An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination [calibre 4.99.5]

He had been influenced by a book called What You Do Is Who You Are, by Ben Horowitz, one half of Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm that invested early in Facebook. (Marc Andreessen, Zuckerberg’s friend and a Facebook board member, was the other half.) In his book, Horowitz argues that at various stages of development, tech companies demand two kinds of CEOs: wartime and peacetime leaders. In periods of peace, he writes, a company can focus on expanding and reinforcing its strengths. In times of war, the threats are existential, and the company has to hunker down to fight for survival. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had led the search engine’s growth into a global powerhouse during a period of peace and little competition. But Larry Page had taken over as CEO as the company saw new threats in social media and mobile technology. “Peacetime CEO works to minimize conflict. Wartime CEO heightens the contradictions,” Horowitz writes. “Peacetime CEO strives for broad-based buy-in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus-building nor tolerates disagreements.”2

The idea was widely embraced by tech leaders, but it wasn’t new. In public speeches and interviews,3 Horowitz acknowledged that he had been inspired by Only the Paranoid Survive, written by Intel’s famously brutal former CEO Andy Grove, who had steered the company from the production of memory chips to processors. Grove was notorious in Silicon Valley for bullying challengers and opponents as part of his philosophy: never relax, because a new rival is coming just around the corner.

(In a blog post, Horowitz conceded that he had also taken some inspiration from the movie The Godfather, quoting a scene where consigliere Tom Hagen asks the Corleone family don, “Mike, why am I out?” and Michael Corleone replies, “You’re not a wartime consigliere.” The reference to The Godfather’s Mob boss struck some Facebook employees as apt. “It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Mark would want to think of himself as modeling his behavior after Andy when in fact he was taking cues from Hollywood’s most notorious gangster,” said one M-Team member. “You won’t find anyone more ruthless in business than Mark.”)

From that day forward, Zuckerberg continued, he was taking on the role of wartime CEO. He would assume more direct control over all aspects of the business. He could no longer sequester himself to focus only on new products. More decisions would fall to him.

The M-Team was silent. Sandberg and a small group of executives who knew in advance what Zuckerberg had prepared to say that day nodded approvingly. But others could only keep their faces carefully neutral as they tried to assess what Zuckerberg’s words meant for their departments and personal advancement. Technically, as the founder and stakeholder with a majority of voting shares since Facebook’s earliest days, Zuckerberg had always been in control of the company. But he had liberally delegated many parts of the business. Executives in charge of arms like WhatsApp and Instagram could operate with a fair amount of independence, and powerful heads of engineering within Facebook’s central product had cultivated their own, loyal teams. “Zuckerberg hired and promoted managers who had big dreams for themselves. For years, he had kept them happy because they knew they had their relative autonomy,” noted one member of the M-Team who attended the meeting. “Now he seemed to be saying that was about to change.”