It really is a user-growth roulette wheel with razor-thin odds.

No user data we had, if fed freely into the topics that Facebook’s savviest marketers used to target their ads, improved any performance metric we had access to. That meant that advertisers trying to find someone who, say, wanted to buy a car, benefited not at all from all the car chatter taking place on Facebook. It was as if we had fed a

Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future, we wouldn’t all be famous for fifteen minutes; we’d be famous 24/7 to fifteen people. That was the new paradigm, even if the outside world didn’t realize it yet. Facebook employees—we few, we happy few—knew what world was coming, and we’d help create it.

Incidentally, it helps to have enemies. While love is a beautiful emotion, far more empires have been built, books written, wrongs righted, fights won, and ambitions realized out of vengeful desire to prove some critic wrong, or existential dread of some perceived enemy, than all the love in the world. Love is grand, but hate and fear last longer.

performing employees, their final score was very rich indeed.

and you are their first whiff of corporate

you will it, it is no dream; and if you do not will it, a dream it will remain.” Willing

irreverence without disrespect, competence without arrogance, ambition without ego.

People go into startups thinking that the technical problems are the challenges. In practice, the technical stuff is easy, unless you’re incompetent or really at the hairy edge of human knowledge—for example, putting a man on Mars. No, every real problem in startups is a people problem, and as such they’re the hardest to solve, as they often don’t