More Awesome Than Money

by Jim Dwyer

  At one point, they seemed to be at a loss, but Dan spun around and moved one of the sliding blackboards to find the next line.

  “Why us?” he said, turning back to face the camera.

  “So,” he said. “Why us?”

  Rafi jumped in: “Us—because we’re ready to do it. We’re ready to work full-time.”

  “Twelve hours a day,” Ilya said.

  “I think it’s a little more than twelve,” Dan said.

  “We’re ready to give up three months of our lives,” Max said. “Dan and I are graduating from school. Ilya and Rafi turned down some sweet internships. We’re really passionate about this idea. We really want to see it, so we can use it.”

  Max would later estimate that the video was the single most awkward moment of his life. But it worked. They were so obviously struggling that one blogger wrote, “After watching the video of students explaining their idea, saying ‘no’ would be like turning away a Girl Scout cookie seller empty-handed. We just don’t have it in us.”

  They’d had a budget of twenty thousand dollars in their heads, the product not of any sharp-penciled calculations of what it would cost them to live but simply because it was the maximum amount offered by the Y Combinator program that they had ended up not applying for. The most successful Kickstarter project to date had raised more than eighty thousand dollars, but nearly all the others had brought in less than five thousand.

  Korth argued that the twenty-thousand-dollar target was a mistake. Before going into teaching full-time, he had a life in the business world, working as a sports agent and at a successful web company. They needed to crunch the numbers tighter.

  “Remember,” he said. “It’s all or nothing. Set the goal too high and you could end up with nothing.”

  If they stuck with the plan of camping out in the Salzberg house, their housing expenses would be minimal. They’d still need round-trip tickets to Lake Tahoe, some kind of transportation while they were there, gas, and food for three months. Maybe some computer server space.

  Could they do it for ten thousand dollars?

  More important, was it realistic to think they could raise ten thousand dollars in contributions? Their families would probably pitch in, maybe some aunts and uncles. Their friends were, like them, college students with no cash to spare for philanthropy. It was a lot of money.

  As they got closer to pushing the button, the risks of winding up with nothing got to Dan. He was blowing off job interviews. He called Max.

  “Maybe we should go for eight thousand dollars,” Dan said.

  Max tried to calm him down. They could get their families to top off if they were close.

  The pitch went live on Friday, April 23. First across the line, no surprise, was Evan Korth, who pledged one hundred dollars.

  Two other friends pitched in, too. But that was it. One day, three contributions.

  This time, Max called Dan.

  “We should have gone for eight thousand dollars,” Max fretted.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  By Sunday night, they had gotten donations from twenty people, including Korth, Fred Benenson, and Max’s sister Lili. Not bad, but not quite a land rush. A few donors mentioned on the comments page that they had been thinking about precisely this kind of project. The guys were checking in all weekend, to see how it was advancing, and they were delighted to trade shoptalk with the fraternity of geeks who had also thought about the subject.

  Late Sunday evening, a peculiar e-mail arrived, not through the Kickstarter website but at the account they had set up for the Diaspora blog.

  “I’m just writing to thank you for creating this project.

  “My name is Yosem Companys, and I am a PhD candidate in engineering at Stanford University. I had thought about your very project around two years ago and have spent just as long evangelizing about it to anyone who would listen in the hope that someone would take the initiative and do it. I wish I could get involved, but I just don’t have the bandwidth right now with all my other doctoral obligations.”

  He went on to mention that he was involved with a technology ventures program at Stanford, and would be glad to connect them with folks who might be willing to help with advice, money, etc. “So if you need any help, please don’t be afraid to ask,” he wrote.

  Max quickly sent back a note of thanks.

  “Right now we are in fund-raiser mode for our Kickstarter, so anyone you may know that would be willing to show their support or enthusiasm to help us get the project started would always be appreciated,” he wrote.

  After the summer, Max wrote, there would probably be more opportunities for the venture community to help them continue the project. He signed off by saying that Diaspora could be followed on Twitter and through their blog. The whole exchange seemed preposterous. They hadn’t put a line of code in public, and this guy was hinting that he could fix them up with venture capital? Max put the matter out of his mind until the next morning. Then more e-mail arrived from Yosem Companys. This time it was a copy of messages he had sent to senior partners at two venture capital firms, discussing a wonderful start-up opportunity called Diaspora, and, by the way, his brain surgery had gone well. Max shook his head. Brain surgery. It was starting to make sense.

  An hour later, they got a message from one of Yosem’s correspondents, a man named Randy Komisar. “I love the Diaspora idea,” he wrote. “Believe it or not, I have been working up a related concept. This is important. We need control of our information. We may share it, trade it, publish it, but it should be ‘we’ who do it.

  “Max, Dan, Raphael, and Ilya, I would love to meet. Maybe even tomorrow.”

  A few seconds on the Internet introduced Randy Komisar: a former CEO of LucasArts Entertainment, the video game division of the empire of George Lucas, the director of Star Wars. (Lucas had turned down his director’s fee on the first film in favor of licensing rights to the toys and games, deemed to be worthless by Fox Studios; the sales would allow him to self-finance the sequels.) Komisar had also been a senior counsel at Apple, and had written a bestselling book on starting businesses, The Monk and the Riddle.

  But it wasn’t just Komisar. It was what and who he stood for. He was a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley that had been an early backer of Amazon, Google, Lotus, Sun Microsystems. They were Goliaths.

  Max had to read the e-mail several times. So did Rafi, Dan, and Ilya, all of them trying to get their heads around the news. It could all be a hoax, someone spoofing them. Or had this guy Yosem actually gotten one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley to contact them about their project?

  Not only that, this Yosem had sent e-mails to twenty or thirty other famous names in technology, government, and finance.

  “Forgive me,” Max wrote to Yosem, “because I am a little taken aback about how awesome this list is.”

  They would get back to Randy by the end of the day.

  Another e-mail arrived from a lawyer, Mark Padilla, with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a law firm in Palo Alto that specialized in start-ups. Rafi knew them well: his brother Joseph had been involved in a start-up that had used the firm. He wrote back to set up a conference call.

  Dan phoned his mother to report on all the people Yosem Companys had contacted.

  “Guess who else this guy e-mailed it to,” Dan said. “Obama’s technology adviser!”

  “That’s nice,” his mom said. Carolyn Grippi was the chief operating officer of the Daytime Emmy Awards program, and both she and her husband, Casey, an accountant who was about to retire from Citibank, were skeptical of this plan to build a social networking site rather than get a job. They had just paid for four years at one of the most expensive private colleges in the country, and their son was talking about living on noodles?

  Then again, she thought, if not now, when?
r />   —

  A few days after the Kickstarter appeal was posted, a slightly awkward young man in jeans and T-shirt stepped up to the microphone in an auditorium at the San Francisco Design Center. The crowd erupted in cheers. Mark Zuckerberg, the twenty-six-year-old founder of Facebook, was going to address software developers about changes that the site was going to make. On the surface, there was something endearingly unpolished in his apparent nervousness set against the gleaming graphics and stagecraft, like a high school play put on by venture capitalists. A focus on the bumbling style was a sure way to underestimate the breadth of the day.

  “We think that what we have to show you today will be the most transformative thing that we’ve ever done for the web,” Zuckerberg said.

  That day, Zuckerberg and his chief technical officer, Brett Taylor, ran through a series of changes that would give Facebook a presence on other websites with “like” buttons. When clicked, these like buttons would alert the user’s friends—and anyone else who viewed their Facebook pages—of their interests: what they had been looking at and, presumably, thinking about. The likes of users were a form of currency that Facebook would negotiate into advertising dollars. When other changes were added in, including the ability to watch what people were reading away from the Facebook site, what Zuckerberg and his backers were proposing was nothing less than becoming the tollbooth and gateway to the whole Internet.

  By following the interest of its users across cyberspace, Facebook would plant its flag, and eye, on every corner of the web. What Facebook and Zuckerberg saw as a great expansion of human connectedness others saw as a silken trap from which there would be no escape.

  At the same conference three years earlier, Zuckerberg had introduced the term “social graph” to describe the blueprint of connections between any two people. It was a variation on the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, a dorm-room trivia classic in which the challenge was to link the actor to anyone else in Hollywood in six connections or less; the Bacon game itself descended from an early-twentieth-century notion that the expansion of communication and transportation had so shrunk the world that every person on the planet could be linked through a chain of acquaintances extending beyond no more than five others. In the early 2000s, a Harvard economics student applied the Bacon game principles to Harvard students; his sociogram, or social graph, was bared in Facebook friending.

  In April 2010, Zuckerberg and Facebook were extending the social graph to record virtually any interest a person might express through the World Wide Web.

  “The open graph puts people at the center of the web,” he said.

  The stunning implications were mostly unmentioned by Zuckerberg. If the social network functioned as an all-seeing vehicle for tracking people’s curiosities, views, and interests, Facebook would control a vast database of human appetites. Its presumptive commercial value had already brought in billions in investment money.

  With his friends, Zuckerberg had started the Facebook site when he was twenty years old, and in his view—apparently adopted after he had created his product; how worked out is the philosophy of any twenty-year-old?—individual life in the twenty-first century would be led in total transparency.

  Every person arriving for the conference that morning was given a small RFID chip—the same kind of little radio frequency gizmos that Dan and Max had installed on the door of the computer office to send a tweet. Rather than tracking the movement of a door, the Facebook RFID chips would track people as they moved around the conference. When someone stopped, for instance, at a gaming booth, the chip would send a signal to a computer, and then to his Facebook page. The chips were in regular use for a “keg bot” by Facebook employees at headquarters: when people stopped at the office beer keg, a picture was snapped and loaded to an internal Facebook page devoted to life events of the keg, including when it needed replenishment. All good fun. But creepy.

  The mass sharing would let a person going to a restaurant—one that had been rated on Yelp, the crowdsourced rating site—know immediately which of her friends had visited the restaurant and commented on it. Already “Yelp knows who I am, what I’m connected to, so they can give me a nice social experience,” Taylor said. “What isn’t possible is to take a part of this graph that Yelp has mapped out and connect to other parts of the graph. We want to have instantly social and personalized experiences everywhere users go.”

  The commercial power of such connections was not acknowledged. Nor was the limited control that a user had: if a friend on Facebook installed an application that wanted to vacuum up that person’s acquaintances and their interests, there was little the user could do to stop it.

  “This is a really significant step for Facebook. For years, we’ve been saying that Facebook is an open platform, but now for the first time, the likes and interests of my Facebook profile link to places that are not Facebook.com,” Taylor said. “My identity is not just defined by things on Facebook, it’s defined by things all over the web.”

  This may have seen an unalloyed, giant step forward to Zuckerberg, Taylor, and others in the bubble of Facebook’s headquarters. Outside, the reaction was brutal. The toughest—because the nontech press relied on it to render the changes into nongeek-speak—was Wired, which ran a major essay that became the most-read story on its website for a month.

  “Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination,” wrote Ryan Singel. “It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.”

  The essay went on to recognize the important ground that Facebook had opened. But it argued that the company, and Zuckerberg, had not understood the importance of self-control.

  “Clearly Facebook has taught us some lessons. We want easier ways to share photos, links and short updates with friends, family, co-workers and even, sometimes, the world. But that doesn’t mean the company has earned the right to own and define our identities. It’s time for the best of the tech community to find a way to let people control what and how they’d like to share.”

  Around that time, a professor at Columbia University studied Facebook users, asking their intentions and beliefs about their control of their privacy features on the site. Then he compared it with their actual settings. He found that 90 percent were sharing material that they had intended to keep private; a perfect 100 percent were not achieving their privacy goals.

  —

  The four guys met in the ACM room, door closed, and tried to figure out what had happened. They were just trying to scrape together enough money to write code for the summer. Now they were getting e-mails from Randy Komisar, a figure who Ilya reckoned was like the Steven Spielberg of Silicon Valley, which probably overstated Komisar’s stature, but was near enough to the right order of magnitude for a kid who had been Dumpster diving not many months earlier. Komisar was at least a radio signal from a different galaxy. Dan was bemused: here they were, four guys sitting in a closet at NYU, and now important people were getting tapped on the shoulder about them. Rafi noted that they were in the last week of classes, and after that, they had finals. Max felt a twinge of guilt: he had not gotten very far on his senior paper. Going out to California the next day for a meeting was not in the cards.

  At the very least, they agreed, they should call Komisar back, but be careful not to portray themselves as ready to roll out a gleaming new social network website in three months.

  It took them another few days before they could organize time for a call to Komisar, who was in Menlo Park, California.

  He was mildly startled when he found himself on the line with the whole team.

  “Hi, Randy, I’m Max.”

  “I’m Dan.”

  “Hi, Randy. This is Rafi.”

  “Hey, this is Ilya.”

  Komisar was not coy.

  “I love what you are doing,” he said, by way
of opening.

  The guys wanted to turn up their cards immediately. For the next three or four months, they planned to build a code base, which they would make public and free for others to hack on. They were purposefully modest, as well as candid. One day they might want to do real business with Kleiner Perkins or Randy Komisar, and they did not want to burn their credibility with extravagant promises.

  Komisar, though, wanted to talk about the project, and why he was interested. As mighty web fortunes were being built, largely on personal data that people had given away, he had become galvanized by how individuals managed their own information on the web. Property did not become private until it was owned. Taking the case of Facebook, which, depending on the day of the week, was supposed to be worth billions, Komisar explained his thinking.

  “Let’s say Facebook is worth $30 billion. That’s $30 billion of my frickin’ data. I just built a $30 billion business—or me and my 500 million friends did. That seems like a bad deal. We gave away our data too cheap.”

  For months, Komisar had been thinking about how to refactor the terms. He had spent time with the developers of Bynamite, who were building a little add-on to browsers that would, in effect, track the trackers—keep an inventory of the information that was being collected by advertisers as people surfed the web. It was a first step.

  Describing his thinking later, Komisar said the goal was to “create privacy controls that effectively allowed for me to own my data, and thereby derive the value of that data. That doesn’t mean I would keep it to myself. It means I would share it with who I wanted to, when I wanted to, for purposes that I wanted to. That was the context in which Diaspora came to my attention.”

  That was practically the language from their Kickstarter pitch. “With Diaspora, we are reclaiming our data, securing our social connections, and making it easy to share on your own terms,” they had written.