The Facebook-insider memoir: A skeleton-key password and 4 other revelations

The company's early days were riddled with lax security measures and claims of sexual harassment... at least until COO Sheryl Sandberg cleaned things up

In the new memoir The Boy Kings, former Facebook employee Katherine Losse alleges that the company had a reputation for testing new female employees by making them look at inappropriate wa
(Image credit: barnesandnoble.com)

A few years before Facebook was a publicly traded giant closing in on a billion users worldwide, it was a small 50-employee company that had just moved out of founder Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard University dorm room and into a tiny office in downtown Palo Alto, Calif. In a new memoir The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network, Katherine Losse, an early employee at Facebook, recounts how the 2005 office had a distinctly collegiate tone akin to a frat house, complete with questionable security practices, alleged cases of sexual harassment, and more. This week The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from Losse's book. Here, five revelations from the eyes of one of Facebook's first female employees:

1. There was a "skeleton key" password

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