Watch out for Facebook pals and Quora

San Francisco: All eyes are on Facebook, which is on the verge of a $5 billion (Dh18.3 billion) initial public stock offering. But the people to watch are an elite group of former company insiders. Already loaded, or soon to be, thanks to the looming Wall Street payday, these Facebook pals are furiously building the next generation of Silicon Valley companies. And they're doing it together.

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, the world's youngest billionaire at 27, has teamed with Facebook alumnus Justin Rosenstein on Asana, which makes online software that helps people work together more effectively.

Adam D'Angelo, Facebook's first chief technology officer, is working with Facebook pal Charlie Cheever on Quora, a website whose aim is to connect people to information. Former Facebook executive Matt Cohler is now a venture capitalist bankrolling his old co-workers, including Dave Morin, who runs a mobile social network called Path.

"Very few people get to change the world with their friends. Now we are setting out to do it again," said Kevin Colleran, 31, Facebook's first ad sales guy, who's now an investor handing out money and advice. Whether these Facebook friends, most still in their 20s, can deliver on these youthful ambitions remains to be seen. Silicon Valley is littered with the wreckage of one-time meteors that burned through all their hype and cash.

What's clear is that it pays to have friends like these in Silicon Valley, where it's all about whom you know and whom you work with. Innovation, researchers have found, is an inherently social act, owing as much to these tightknit networks as the garage tinkering of individual entrepreneurs.

"The basic unit of innovation in Silicon Valley is the team," Silicon Valley futurist Paul Saffo said. "Innovation is an irrational act, and the only way to get through that irrationality is to surround yourself with other people as crazy and obsessed with changing the world as you are."

For decades, these networks have seeded Silicon Valley with breakthrough ideas and ventures. It all began with Frederick Terman, who, as a young Stanford faculty member in the 1930s, encouraged his engineering students William Hewlett and David Packard to start a company. Terman brought together young entrepreneurs and local industry, giving rise to a powerful and wealthy high-tech community to rival the East Coast.

Interlocking social networks were forged in cubicles across Silicon Valley. In the 1960s the "traitorous eight" defected from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to start a competing company. Fairchild Semiconductor quickly surpassed Shockley and became a training ground for engineers. When it began to stumble, the original eight founders moved on to new ventures.

Eugene Kleiner became one of the region's most important venture capitalists. Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce co-founded Intel Corporation.

The most famous social network is the "PayPal mafia", a high-profile band of executives who sold the payments company to EBay. They then built and backed some of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley, including Yelp, YouTube and Facebook. Facebook's first Silicon Valley investor was Peter Thiel of Founders Fund, who was PayPal's chief executive and co-founder.

Now it's the Facebook pals' turn. With social networking wired into their brains, who better to out-friend the PayPal mafia?

Experience

"We have all been through the experience of building something that had a massive, massive impact on the world. Going out a second time and starting a new company, nothing short of that is very interesting," Moskovitz said in an interview in Asana's San Francisco headquarters.

"Everyone is mission-oriented. They want to do something that will touch everyone on Earth."

As the company grew, it became harder for Moskovitz to keep tabs on what various teams were doing. So he built a tool to help Facebook employees organise and discuss tasks. He and Rosenstein bonded over their shared desire to create ways to work more efficiently. In 2008, they left Facebook to concentrate on building a tool to help any group of people be more productive and stay on track.

"We are focused on building a company that will last. We expect to be a $100-billion company," said Rosenstein, 28.

"We run the company with the intent and the expectation to be the next in that lineage." D'Angelo, 27, and Cheever, 30, have similarly lofty goals.

Over Chinese food in Facebook's offices in the fall of 2008, they began discussing Q&A sites that enabled users to answer one another's questions. The services were wildly popular. But the answers were often wrong or useless.

D'Angelo and Cheever decided they could do better, so they started work on Quora in 2009. They rented cramped offices over an art supply store in an old building in Palo Alto, hired programming and design prodigies, and got experts to weigh in with thoughtful, authoritative answers to hundreds of thousands of questions.

Won over fans

Traffic grew quickly as Quora won over fans with answers that were not only smart but entertaining.

Quora landed $11 million in funding and an $86-million valuation via Benchmark Capital's Cohler and now has 33 employees.

Like others in the Facebook network, D'Angelo and Cheever seem to read each other's thoughts and finish each other's sentences. The depth of these friendships is unusual even in Silicon Valley. These Face-book pals don't just call on one another for money and advice, start companies together and sit on each other's boards. They also hook up to celebrate life's big moments.

— Los Angeles Times