Boy Kings: Katherine Losse’s account of the Facebook frat house

Katherine Losse describes the beginnings of social media giant Facebook from the beginning – when it was a wild start up frat house. (Photo: Free Press)

By Libby Denkmann

Katherine Losse was Facebook employee number 51 when
she was hired as a customer service representative in
2005. She was also one of the first women breaking into
what seemed lilke a boys club: a Palo Alto office filled
with hyper-smart, ambitious, exclusively male engineers
who were focused on world domination. That’s the subject
of her new book, Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of
the Social Network.

“I’d heard about these things called startups and you
know, that some guys would gather in a room and build
something that would really change the world,” says
Katherine, “Walking in there it actually had that vibe,
like I felt there was something really exciting happening
and I really felt like we could all bond together around
the fact that we were doing something that I knew was
going to be really huge.”

Working at Facebook during those days was way more fun
than your job. Employees enjoyed vacation rentals in
Tahoe, a summer house to sit poolside and work on laptops,
weekend trips to Las Vegas for lavish birthday bashes – it
sounded like an endless booze-soaked party.

“People are still surprised by the growth, but I think
that people who have been there from the early days, we
always knew this was going to happen. Like as long as we
played the cards right, Facebook would keep growing,” says
Katherine.

But Losse says there were disadvantages to the frat-
house culture at Facebook.

“Women were definitely in a different position than men
and we had to put up with some things that I think guys
just weren’t aware of. One time, some guys were making an
application that would judge women’s appearances. And, to
me, that was disturbing. Like, I wouldn’t want to be a
part of that.”

Losse describes what happened when a female Facebook
employee was told in the cafeteria that her male co-worker
wanted to bite her posterior.

“When she complained, no one seemed to understand why
that was so bad. It was even brought up in a meeting, like
‘oh, you shouldn’t do this, but it’s not that serious,'”
says Katherine, “So I went to Mark and said ‘you know, I
really think we should treat these kinds of issues
seriously in the office because everyone should feel
comfortable.'”

For CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s birthday female employees
were all asked to wear t-shirts with his face on them.
Katherine called in sick that day.

“Obviously a big part of our mission, is just
connecting all of these different people in the world,”
said Mark Zuckerberg in a statement.

For Zuckerberg, the mantra was “move fast and break
things.” Sexual politics just weren’t on his radar.

“He believed in revolution, and he would sort of
jokingly say ‘domination’ in the early days – and he
doesn’t say that anymore. It was just part of this boyish
game, like we’re going to really do big things,” says
Katherine.

But a few years after Losse started with Facebook, they
head-hunted a major addition to their executive team.

“And the problem is this: women are not making it to
the top of any profession anywhere in the world,” said
Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg of women professionals.

Sheryl Sandberg was recruited in 2008 to become
Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer. Losse said Sandberg
immediately took an interest in the plight of women at
Facebook.

“She met with all the women in engineering and she said
‘I want to hear about everything and I’m going to do sort
of house cleaning’ – and that’s what she did,” says
Katherine.

Quietly, Sandberg began to clean up the Mad Men power
imbalance at the social media giant. An engineering
director who had been known to proposition female
employees for threesomes was demoted. Another aggressive
engineer was reassigned.

Losse says the shift from a male-dominated workplace
isn’t just happening at Facebook. Across silicon valley,
many women are taking more prominent roles.

“Now you have social media, which is a form of
technology that many women use – in fact, the majority is
used by women. So it wouldn’t make any sense at this point
in time to have a company making social media that had no
women in high positions or distributed evenly throughout
the company. Tech is a place where women should be more
involved and more women are going to be going and doing
computer science and programming so that this problem
naturally won’t exist so much in the future,” says
Katherine.

Now that Facebook is becoming all grown up – thousands
of employees, sales offices around the world, a much
publicized IPO that made its earlier employees fabulously
wealthy – has the frat-house mentality changed?

A 2011 survey showed that a third of Facebook’s
employees were women. That’s a a higher level of diversity
than Microsoft, Google, Apple, or Amazon. In June, Sheryl
Sandberg became the first woman on Facebook’s board of
directors. And last week, Facebook Seattle installed a hot
tub in their office.

Maybe the party’s just getting started.

Listen to Libby’s story:

Katherine Losse’s new book The Boy Kings: A Journey
into the Heart of the Social Network is available in
bookstores everywhere.