What You Wear to a $50 Million Deal Closing in Silicon Valley
August 11, 2009
FriendFeed grew out of Google's casual engineer culture, and the team didn't bother dressing up to sell the social aggregator to Facebook for $50 million, either. This picture does indeed speak volumes.
From left to right are Facebook's Vaughn Smith, FriendFeed co-founder Jim Norris, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor. But the winner is clearly the guy on the far right, Mark Zuckerberg: if the Facebook CEO was the one dropping $50 million in this situation, that only made him more entitled, under Silicon Valley social mores, to dressing in shorts without socks. Let's just hope he never uploads pictures of a multi-billion-dollar transaction; it's a good bet a Speedo would be involved.
For comparative purposes, this is what a merger looks like in New York, with an old media company involved:
