What You Wear to a $50 Million Deal Closing in Silicon Valley
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:
UPDATE: When Patricia Handschiegel sold StyleDiary in 2007, she snapped a decidedly unglamorous picture of herself at the end of the closing, when the fashionista found herself clad in a t-shirt, her hair pulled back. "This shit makes you humble," she told us at the time. Indeed!
(Top pic by FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit; bottom pic by Getty Images)
