Let Mark Zuckerberg Take You On a Romantic Woodland Stroll
The hiring practices of Silicon Valley tech companies are famously rigorous, but Facebook must be the only one to test physical strength. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes high-profile prospective hires for a hike behind the company's Palo Alto headquarters.
The New York Times' Nick Bilton spoke to some of the engineers and designers whom Zuckerberg fancied enough to invite on a stroll "along the wooded area of Palo Alto that skirts Stanford University." He takes them to a scenic lookout where they gaze upon Palo Alto's splendor. Then they make out while "Total Eclipse of the Heart" plays softly on the Chevy stereo. Er, actually Zuckerberg gives them a history of Silicon Valley tech companies, finishing with the big pitch:
"He pointed to Facebook and said that it would eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned," One person who went for a walk with Zuckerberg told the Times, "and that if I joined the company, I could be apart of it."
This is definitely indicative of a theme: Mark Zuckerberg has declared that he's only eating animals he kills with his own hands; plus, he's apparently traipsing around the woods, basking in the union of human technology and nature like a Silicon Valley's own Ralph Waldo Emerson. Could it be that the billionaire behind the most modern form of communication secretly yearns to be a 19th-century fur trapper?
[Image via Getty]