Time’s Lev Grossman, writing about Mark Zuckerberg’s relentless quest to get every human on the planet online and on Facebook:

The story of Facebook’s first decade was one of relentless, rapacious growth, from a dorm-room side project to a global service with 8,000 employees and 1.35 billion users, on whose unprotesting backs Zuckerberg has built an advertising engine that generated $7.87 billion last year, a billion and a half of it profit. Lately, Zuckerberg has been thinking about what the story of Facebook’s second decade should be and what most becomes the leader of a social entity that, if it were a country, would be the second most populous in the world, only slightly smaller than China.

This is an enjoyable, educational read. We get a sense of the current incarnation of Mark Zuckerberg and we get to know a bit about Facebook, the company.

When you walk into Facebook’s headquarters for the first time, the overwhelming impression you get is of raw, unbridled plenitude. There are bowls overflowing with free candy and fridges crammed with free Diet Coke and bins full of free Kind bars. They don’t have horns with fruits and vegetables spilling out of them, but they might as well.

The campus is built around a sun-drenched courtyard crisscrossed by well-groomed employees strolling and laughing and wheeling bikes. Those Facebookies who aren’t strolling and laughing and wheeling are bent over desks in open-plan office areas, looking ungodly busy with some exciting, impossibly hard task that they’re probably being paid a ton of money to perform. Arranged around the courtyard (where the word hack appears in giant letters, clearly readable on Google Earth if not from actual outer space) are restaurants — Lightning Bolt’s Smoke Shack, Teddy’s Nacho Royale, Big Tony’s Pizzeria — that seem like normal restaurants right up until you try to pay, when you realize they don’t accept money. Neither does the barbershop or the dry cleaner or the ice cream shop. It’s all free.

This sounds very much like Google’s approach, provide food and basic services so employees can spend more time focused on the job at hand.

My favorite:

Because of the limits of space and time, a lot of Silicon Valley companies don’t build new headquarters; they just take over the discarded offices of older firms, like hermit crabs. Facebook’s headquarters used to belong to Sun Microsystems, a onetime power-house of innovation that collapsed and was acquired by Oracle in 2009. When Facebook moved in, Zuckerberg made over the whole place, but he didn’t change the sign out front, he just turned it around and put Facebook on the other side. The old sign remains as a reminder of what happens when you take your eye off the ball.

Lots more to this, well worth the read.