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office, “What did you think of Mark?” he answered, “Which one was Mark?” I had the thought then, as we walked to dinner at the Italian place down the street, that it was my dad, and not me, who should be working at Facebook: Unlike me,he would instantly fit in, and everyone could talk about graphs happily ever after. But my dad didn’t need a job, and I did, so my dad flew back to Phoenix and I stayed in Silicon Valley with the engineers and the graphs.
    In the small office of twenty engineers and a smattering of support reps and admins who were rapidly becoming friends, Mark’s presence tended to be more aloof than the others. He walked with his chest puffed out, Napoleon-style, his curly hair jumping forward from his forehead as if to announce him in advance. My general sense of camaraderie with most of the engineers, with whom I had exchanged at least a few words around the kitchen fridge or over a beer at happy hour, felt cooler in relation to Mark. Someone has to be the boss, and no one likes the boss (do they?) and so it seemed natural that I felt nothing more than a slight wariness around him, born of his Silicon Valley status as an anointed boy wonder. He seemed more of a necessary evil. I was almost relieved that he was so distant, so preoccupied—like a father you know won’t be overly concerned about what you were up to.
    • • •
    Three weeks after I started working there, Facebook celebrated its five-millionth user by throwing a party in a dimly lit space below a swank new restaurant in San Francisco. It was the first and last company party I attended that was made up mostly of people—adults—who didn’t work there. (As we grew bigger, we turned inward, populating parties mainly with Facebook employees, until it felt like we were our own island.) The five-millionth-userparty was attended mostly by venture capitalists, curious or invested in this new, already buzzing upstart of a company. The name Peter Thiel, PayPal’s infamous founder and billionaire, was on everyone’s lips, but I couldn’t identify him because all the men at the party looked like a version of him: dirty blond, excessively fit, with drinks held casually against their unbuttoned blazers as they discussed investment business and tried hard to impress one another. My customer support teammates and I stuck mostly to ourselves in the corner, having nothing to offer the investors, watching while they swarmed over the mussy-haired engineers standing around clutching barely touched drinks.
    As I sat on a couch watching all this in my cocktail dress, holding a melting gin and tonic, I wondered at the VCs’ obvious predilection for boys who looked like younger versions of themselves. I could see that as a woman I would automatically appear alien in this context. An engineer came by to take photographs and I posed, smiling, with my female teammates. One always had to smile and appear happy for Facebook. The photographer moved on to another group and I went back to musing.
    It often felt like this at Facebook, like I was the only one who was watching, seeing what was happening not as a privileged participant but as an observer. Dustin, the most critically astute of the Facebook founders, did not fail to notice. A year after I started working there, we were talking at a smoke-filled party somewhere in the Stanford hills when he said to me, matter-of-factly, “You’re going to write a book about us,” as we descended the stairs into a crowded den to watch a band that had just begun to play.

CHAPTER 2
IN HACK WE TRUST
    T hat first winter, to go along with the perks of meals, laundry, and gym memberships that Facebook provided, the company rented a house in Tahoe for employees to use on the weekends. Mark is serious about wanting us to have fun, I thought. The prospect of escaping my queue of Facebook user emails to frolic for a couple of days in the woods sounded ideal, but the three-hour drive to Tahoe and sixty-dollar-per-day ski