More Awesome Than Money (10 page)

That was the last they saw of Bill Joy.

—

Tuition for the design class was just about ten thousand dollars, and the check was signed “Casey Grippi.”

Janice Fraser looked at it and tried to place the name. She knew that Diaspora had a Daniel Grippi, and Max and Ilya and Raphael.

“Who's Casey Grippi?” she asked.

“That's my dad,” Dan said. “He's handling the money for us.”

The guys had been sent to Fraser by Mitch Kapor and Rob Mee. The entire Bay Area was filled with people who were ready to explain the gospel of tech start-up, none more so than venture capitalists who had, through accomplishment or delusion or their proximity to seams of investment gold, come to believe that they knew what they were doing.

Fraser was not another fish in the start-up capital pond, taking no stake in the companies. She was a design guru, a kind of mentor for hire. For ten to twelve weeks, she ran seminars to help young entrepreneurs find ways to build a product that wouldn't blow over in a stiff breeze. Diaspora was one of five start-ups in her summer 2010 class. Designers could come and go, the pixels could be moved all over the screen, but as crucial as how a thing looked, that was the simplest part of the endeavor. Discerning its purpose was far more difficult.

“A lot of people think that design is the skin. Pretty pixels,” Fraser told her classes. “That's not to diminish the importance of pretty pixels, but it's not enough. It's necessary but not sufficient.”

At the first session, Fraser moved to each group to hear them explain what they were doing. She listened to Max tell the genesis story—the Moglen speech, the pizza-fueled coding sessions, the Kickstarter rampage. Then she popped her North Star question.

“Who,” she asked, “are you building this for?”

Well, Max said, privacy on Facebook sucked. They were going to make it possible for people to have encrypted conversations. And the users would have the ability to take their data with them. There would be no question about who owned their personal information.

Dan had some ideas about taking away the limits on what a user could do—making it possible for a picture to be bigger, or to have a page of type.

Who, Fraser asked again and again, was Diaspora for?

“Is it for PLM?” she said.

That was Fraser's shorthand for People Like Me. Or people like Max, Dan, Ilya, and Rafi—distinctive personalities, unquestionably, but all members of the same food group, computer nerds. And proud of it. Were they building Diaspora for other guys who liked to hang out in the computer club and play online games? Google was an instance of something that was built for PLM. But that worked as a business because so many people felt they had to scratch the same itch of searching the Internet.

Gently, Fraser pushed her fingers through the holes of their work plan. They were working on creating a messaging function? Pictures would be shared? So? All the features wouldn't necessarily mean a thing unless they had an idea of who was going to use it. “Every application is
one person,” Fraser said. “You have to satisfy one person before you can make a market.”

For many years, the developers of free software prided themselves on a stripped-down aesthetic. Linux was a fine operating system, and could do as much or more than Microsoft's Windows, or Apple's OS X, but it required users to type strings of commands that in slicker products could be activated by clicking a single button. Plenty of free software was like a car with a manual transmission instead of an automatic one: the stick shift gave drivers a better feel for the car and the road, but required a level of attention to the motor and its gears that simply was unneeded in cars with automatic transmission. Apple had achieved its success with a slick, simple user interface, shorthanded as UI, which mediated the user experience, known as UX. To break free software out of its dowdy appearance, a company called Canonical had developed Ubuntu, a handsome, easy-to-use operating system based on a version of Linux known as Debian; its good looks were viewed with suspicion in some corners of the free-software communities. Not by the Diaspora guys, though. They had grown up with the clean dazzle and elegance of Apple products, and expected that everything would look good, and work simply.

But by itself, a great look meant nothing, Fraser warned. Without substance, a clear notion of who and what the product was for, a cool interface was the graven idol, the golden calf.

The right answer, or at least the truth, was that they were not building a product. They were creating a function, something that would make it possible to use the distributed, federated nature of the Internet for people to swap and share without paying a toll in data. That function was not a product that could be sold; it would be like trying to monetize breathing. Yet the four pizza-munching dudes were taking on the coloration of Silicon Valley, where ideas mattered only if they were the kindling for start-up businesses. The questions posed to start-ups were also put to them—interesting, provocative inquiries that did nothing to dislodge a premise that was not true and had little hope of becoming true.

At the next session, a week later, they offered ideas about trying to create a network where strong ties would thrive, and not be overgrown by the weeds of acquaintanceship.

“We're not just the un-Facebook,” Dan said. “We're not trying to out-Facebook Facebook. That's not interesting to us.”

Max said: “What is really interesting to us is how we can build a product around meaningful ties. We don't want to end social networking. We want to fix it.”

He brought along a deck of slides from a presentation by a Google researcher on the nature of online relationships. The thrust of it was that the existing social networks—that is, Facebook and the dying star of MySpace—did not encourage strong ties. Granting the obvious business interest of Google in undermining Facebook's spreading empire of content that was walled off from the relentless indexing machines of Google, the point was beyond dispute. There was no calibration. What you posted for the benefit of the softball team about the after-game beer party was the same thing that your mom saw.

Max spoke a mile a minute. Dan barely uttered a sound. Fraser suggested they draw the problem. Whether her students were garrulous or not, Fraser had often found that when people were at least temporarily emancipated from expressing themselves verbally, they could convey a thought visually. So Dan and Max drew an iceberg, a waterline where the peak protruded, and the underground mass. That tip was what people revealed online, shown to their weakest ties, the tiniest, usually least consequential bits of ephemera. Most of a person's identity was unseen, below the waterline. The hoariest of clichés, but it covered the ground that they needed. The fundamental shortcoming of the existing social networks, at least as the four saw it, was that everyone got to see the whole online iceberg. It was a dimension of the privacy problem that was a subset of the larger concern that had been mapped by Eben Moglen.

“Wouldn't it be good if you could really share with your strong ties?” Fraser asked.

—

Rafi was, in many ways, the oldest soul of the group, poker-faced under virtually all level of provocation. A diligent coder, he nevertheless did not permit the ravenous appetite of the project to consume all hours of his life. One day in mid-August, he called in sick. A stomach bug had laid him low. He was gone for the better part of a week, giving him an escape from the Diaspora grind.

While Rafi was away, Max brushed up on theories about the optimal, realistic size of an individual's social networks. On Facebook, people could have up to five thousand “friends,” a boundary so elastically promiscuous as to dilute the concept of friendship beyond recognition. Maybe, Max mused, Diaspora should emphasize quality over wholesale faint acquaintanceship.

Two decades earlier, Robin Dunbar, an English anthropologist, had studied thirty-eight primate species to see if the size of the neocortex—the “thinking” area of the brain—related to the number of stable social relationships the primate was able to maintain. Indeed it did. Based on the volume of the typical human neocortex, Dunbar projected that the mean number of relationships for people was 147.8. Roughly defined, that was how many people an individual could reasonably ask a favor of.

His number was heavily critiqued. Checked against real life, the research stood up: communities of Amish, the Bushmen of South Africa, Hutterites, Native American tribes, and military companies all formed into groups of about 150.
Bill Gore, the inventor of Gore-Tex fabric, walked into one of his early factories and realized that he no longer knew everyone. From then on, he built parking for only 150 people at each site, to ensure that the factories would not get beyond what he regarded as a manageable level.

More intimately, the primates studied by Dunbar belonged to smaller “grooming cliques,” a social function that, he postulated, was replaced in humans by language.
Whether they were picking bugs out of one another's hair, listening to tales of golf shots, or going on shopping trips, people got psychopharmacological benefits from the contacts, Dunbar and others argued.

It was the study of human networks that gave rise to the concept of “six degrees of separation.” In 1967, a psychologist named Stanley Milgram sent letters to random people in Omaha, Nebraska, and Wichita, Kansas, and explained that the final destination was a stockbroker in Boston. The object was for the people in the midwestern United States to mail their letters to someone they knew on a first-name basis who, in turn, might know the stockbroker. As letters moved along the chain, each person who received one was given the same instructions. The median number of “hops” was five and a half or six. Milgram published an article
on the study in the premier issue of
Psychology Today,
and later in academic journals. His methodology was widely criticized for introducing various kinds of experimental biases, and failing to account for the high percentage of letters that simply dropped out of the study. He died in 1984.

Yet Milgram was not far off. As Facebook encircled the world in digital ribbons, it provided data for the largest study ever conducted of social networks. It showed how many paths were needed to connect any two people, assuming they were not friends. Researchers working with Facebook reported in 2011 that 92 percent of all Facebook users—then about 721 million—could be connected in a path of five people, and 99.7 percent in a path of six. The average distance in the United States was 4.3 people.

So, yes, Milgram was right: there were no more than six degrees or so of separation among humans. But so was Dunbar: meaningful relationships didn't extend much beyond the second degree. The same study found that the median number of friends an individual member had was ninety-nine, and while there were people with thousands of friends, most had fewer than two hundred.

After Rafi came back, the four of them discussed it in a conference room.

“There's research that shows 150 is the number of relationships a person can plausibly maintain,” Max said. “I think that limiting it to 150 would be something we would do.”

The other guys thought there was some merit to this view, but Rafi came from sprawling families on both sides. Given a few minutes, he could probably add up more than one hundred cousins by going out to the second degree. About ten days earlier, a woman approached Rafi in the airport in Portland, Oregon, when they were on their way back to San Francisco from the federated social web conference.

“Are you a Sofaer?” she asked Rafi.

She, of course, was another cousin.

Limiting the number of friends on Diaspora to 150? He'd never get past family members.

“I think that's a terrible idea,” Rafi said. “I would never use that product.”

It was the kind of argument that flushed them out of the software engineering cave and into a conversation about social values.

“You can't be private with a thousand friends,” Max said.

Rafi made a face. He understood that. But the hard cap on how many friends? He foresaw tiffs and hurt feelings over who was in, who was out. “This could bring back high school,” Rafi said.

Max suggested that Rafi's resistance to the limit was due to his stomach virus.

“And you'll agree,” Max said, “when you get whatever was in the water last week out of your system.”

“I wasn't infected by whatever bullshit you heard last week,” Rafi said.

—

Late one afternoon, a tall and massive man with a shaved head stepped from the elevator on the third floor of 731 Market Street, and into the buzzing floor of Pivotal Labs. There was no receptionist. Instead, Yosem E. Companys beheld dozens of long tables and people plugged into headphones and laptops. No one seemed to be in charge, but the space had the focused energy of an anthill. He wandered from one end of the floor to the other, a city block, looking for faces he knew only from photographs.

A few times he asked people who didn't seem to be fully absorbed by their computer screens if they knew where the guys from Diaspora were. No one did. Of course, the four had no idea what Yosem looked like. Of the thousands of strangers who had gotten in touch with them, his messages had been the most resonant. Not long after he said he was going to bring them to the attention of Randy Komisar, they heard directly from the VC. He introduced them to a half dozen other people. All of this was done by e-mail, while they were in New York and Yosem was on the other side of the country in Palo Alto. When they moved out west, the fellows had invited him to dinner in thanks for all the introductions and spadework he had done.

He arrived a bit early. So he sat down at an open computer and ran through his e-mail for a little while, then wandered down to one of the conference areas and spotted someone he recognized: Ellen Pao, a Kleiner Perkins partner who worked with Randy Komisar. She was just finishing a meeting with the four.