FOR ITS FEARSOME size and confident leadership, Facebook seems strangely precarious. Maybe it’s my feeling that something that can grow so big so fast might disappear swiftly, too. Or the sense that the world is revving up to take on Facebook. A hearing last week by a grand committee representing nine governments was brimming with anger, as politicians lashed out at an apologetic Facebook underling unlucky enough to be sitting next to an empty chair behind a Mark Zuckerberg placard. One Canadian member of Parliament spoke for the room when he concluded that, “While we were playing on our phones and apps, our democratic institutions seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California.”
All solutions are on the table: fines, regulations, breaking up the company. And as serious as these inquiries may be, the real problem for Facebook is internal, not external. The mythology of Facebook as a well-meaning company doing good by connecting the world didn’t only pacify an unsuspecting public for a decade, it inspired a fiercely loyal workforce. How does a company bounce back after its deepest myths have been smashed?
A belief in the inherent goodness of growth looks like the kind of thing you tell yourself and others as you devise stratagems to keep adding users to Facebook. This brings us to Thiel’s other big startup idea, which he outlined in his book Zero to One: “The best startups,” he wrote, “might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults.”
Indeed, with a revered leader and a mythic mission, Facebook followed Thiel’s path. Barely two years ago, the tech press was in awe of Facebook and its devoted workforce, what Inc. magazine called “Mark Zuckerberg's Secret to Extremely Loyal Employees.” The crucial evidence of this loyal bond was a series of Friday meetings, in which Zuckerberg revealed corporate strategy and personal feelings, without worrying that an employee would leak to the press.
As Recode reported last year, the strongest deterrent was shame. “People would be pissed if someone else leaked something,” one former employee told Recode. “You don’t betray the family.”
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