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CHAPTER 1
HOW IT HAPPENS
My father grew up on the grounds of a country club in Mount Airy, North Carolina, the town that inspired Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show. He was born in the early years of the Great Depression, and for the first decade of his life, his parents and he shared a single room in the back of the small clubhouse, heated by a wood stove. His father was the club manager and groundskeeper, and his mother worked in the pro shop. As a kid, he worked as a golf caddy, learning to endear himself to the golfers. When he became a traveling paper salesman as an adult, he used that charm to win the affection and loyalty of his customers.
As he sees it, he picked himself up by his bootstraps and made good on the American Dream, providing our family with a home, a stable income, and a middleclass lifestyle. Today he is 85, and his life's trajectory makes him skeptical that we need a guaranteed income in the United States.
My own life leads me to the opposite conclusion. My success at Facebook taught me that seemingly small events like who you choose to room with in college can have outsized impacts on the rest of your life.
To tell you how my dad and I eventually found common ground, I need to tell you the story of where I grew up, the rocket ship of Facebook's success, and the power of unrestricted cash transfers to transform people's lives.
Our family goes back generations in North Carolina and Virginia, but there is no Southern gentry in our blood. My mother was part of a large family of rural farmers, Lutherans who emigrated from Germany before the Revolutionary War. They spent the next 200 years tilling the rocky soil in the foothills of Appalachia. Her parents left the farm to become workers in the local textile mill. Both my parents were the first in their families to go to college, and they worked full time in good, stable jobs until they retired. My mom became a public school teacher, and my dad sold industrial paper to small-town printers. They settled down in Hickory, North Carolina, not far from where they grew up. As their respective parents grew older, they picked up the slack and paid many of their bills — they had gone further than anyone in their families ever had, and they were happy to help.
For the first five or six years of my life, our family belonged to New Jerusalem, a small church on the outskirts of Hickory. A simple, redbrick building with a steeple, the church sat on a small hill off a winding two-lane country road. The pastor and his family lived in a little parsonage across the way. The pictures on the stained glass windows inside the nave looked as if they were paint-by-number, and its wooden pews felt like they had been ordered out of a catalog and installed the day before. The cheapness of the setting didn't matter, because the people who came to worship at New Jerusalem knew how to rejoice. Weekly fellowship nights were full of spirited laughter and hugs all around. The latest gossip and group prayers were shared over large bowls of homemade potato salad and plates of fried chicken. On Sundays after services, congregants milled about on the lawn outside the church's firehouse-red doors and chatted about the hymns they'd sung that day and what was on the menu for Sunday dinner. I loved that hour after church in the sunshine. I remember playing tag with other kids in the maze of legs that surrounded my parents and dashing back to the safety of my mother to hide in the folds of her dress. For a time, my dad served on the church council, and the pastor's wife taught me to read. New Jerusalem felt like a second home.
But it was a long drive there from our actual home in the center of town. A year after I was born, my parents had moved us from a wooden, single-floor ranch-style house in the country into a smaller house in town with a fenced-in backyard just big enough for a little vegetable garden and some grass for our collie-mix, Smokey. The house was cramped even for a family of three, but I had my own room and there was a small sun porch in the back where we made peach ice cream with a hand-cranked machine in the summer. Our home sat a block away from a picture-perfect Southern downtown street lined with mansions that had magnolia trees in their front yards and wisteria vines growing in the back. We lived in the shadow of their grandeur but a world away in spirit.
When I started elementary school, we left New Jerusalem and my parents joined the church a block away from us, Holy Trinity, which happened to be one of the largest and richest in town. Our family walked there every week, my dad and I wearing suits and my mom her Sunday best. Holy Trinity was a fixture of our lives — I can count on one hand the number of Sundays that we didn't attend services — but it was also a place where our family stood out like a sore thumb. It was an enormous and towering building with cold stone floors, and the parishioners were wealthy and wanted you to know it. They liked the elite nature of the church and fought to keep it that way by exercising their snobbery over us. They smiled in the halls but never lingered to chat or invite my parents over for dinner.
I found a couple of friends in Sunday school, but I had a lot less fun with them than I did with the friends I made in the government-run after-school program. Every day after class, I reported to the gym for a couple hours of unstructured homework and play. Almost all of the other kids were black and brown, unlike me, and none of us was rich. Each day, my mom picked me up around five after she had finished teaching and writing her lesson plans.
Our days followed predictable rhythms. My mom made breakfast every morning and dinner every night, and we would go out to eat on Saturdays once a month. We visited my grandparents who lived down the street most evenings and picked up KFC after church to share as an extended family. Weekends were full of chores like mowing the lawn, cleaning the gutters, and vacuuming. My mom clipped coupons from the Sunday paper every week, and we occasionally stopped by the Stouffer's factory to buy rejected frozen meals in bulk for our deep freeze. We were thrifty and cheap, but we always had enough to make ends meet.
My parents worked hard to make sure I got the keys to every room they had been locked out of in their own lives. By the time I was eight, I was invited to join classes for the "gifted" — code in the small-town South for the white and wealthy — and I learned that I could be friends with the after-school kids and the rich kids at the same time. I felt a little like a chameleon, trying to be everything to everyone all at once, pleasing my parents and finding time to be with the friends with whom I was the most relaxed.
As I grew older, I was increasingly socialized into groups of white, wealthy kids, but from early on, I was suspicious of their privilege. I joined sports leagues and enrolled in the manners-building cotillion classes that my parents had never been invited into when they were teenagers. But the rest of the kids in my after-school program, who were just as smart, didn't get tracked into the gifted classes or the cotillion classes or sports teams. Their parents didn't belong to the white church or sit a few pews away from the school principal each Sunday.
While the color of my skin helped me blend in and offered its own set of privileges, it was clear that I was not one of the Hickory elites. We drove an Oldsmobile; the people up the street, Lexuses. We were more devout in our religion, kneeling together as a family each evening for our nightly prayers. The well-to-do went to the country club pool in the summer; we went to the YMCA. I gradually made it into the social class my parents wanted me to be a part of, but in spirit, I knew I never really belonged there. As I became more aware of the world as a teenager, I felt a percolating anger and a desire to defend my parents from the men who snubbed their noses at my dad and the women who never invited my mom to bridge or dinner parties.
By the time I was 14, I had become restless. I was at the top of my class and had a handful of friends, but I found few people who liked the things that I did — classical music, homework, and books. I wasn't clear-eyed about it at the time, but I was gay and in a place where I knew that was anything but okay. My parents told me I could do anything I wanted, and I took their words literally. I wanted to go to a high school where everyone loved to read the fattest books on the shelf and there was a culture of openness and tolerance, unlike the culture of Hickory. One day I searched for "best high school in America" on one of the pre-Google search engines of the early Internet, and I thought I had discovered paradise.
I saw photos of leafy campuses, smiling students, and Oxford-style libraries stacked high with books. Every one of the schools had a gay student group, and a lot of the graduates went to colleges like Yale and Harvard. I applied to several boarding schools, all in liberal New England, without having ever stepped foot anywhere near there. I didn't do it on a lark, but I knew the idea was far-fetched. My parents looked on, unsure if this was part of the plan. I was accepted everywhere I applied. Phillips Academy, often called Andover, offered me a financial aid package, but it wasn't enough. My parents had saved $40,000 to pay for my college, an enormous amount for them, and a single year at Andover cost just shy of that. Even with the financial aid, they would have exhausted the whole $40,000 before I even started college. I called up the admissions agent and explained the situation. They called back and increased the package to nearly a full ride. My parents, nervous and reluctant to see their only child leave so soon, nevertheless agreed to allow me to go.
The day I arrived on campus was idyllic. I had taken a $19 shared SuperShuttle from Boston Logan Airport, and as the blue van pulled up in front of the school, I caught a first glimpse of the vast green lawns, known as the Great Quad, washed in autumn light. Stepping down from the van with a single large rolling suitcase in tow, I must have appeared more than a little out of place. Southern, religious, a scholarship kid, and closeted, I was in a sea of other teenagers with white polo shirts, copper-red shorts, and penny loafers that their parents in finance had bought them over the summer in Nantucket. I had no common language and no common interests with these children of America's elite, who had come from the top private schools and the wealthiest neighborhoods of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston. They were friendly enough. No one made fun of me to my face, but neither did they seem all that interested in spending more than a minute or two in my presence.
I settled into a dorm room with a reclusive roommate from Greenwich, a wealthy Connecticut enclave outside New York, and struggled to make friends. Over the following months, I dreaded nothing more than the challenge of finding someone to sit with at meals in one of the school's four dining halls. One was for the popular kids, another for the jocks, a third for theater types, and the fourth for faculty, their kids, and the stray misfit. I tried my hand at each, but every time I sat down with a tray and joined a group, I struggled to know the right thing to say, the right person to be. Afraid of rejection, I froze and ended up saying nothing. I took to skipping meals, filling my stomach with Butterfingers and Reese's from the dorm's basement vending machine instead.
I had made it into the country club, faster than my parents had ever imagined, but that did not mean I fit in. A robust financial aid program had catapulted me to the top of the American social hierarchy nearly overnight, and I was still not "one of them." Instead of trying harder to fit in, I swung hard in the opposite direction, and the rage at anything establishment, authoritarian, or rich that had simmered in Hickory boiled over. I took up smoking — the trashiest kind of cigarettes I could find — and looked for other scholarship kids I could relate to. With few friends and no resources, I fell back on the habits I had brought to the school in the first place and channeled my anger into disciplined study. I wasn't going to embrace the shame of isolation and go home. I intended to beat every single one of those students who'd arrived with first-class educations, designer clothes, and inborn entitlement. I created a community of one in the silent study room of the wood-paneled library.
In time, I started to get the hang of it. Fancying myself an anthropologist in the making, I dropped in on school dances on Saturday nights for an hour or two and hung around the sidelines watching how they worked. I saw how my dorm mates came by each other's rooms casually and made plans to meet one another in the dining hall at a certain time. I began to get the drift. I lost my Southern accent and my religion by the end of my sophomore year. Endless hours of study enabled me to go toe-to-toe with the smartest of the bunch, and I joined the leadership of the campus newspaper and made a real friend. A year later, I made a couple more. In the fall of my senior year, I came out of the closet and got into Harvard with another financial aid package, this time, no haggling required.
The summer after I graduated, I backpacked across Europe on a budget of $20 a day with three friends, studying Botticellis in Rome and how to order coffee properly in France. That fall I arrived at Harvard and realized that I was now one of the immaculately prepared students from a best-in-class school. I still lacked the sense that I belonged, but at least now I knew how to "play the role," as my father had always encouraged me to do. I was only 18 years old that fall, but I knew that friends from Hickory and peers at Harvard saw in me the kind of "up by the bootstraps" success our country supposedly makes possible.
Then, with the success of Facebook, that story was put on steroids. My sophomore year of college, I chose to room with an acquaintance I had met freshman year, Mark Zuckerberg, in order to be placed in the same dorm as many of my female friends. Dustin Moskovitz and Billy Olson were paired with Mark and me by chance, and the four of us lived in a single suite in Kirkland House. We got along well, but we weren't a tight-knit group. Mark launched multiple projects that fall — a study guide for a class and a now infamous "hot or not" website that compared Harvard students' faces to one another. He was hauled in front of the disciplinary committee for that one.
Around the first of the year in 2004, Mark started talking about a new project that would enable students to voluntarily list themselves on a website. Mark and I had gone to rival boarding schools, Phillips Exeter and Phillips Andover, that were founded by different branches of the same family. Both produced paper "facebooks," spiral-bound directories of their students, printed at the same shop located somewhere between the two. All they contained were the students' names, ID photos, the towns they came from, and their years of enrollment and graduation. As both Mark and I knew, they also provided fodder for endless late-night dorm room conversations: Who was the best-looking? Was this person gay? Would that person make it through the year without getting kicked out? The digital Facebook we launched that winter at Harvard was not specifically built to imitate those spiral-bound relics from high school, but it felt similar because it tapped into the same desire to gaze at others and collectively judge. Most importantly, unlike the paper books where you had no control over how you looked, Facebook gave you the power to choose which profile photo was just right — at least for the self you wanted to be for the next hour or two. That's how the obsession with Facebook took root in the early days: you had to constantly click around to see who had updated their profiles most recently, sleuth out what they had changed, and speculate as to why.
The initial version of Facebook we launched was bare-bones, similar to the popular open social network Friendster, but open only to Harvard students. Mark was user number four, I was number five, and our roommate Dustin was number six. (Users one through three were test accounts.) We sent a few e-mails to our friends inviting them to join, and within three weeks, 6,000 students signed up. The rocket ship began to take off.
While Mark enlisted Dustin to help build the site and open it up to other colleges, I prepared promotional plans for Harvard and the new schools and helped design core features on the site, like messaging and an early news product. The non-techie of the group, I took responsibility for how the site might be used and how others might perceive it. I pitched in wherever I could to tweak a feature, improve an interface, or make sure a reporter knew the facts. At that stage, Facebook was mostly a fun side project, more something to bond with my roommates over than a way to change the world. Seeing how quickly we could make it grow was almost like a game.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Fair Shot"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Chris Hughes.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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