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.