counsel position at Facebook and revealed
Ullyot was one of the few names he was
recommending for the job. “He told me
not to get overly excited because [the
candidates he suggested] all had strengths
and weaknesses relative to each other so
it would probably turn on unpredictable
factors like chemistry,” Ullyot says. “In
the interview, Mark [Zuckerberg] and I hit
it off better than you might expect. He’s
famously a fan of The West Wing, and he
was interested in what it was like to clerk
for the Supreme Court and work in the
White House.” In that interview, Ullyot
says Zuckerberg struck him as a person he
wanted to work for: “He’s such a smart and
intellectually curious guy, and he wants to
learn more about subjects he doesn’t know
much about.”
When the offer came, Ullyot wondered
whether it would be disloyal to leave
Kirkland, which he had returned to only a
short period before.
“That tells you about his character,”
Cappuccio says. ” This was an offer that had
a 90 percent chance of turning him into a
hundred-millionaire, and his first reaction
was whether this was convenient for the
law firm. It took me and some of the other
guys at Kirkland to convince him not to
worry about it.”
Ullyot says his initial sense of
Facebook, which still remains the
same, was that it was “a humble team
of serious people who understood the
magnitude of the challenges before
them. They were a more serious
operation than I might have thought.
They were a sober, serious team, and not
high-fiving, self-congratulatory.”
It was significant to Ullyot that Sheryl
Sandberg, who had been chief of staff
at the Treasury Department during the
Clinton administration, had come aboard as
Zuckerberg’s No. 2. Coincidentally, she had
married one of Ullyot’s college roommates.
Before Facebook, he had perhaps three
interactions with her, including one at her
wedding, in 2004. Ullyot was working at
the White House at the time of the wedding
and at one point during that weekend, she
started debating with him about the war in
Iraq and the No Child Left Behind public-education program.
“I thought, ‘This is your wedding. I come
in peace and I’m happy to be your token
Republican,’” he says with a laugh. “She
loves to debate and has a great sense
of humor. She turned out to be a great
booster of mine with Mark in the process
[of being hired as general counsel].”
“My main concern,” says Sam
O’Rourke, deputy general counsel of
intellectual property at Facebook, “was
not related to his political affiliation, but
was he going to come in and change
everything—bring in his own people, and
his own outside law firm? To his credit,
he took a long time to understand the
business and the people he had, and
didn’t make any structural changes for
five or six months.”
As with many quick-growing startups,
the legal department had developed by
happenstance, and Ullyot organized it in
a more logical way, around the triad of IP,
product/regulatory/litigation issues, and
corporate and commercial law. But his
most important task was strengthening
the ties with the engineering
department. “We need to adapt our style
and be respected by the engineers,” he
says. “In an engineering company [like
Facebook], we need to go the extra mile
and show we get it.”
Before his family moved from D.C. to join
him, Ullyot started going to Facebook’s
hackathons. At these storied events,
programmers and people from other
departments get together to work through
the night on impromptu projects they don’t
have time for during the regular day.
“That was cool to see a senior executive
at a hackathon at 11 or 12 o’clock at night,”
Keyani says. “It was kind of mind-blowing.”
In the fall of 2008, after newly arriving
at Facebook, Ullyot organized the legal
department to participate en masse in
a hackathon. Over the years, a few legal
team members, like Ullyot himself and
the department’s open source lawyer,
who has a programming background,
even won the coveted “Hackathon Hero”
award, which is given for outstanding
achievement during each of the sessions.
Such efforts certainly brought the legal
and engineering groups closer together, as
did Ullyot’s openness (or “transparency,” a
CONTINUED ON PAGE 363
favorite Facebook term). “He posts pictures
of himself and his kids at the Vikings
training camp on his Facebook page,”
Keyani says. “He’s sharing his life, and it
humanizes him. People feel free to ask him
questions. The whole legal team follows
his example.”
Sandberg praises Ullyot’s commitment
to the startup’s culture. “We have a saying
at Facebook that you should ‘bring your
whole self to work.’ Ted does this every day,
and he infuses his teams with our mantra
to move fast and be bold.”
Indeed, the legal team was organized to
work in the same way engineers do—fast.
“Our ability to move fast is a competitive
advantage,” Ullyot says. “Most companies,
and most legal departments, take longer
to reduce a handshake deal to a legally
binding deal. But we tell our outside firms
they need to move fast too.”
For example, when Facebook spent
$1 billion in cash and stock to purchase
Instagram, a photo sharing company,
it was widely reported that Zuckerberg
acted as a lone wolf. Ullyot bristles at the
suggestion that the legal department
was not deeply involved. “When a deal
gets done very quickly, it’s not the case
[that] the lawyers were not involved,” he
says. “The lawyers were working around-the-clock with a move-fast attitude on
that deal.”
That philosophy also influences day-to-day activities. Keyani recalls emailing
a member of the legal team about a
new idea he and a colleague had been
working on. The lawyer he called “set a
meeting immediately, quickly came to
a decision, and followed that up with
another meeting,” he says. “The legal
department operates fast, like engineers.
You’re not shooting an email to them
and getting a response two to three
business days later. I’ve been at other
big companies, and legal does slow you
down from launching things.”
This partnership was crucial in
convincing the engineering staff of the
value of patents. “We’re an engineering-centric firm, and there’s a healthy
skepticism for patents,” O’Rourke
says. “The engineers have come a
long way from not wanting to be in
16
SUPERLAWYERS.COM
AT TORNE YS SELECTED TO SUPER LAW YERS WERE CHOSEN IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROCESS ON PAGE 8.
