Preface

In 2009, Mark Zuckerberg was immortalized in Ben Mezrich’s Accidental Billionaires—a book that starts with the sentence, “It was probably the third cocktail that did the trick” and served as Aaron Sorkin’s source material for the movie The Social Network—as a morally dubious, socially awkward coder mostly motivated by meeting girls. Facebook, with just 150 million users at the beginning of 2009 and coming off a year with only $270 million in revenue, was considered as uncertain a business as MySpace, which was still the largest social network in the United States.

By the end of 2015, Zuckerberg was feted as one of the greatest CEOs and philanthropists ever, Sheryl Sandberg as not only a model COO but a leading light and voice in equality, and Facebook as a company as respectable—and deserving of credit for changing the world—as Google and Apple. They had grown the number of people who used Facebook by 15 times, become the home to four of the world’s top six communication tools (three of which serve more than a billion users monthly), increased their market value by 30 times to over $300 billion and their revenue over 60 times to nearly $18 billion annually.

This book is the story of what happened in those seven years and what may happen in the next ten. From the inside. Facebook’s coming-of-age as one of the world’s great companies.

As for me, I’m a builder. Have been since 1981 when I got my first Apple ][ computer. Maybe the only thing I love more than building is to observe great builders. So it’s no accident I’m on my second stint in Silicon Valley. The first one was back in 1978 when my dad was on a sabbatical at UC Berkeley and we’d drive around the pre-PC, pre-Internet, pre-iPhone valley and visit Texas Instruments to see their brand-new Speak’n’Spell toy in the lab. The second started in 1990. Twenty-five years later, I’m still here.

I had the good fortune to be at Intel to work on the first microprocessor to have a name and to see the PC take the world by storm in the early 1990s. To work for Andy Grove when the Internet emerged, and we would visit Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin and their ping-pong table boardroom in Palo Alto, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in a converted hospital building in Seattle, and Loudcloud’s Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in an industrial park in Sunnyvale—a decade before they would come to be known simply as venture capital firm a16z. To work for Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg as they built some of the most influential services of the tectonic mobile shift.

As general manager of the Intel Inside program, I had already been a customer of Sandberg’s for a year by the time the two of us sat down in a coffee shop in downtown Palo Alto in the fall of 2008 to talk about my joining her team building Facebook’s fledgling advertising business. Long story short, Sandberg was very convincing, and seven years later the team had grown Facebook’s advertising business by more than 60 times to $18 billion annually, and I had built the global branding, positioning, communication, consulting, and consumer insights teams, for that business who were made up of—as was every team at Facebook—hundreds of the best people in the world in each of their roles looking to make their contribution to Facebook’s mission of making the world more open and connected.

It was always intense and never easy, but the story of how Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and Facebook’s teams built a business of real consequence—to go along with the largest mobile consumer services in the world—is one of the all-time great Silicon Valley stories. I’m grateful to have been a part of it and thrilled to write it down and share it with you.

I’m not a journalist like Michael Lewis (Moneyball) or a professor like Clayton Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma), but I am a builder and an observer.

I built with Sheryl and Mark and their 10,000 closest friends.

And these are my observations.

Mike Hoefflinger
Los Altos, California
October 2016