You can thank Soleio Cuervo for the ‘Like’ button
ENLARGE
Soleio Cuervo isn’t resentful that Facebook expanded its menu of emotions beyond the “Like” button. Now there are emojis to tell your friends that you’re sad, angry, laughing, surprised, or that you really love something. As opposed to just liking it.
Mr. Cuervo, who went to work for the social-media juggernaut in 2005 as employee No. 30 and one of its first designers, is credited for bringing the world that now ubiquitous “Like” icon.
“Disrespected?” he asked as we sat in Facebook’s offices, on Ninth Street off Broadway. “Not at all. If there’s one thing about Facebook, we’ve never been sentimental about its past.”
“If you don’t evolve yourself,” he added, citing the company’s ethos, “outside forces will evolve you.”
Mr. Cuervo left Facebook in 2011, becoming chief designer at Dropbox, the cloud-storage company. He’s currently an investor and adviser to early-stage tech firms.
He’s also a graduate of New Jersey SEEDS, a Newark-based educational nonprofit that prepares and helps place high-achieving students from low-income families in selective private day schools, boarding schools and colleges.
In 1995, Mr. Cuervo graduated from one of SEEDS’s earliest programs. Last week, he flew in from Los Altos, Calif., where he lives, to address one of the organization’s alumni events about cultivating diversity in tech.
I got the sense that, at 34 years old, he’s treated as something of an elder statesman on his occasional NYC Facebook visits, even though he worked out of the company’s California headquarters.
And while there’s no such thing as a gold-plated lifetime building pass, “I don’t have too much trouble getting into the building,” he stated modestly.
I couldn’t resist asking Mr. Cuervo what he thought of “The Social Network,” the Oscar-winning 2010 movie about Facebook’s origins and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
“When they depicted the 1 million-user party, the office they showed looked something like this,” he said, motioning to the sprawling office outside the glassed-in conference room where we met. (It was filled with appropriately fashion-backward programmers, free snacks and a sign quoting Yoda: “Do or do not. There is no try.”) “It was just a bunch of guys sitting around a table. It felt wrong somebody would own our story.”
He also took issue with the movie’s depiction of Mr. Zuckerberg. “Early Facebook attracted highly competitive personalities,” Mr. Cuervo remembered. “A lot was the culture Zuck created around his drive to win. But it never came from a hostile place.”
Mr. Cuervo, a first-generation American whose family was from Bogotá, Colombia, traces his own success to an amiable fifth-grade bully in Piscataway, N.J., where he grew up. “He said, ‘Dude, you keep getting ‘A’s.’ You should skip a grade.”
That planted the seed, no pun intended, in Mr. Cuervo’s mind that led him to SEEDS, St. Andrews boarding school in Delaware, and Duke University.
“It was like Hogwarts before there was Hogwarts,” he remembered of St. Andrews. “Up to that point I hadn’t been exposed to kids who were highly motivated from accomplished families.”
He said he was no longer “a top student just by showing up.”
Nonetheless, his design talent was quickly recognized by a teacher who was so impressed with the newsletter Mr. Cuervo produced for the boarding school’s indoor soccer league that he enlisted him to work during the summer in St. Andrews’s communications office.
And when he went to Duke in 1999 he quickly made a name for himself designing websites for college rock bands and faculty members. That is when he had another epiphany, realizing that there was code behind the clunky desktop publishing software he was using.
“Why the hell was I monkeying around?” he recalled. “I could just write the code. It’s like discovering there’s an engine in a car. All that work ultimately brought me to San Francisco. It kicked off my career as a developer.”
I use Facebook’s “Like” button sparingly, if at all. Seeing it as shorthand, even a substitute, for communication, rather than the real thing. A dumbing down of culture.
Mr. Cuervo didn’t take the criticism personally, though he politely disagreed, backed up by data. “There was a lot of concern that we’d cannibalize engagement,” he recalled of the period when “Like” was in the testing phase. “The fear was that people were going to stop leaving comments and just click a button.”
What happened instead was the universe of opinion sharing—on everything from cat videos to presidential candidates—we inhabit today.
“Actually, it acted like a social lubricant,” said Mr. Cuervo. “Because we radically lowered the cost of engagement, we increased the likelihood.”