Employees lived and died by Mark Zuckerberg's samurai sword during the early days of Facebook, according to employee No. 30, and while beheadings were metaphorical, the sword was as real as Zuckerberg's dream to ingrain the social networking company into the lives of users worldwide
Fired roughly nine months after he began working for the fledgling social network, Noah Kagan paints a picture of Facebook's early days as an environment that thrived on chaos. In a self-published book, "How I Lost $170 Million: My time as #30 at Facebook," Kagan describes Zuckerberg as passionate and as mature as a 23-year-old CEO could be.
The company's quality control team, at the time, donned army gear and a mural of a woman using a toilet decorated a bathroom wall until venture capitalists started swooping in to look at the startup, according to the book. The mantras "dominate" and "don't suck" were often intoned by the Facebook CEO and his disciples, states Kagan.
"The company resembled a combination of 'Lord of the Flies' meets old-school Silicon Valley decorum," states Kagan in the book.
Back then, there was no policy against weapons in the workplace at Facebook -- at least, there were none that applied to Zuckerberg. Kagan says the Facebook CEO would prowl the office with a samurai sword, using the blade to make mock attacks at employees and jesting he'd behead anyone who didn't adhere to his code.
"Where the hell he got that samurai sword, who the hell knows -- luckily, no employees were harmed while I was there," says Kagan. "He'd come around and pretend to cut you, joking if you take down the site he'll chop your head off. You have to remember you have a 23-year-old uber nerd running one of the fastest-growing sites on the web. As mature as he could be, he also was still immature."
In Kagan's book, he recounts demoing a Facebook feature to Zuckerberg. Kagan says he and Chris Putnam, an engineer, had spent nearly a month working on the feature, which they thought Zuckerberg would love.
"[Zuckerberg] walks to Chris' computer and we demo the product to Mark -- Mark thought it was shit," states Kagan. "I know so because instead of giving product feedback, he screamed 'this is shit - redo it!,' threw water on Chris' computer, and walked away. All of us stood around in shock."
As Zuckerberg continues his climb up the listing of billionaires, he's likely set the samurai sword aside. But who knows -- no one at Facebook has stepped forward to comment on Kagan's accounts so far.
