The Facebook effect

Mark Zuckerberg wanted this book written, and that tells you most of what you need to know about its strengths and limits.

Kirkpatrick, then Fortune's senior internet editor, had access that no other journalist has matched: multiple interviews with Zuckerberg himself, candid sessions with co-founders and early investors, and the cooperation of executives like Sheryl Sandberg and Peter Thiel. The result is the most detailed corporate history of Facebook's first six years, from Harvard dorm room to 500 million users. You learn the equity percentages, the rejected acquisition offers worth billions, the chaotic summer in Palo Alto, the product decisions that shaped the News Feed. That granular detail is the book's genuine value.

Buyers have repeatedly offered astounding sums of money—billions—if he would sell it. But Zuckerberg is more focused on 'getting stuff done' and convincing more people to use his service than he is on getting rich from it.

— Kirkpatrick, *The Facebook Effect*

The argument running through it is that Zuckerberg's most distinctive trait was a willingness to leave money on the table in service of a longer game. Where his competitors were building media destinations, he was building infrastructure. Where investors wanted profitable exits, he wanted to dominate communication on the internet. In 2010, that word seemed like the ambition of an idealistic college kid. Today it reads like a mission statement that was taken literally.

if a cute girl sat next to you in Topology, you could look up next semester's Differential Geometry course to see if she had enrolled in that as well

— Kirkpatrick, *The Facebook Effect*, ch. 1

Where the book disappoints is exactly where its title promised to deliver. The actual social, political, and psychological weight of 500 million people using a real-name social graph gets roughly 90 pages in a 372-page book. The corporate machinery gets the rest. Kirkpatrick acknowledges this gap in his introduction, promises to explore the bigger questions, and then mostly retreats to deal memos and hiring decisions. Readers who came for analysis get biography.

There's also the access problem. The Winklevoss twins were never contacted. Aaron Greenspan, who had a credible prior claim to some of the underlying concept, was ignored. Eduardo Saverin is rendered almost as a nuisance. When everyone with a grievance is excluded and the subject himself is the primary source, you get something that reads less like history and more like authorized mythology. Kirkpatrick is smart enough to note Zuckerberg's failures — the Beacon advertising disaster, the repeated privacy fumbles — but smart enough too to frame them as inevitable growing pains of visionary leadership rather than early evidence of a pattern.

The book aged badly, and not because Kirkpatrick can't write. He's a clean, precise journalist. It aged badly because he wrote it in a world where Facebook's ideology of radical transparency still sounded plausible. What reads in 2010 as a credulous account of a young visionary reads now as the document that captured the moment before the costs became visible. If you want to understand how intelligent people could be genuinely optimistic about what Zuckerberg was building — before what came after — this is your primary source. That's a narrower recommendation than the book deserves, but it's an honest one.