Keen On… The Boy King: The Truth About Mark Zuckerberg From Facebook Employee #51 [TCTV]

Andrew Keen

Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award. As a pioneering Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur,... → Learn More

Monday, July 9th, 2012

A few months ago, I had Doug Edwards, Google employee #59, on the show to confess all about Google’s early days. But whatever Google ex-employees can do, ex-Facebook employees can do better. So instead of employee #59, we’ve lined up Facebook employee #51 to reveal the most intimate truths about what it was like to work at Mark Zuckerberg’s production in the very early days. Katherine Losse was not only the 51st person to join Facebook, but she’s now written a memorable tell-all about her experience as Zuckerberg’s personal ghostwriter in The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network, And it was thus a great honor to Skype with Losse about both her new book and her Facebook experience.

Losse didn’t disappoint. Did you know, for example, that all female employees at Facebook received t-shirts with Mark Zuckerberg’s profile photo on them to wear on his birthday? And did you know that a covert Facebook platform application internally created by Facebook developers displayed photos of users (mostly women, surprise surprise) for others to score. So here’s your opportunity to learn what life was really like at Facebook when Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t the most famous boy on earth and Facebook hadn’t become the third largest country in the world.


Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: February 1, 2004
IPO: NASDAQ:FB

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Person: Katherine Losse
Companies: Facebook

Worked at Facebook between 2005 and 2010, and at one point, was Mark Zuckerberg’s personal ghostwriter. Recently published her book, “The Boy Kings”, which takes readers on a journey through the fast growth of Facebook.

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