Antonio Garcia Martinez Antonio Garcia Martinez
This chapter describes what happened to Garcia on his first day at Facebook, and how he was inducted into the company's official culture of secrecy. We have also included some photos from the two years he spent at Facebook as a product manager.
Boot Camp: APRIL 25, 2011
Before the city-within-a-city campus that Facebook would come to occupy, the company was housed in two buildings in the down-market part of Palo Alto, east of Stanford's campus. One, on California Avenue, contained Zuck, Engineering, Ads, and just about everyone involved in making actual product. The second building fronted on the next artery over, Page Mill Road, and housed sales, legal, operations, and everyone involved in the nontechnical side of the Facebook machine. A fleet of tidy white shuttle buses shuffled people between them, and the occasional Facebooker walked the half mile for exercise, or just to see the sun occasionally.
The daylong session known as on-boarding was held in the nontechnical building, so white shuttle it was to Page Mill Road. The conference room was named "Pong" (and yes, the room next to it was "Ping"), a large room meant for presentations. A raised stage lined the back wall, and long, narrow desks, like hedgerows, crossed the room from right to left. As usual, I chose to sit in the front, right under the nose of the speaker, so I could catch every twitch and take the real measure.
An HR person offered some introductory drivel or other, and then it was straight to the first speaker, my superboss, the head of product for Facebook: Chris Cox.
Cox was handsome in the way of a Gosling or Depp: a tempered masculinity encased in a cuddly package, custom-made for female desire. It was a recurring internal joke at Facebook to point out the Twitter storm of oohing and ahhing whenever he took the stage at a Facebook PR event. He had the gift of the gab, which he used to great effect, weaving a seductive narrative around Facebook and the future of media. As the first speaker, he was clearly there to instill the big-picture vision of what we had been selected to help build.
"What is Facebook? Define it for me," he asked, challenging the rows of attentive faces almost the moment he appeared.
"It's a social network." "Wrong! It's not that at all."
He scanned the audience for another answer.
Perfectly articulated, to the point I suspected she was a shill, a young, perky intern came out with: "It's your personal newspaper."
"Exactly! It's what I should be reading and thinking about, delivered personally to me every day."