The Facebook Visit

Scott and Audrey at Facebook

My good friend Ashley lined up a contact with an ex collegue Scott who now works for Facebook. Scott kindly offered to host us on a visit to Facebook's Menlo Park campus headquarters. It was very strange walking into the "brain" of the organisation that has partly defined and is redefining the way we communicate online.

Facebook have "Hack'ed" into Sun Campus

The Menlo Park campus was built for Sun Microsystems who sold it in 2011 as part of the "synergy" resulting from the Oracle buy out of Sun. I recognise many similarities in the late 1980 versions of the Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard (HP) as both were developing hardware and operating systems around this time. This is "Silicone Valley" near Palo Alto and Cupertino .. the very epicentre and ground zero of the computer industry.

An old HP crane replanted at the Sun Campus.

It is somewhat insulting (maybe only to me?) to have such a young company remove an old HP work crane from yet another site that Facebook outgrew to plant it in the courtyard of the Sun's own global discarded heart because it had become a cool meeting point?

What lies beneath?

My understanding is that the big "Like" icon on the main road campus entry sign is just mounted on the back of the old Sun logo turned around backwards. There is a sense of "temporary residence" about all of this. I am guessing this site too will soon be discarded as Facebook are already building a new campus over the road from this one!

Yep Thats Fast!

Back to our visit...We could not resist signing into Facebook.. on Facebook. The guest wifi in reception had 50meg down and 40 meg up... to my iPhone.

Audrey and I have debated that there are now over 6000 Facebook employees on site and they don't actually "make" anything. Of course this is true of all software companies. Facebook does make money however! Something in the order of $12 billion (12,000 million) dollars per year in revenue from advertising to people like you and me (1.5 billion of us). Facebook is a new media ad agency.

We saw (yes we did) Mark Zuckerburg working in his open plan "fish bowl" office looking out onto the busy lunch time main street campus crusade of employees and visitors. I caught his eye for a brief second and he looked like a man worth $30 billion... that is, pretty much just like you and just like me (although younger and fitter than me)! Owning around 28% of Facebook ( try this http://whoownsfacebook.com ) he is the largest single shareholder. That must make Facebook worth around $150 billion, smaller than Apple and Microsoft, similar to IBM and Oracle.

On Site Pro Bikeshop

There is a pro bike shop... Facebook employs full time bike technicians to look after employees bikes. Only parts are charged for.

The nice man will fix your Mac

The bike shop was next to one of the site IT help desks where employees can get free service, repairs and updates to all of their personal PCs and phones etc.














Add to this an army of chefs producing themed free lunches dinner choices from around 15 restaurants for around 6000 employees and you can see that the cost of all of this would appear to be... irrelevant. The raw materials of this company are its people and pretty much nothing else (ok, a site, a few desks, IT systems and a bike shop). $12 billion revenue has to be spent on something after all!

"Hack", "Move Fast" and "Break Things". Facebook is littered with graphical propaganda suggesting the best way forward is to make something work "fast and dirty" and make it elegant later. This is the "just do it" kind of mentality that is supposedly at the root of the software engineering teams.

Behind the Disney World vibe of Facebook's copy of "Main Street" Palo Alto you start to see some scary organisation. A company that takes 600 interns per year on a 3 month rotation, paying them in full (and handsomely, $6000 per month) and housing them locally.. for free.

Facebook employees are the best you will find anywhere. You can smell bright, young happy energy everywhere.

There is such a thing as a free lunch!