesn’t sound fun to voluntarily pull an all-nighter at work, but these events were energizing, exciting, and community forming, and they embodied the passion and entrepreneurial spirit of the company.

During this particular hackathon, it was about two in the morning and I was getting ready to head home (as hard as I tried, I was never really one for all-nighters) when two engineers came up to me.

“Randi, we know you’re working with the TV networks. We have an idea.”

The engineers, Peter Deng and Ari Steinberg, explained that during the debates, they found it annoying that they had to keep two browser windows open on their computers at the same time—one to watch the debate and one to see what their friends were saying about the debate on Facebook. Why didn’t we build something to combine them?

I called Andy Mitchell.

Four weeks later, we had a working prototype of the system, and CNN planned to use it for their first socially enabled coverage of the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama. But it wasn’t an easy journey. It took a lot of resources from both CNN and Facebook. There were huge technical challenges to solve. We had to blacklist over ten thousand potential spellings of every conceivable curse and swear word (this was going to be a family-friendly Facebook inauguration, gosh darn it!), and there were questions about whether the site would be able to support so many millions of concurrent video streams at once.