We Sze What You Did There
By Sarah Lacy
On May 19, 2012
Earlier this month, Paul Carr and I were in a cab headed to PandoMonthly, and he was showing me the cover illustration for our new ebook “Buy This Book Before You Buy Facebook.”
I was extraordinarily excited. I am obsessed with illustrators, because it’s such an old school media thing to have them on staff. And we’ve found some particularly great ones like our regular illustrator Hallie Bateman and Molly Crabapple who did the book cover.
The concept for the illustration was a bunch of random faces, but Paul thought it’d be funny to include some that played a prominent role in Facebook’s development. He was quizzing me in the cab to see if I could find them. Here’s Mark Zuckerberg tucked away in the bottom corner:
Marc Andreessen is easy to spot:
This is either Dustin Moskovitz or Sean Parker. I’m still not sure which. The sideburns say Moskovitz but the expression says Parker.
There are a few more I won’t spoil for you.
But Paul was stunned I couldn’t find one of my favorite people from the Facebook saga, Greylock partner David Sze. (Sze is also an investor in PandoDaily through Greylock’s Discovery Fund.) Back in 2006, Sze took a seemingly insane gamble investing in Facebook at a $500 million valuation. Today, he’s looking pretty smart. All the abuse he got at the time surely warranted a illustration on our book. But I looked and looked. No David Sze.
“Here he is!” Paul exclaimed, pointing to a guy in the top center who looked nothing like Sze.
When I informed him of that, he pulled up the picture he’d sent Crabapple. “See!! It looks just like him!”
One problem: Paul had sent a picture of David Tze, not David Sze. It is indeed a nice likeness of Tze. Only one problem: As near as I can tell, he had nothing to do with Facebook. Well done, Paul.
As for David Sze, I was concerned he might be a little miffed so I sent him a note this week apologizing. I got one back on the eve of Facebook’s IPO saying there were no hard feelings and to prove it he just updated his Facebook profile:
It’s rare that a VC that successful doesn’t take himself too seriously. (And another reason we’re excited to see what company he backs next.)
Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily.
She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011).
She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.
