151. Facebook's First Senior Software Engineer, Karel Baloun

151. Facebook's First Senior Software Engineer, Karel Baloun

Author: Brian McCullough August 13, 2017 Duration: 1:02:48

Karel Baloun was the first senior software engineer hired at Facebook in 2005. This was after the Accel round of funding, when Facebook truly began to staff up and grow up. Baloun was only at Facebook for a year, from 2005 to 2006, but he provides some amazing insights about the company. What was Facebook’s culture like in 2005? What were the key innovations that ultimately let Facebook succeed where others failed? Would Zuckerberg make a good President of the United States? What became of Pokey, the mascot Facebook once considered launching?

You can buy Karel’s 2007 book here.


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Brian McCullough's Internet History Podcast digs into the foundational stories of our digital world, exploring the pivotal moments and forgotten detours between the rise of the first mainstream web browser and the dawn of the modern mobile era. This isn't just a dry recounting of dates and corporate maneuvers. Instead, the podcast weaves together the intersecting threads of technology, business, and the profound societal shifts they triggered. You'll hear about the personalities, the breakthrough products, the spectacular failures, and the cultural phenomena that collectively built the internet as we know it. Each episode serves as a chapter in a larger, ongoing narrative about how connectivity reshaped everything from commerce and communication to creativity and community. For anyone curious about how we got here, this series provides essential context, revealing the human drama behind the code and the hardware. Tune in for a deeply researched, engagingly told chronicle of the forces that defined a generation and continue to shape our future.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Internet History Podcast
Podcast Episodes
124. Founder of ReadWriteWeb, Richard MacManus [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:04:58
SummarySometimes you get to talk to your actual heroes. I've been reading Richard MacManus probably almost as long as he's been writing on the web. He is the founder of the popular ReadWriteWeb blog, and he was one of th…
123. Founder of Reel.com, Stuart Skorman [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:15
SummaryAt the dawn of e-commerce, if Amazon.com staked a claim in books, and sites like CDNow staked a claim in music, then Reel.com should be remembered as the important dot-com era player in movie retail. But more than…
122. The First Web Search Engine? With Oliver McBryan [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 23:51
If you’ll remember back to the chapter episode on the early search engines and Yahoo, I said that it’s hard to pin down exactly what the “first search engine” was. There were so many competing projects and technologies t…
121. Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath on Facebook, AIM and WinAmp [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:13
Most of you know Chamath Palihapitiya as one of the most prominent and progressive venture capitalists working today. But before forming Social Capital, Chamath was an early employee at a startup we've already covered, W…
118. The Birth of Amazon's 3rd Party Platform with John Rossman [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 42:09
John Rossman helped transform Amazon.com’s business. After the dotcom bubble burst, Amazon delved into a new business line that allowed third parties to do business off of Amazon’s platform, and make use of Amazon’s many…
117. Founder of Friendster and Nuzzel, Jonathan Abrams [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:04:22
Jonathan Abrams was the founder of the first modern social networking site, Friendster. This is essentially the story of the birth of social media… the ideas that inspired the very notion of social networking, the strugg…