That's why, for days before it was announced, top executives at Facebook desperately hid technical lead Dustin Moskovitz's plans to leave. They dithered as Mark Zuckerberg tried to persuade his cofounder and college roommate to stay, and others, led by COO Sheryl Sandberg, concocted a plan to spin his departure. That spin has now been dutifully printed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal: Facebook's changes are the "type of evolution you see among young growing companies and specifically young growing companies in Silicon Valley," company flack Larry Yu told the paper.

Sandberg, who closely directs the company's PR, would have us think that the uproar that has taken place at the social network since her arrival is a healthy evolution. It is not. The internal politicking she has introduced to the company is destructive, and has sent many of the company's best and brightest fleeing. The list of the departed includes data guru Jeff Hammerbacher, product VP Matt Cohler, platform director Ben Ling, and most recently, Justin Rosenstein, a top engineer who's leaving with Moskovitz. Operations VP Jonathan Heiliger may be next. The defections all hurt. But most of the blame lies with Zuckerberg himself.

Zuckerberg has always styled himself as the company's "founder," relegating the likes of Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, now Barack Obama's Web campaign director, to "cofounder" status. Never mind that this distinction doesn't exist in English; those who start a company are all equally founders.

Zuckerberg clearly considers himself first among equals; he once referred to Moskovitz as "disposable" and a "soldier." The former Harvard roommates patched over those insults, and Zuckerberg said he will rely on Moskovitz's counsel even after his departure.

If Moskovitz really thought he could guide Facebook's evolution, he would have stayed at the company, right? Zuckerberg has a history of churning through confidants. Napster cofounder Sean Parker helped establish Facebook in Silicon Valley as its president, only to be disappeared from the company. Former COO Owen Van Natta was in favor, then out. Sandberg had his ear for a while, but may be losing it. Lately, I hear he favors Christopher Cox, the twentysomething recent Stanford grad he recently tapped as the company's director of product. We'll see how long he stays by Zuckerberg's side.

This fickleness may be predictable from a 24-year-old. But it's fundamentally bad for the company. Yahoo thrived, in its early days, on the partnership between CEO Tim Koogle and founders Jerry Yang and Dave Filo. Google's triumvirate of its cofounders and CEO Eric Schmidt improved on that management form; the troika lends the company some stability by making sure decisions at the top are never unilateral.

Zuckerberg's insistence on the "founder" title suggests that he always planned to rule the company alone. It's a bad plan. His instincts on what kind of website will attract a 100 million users have been spot-on. But he has no business sense. At one point during the Facebook redesign process, he suggested getting rid of advertising altogether, having grown disillusioned with both old-style banner ads and the company's experiments with targeting ads to users' behavior.

Will Zuck ever find an equal partner, a sounding board who can help him turn Facebook into the large, ongoing concern he envisions? Dustin Moskovitz may not have been the right person. Nor, it seems, is Sheryl Sandberg.

Yet to staunch the bleeding of Facebook's technical talent, Zuckerberg will have to find someone to ground him — someone for whom he has enduring respect, who can moderate his worst impulses. Without it, there will be one word describing what's going to happen to Facebook: "founder."

Valleywag's coverage last week of Sandberg's spinning in response to the departure of a key employee was deemed, in some quarters, a "character attack." Yet Sandberg's character is the very issue here. Her response is very telling: First, she wrangled a long followup story from her frequent dinner guest Kara Swisher that called our story sexist, over-the-top — and factually correct.

Swisher's report is damning for Sandberg. It acknowledges that Facebook executive Matt Cohler, who left to join Benchmark Capital, was unhappy with Sandberg's leadership. It reports that Jonathan Heiliger, the company's infrastructure chief, has also been unhappy with Sandberg — Swisher errs only in saying that the two have patched things up. Swisher's new report also means that the version of Ben Ling's departure fed to her by the company last week was false.

Facebook executives have acknowledged all these facts. But characteristically, Sandberg has steered the discussion away from the real problem — the bad decisions she's made, the poor judgment she's demonstrated — and toward massaging reality. She is, even now, planning a new PR campaign to buff her image.

Did it ever occur to Sandberg to figure out why she rubs so many of Facebook's technical leaders the wrong way? Could it have anything to do with her meddling in matters that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said aren't her job? Facebook has real problems in Sandberg's area of responsibility. Billing, customer service, and other mundane-but-critical aspects of the social network's advertising operations are chaotic, and require fixing. Sandberg's moves to shore up her image suggest the real reason for her unpopularity within Facebook: Her overwhelming concern for style over substance. How ironic that that pointing that out has sent Sandberg spinning.

Do the math: Ling joined Facebook in October 2007. He's leaving Facebook in a few weeks, months before his one-year anniversary — and it normally takes one year of employment for stock options or restricted stock to vest. However miserable Ling was under Elliot Schrage — Sandberg's personal flack and de facto chief of staff, whom she put in charge of Facebook's development platform, to the utter shock of the entire Valley — can you imagine he walked away from that much money? Far more likely: Sandberg and Schrage asked him to resign in exchange for getting to keep his shares. Ling, who was well-regarded at both Google and Facebook, now gets to walk away from Sandberg's mess.

Cohler, formerly Facebook's product chief, has also made nice noises about Sandberg — and he, too, needed the cash. He's now a general partner at Benchmark Capital, where Sandberg's husband, Dave Goldberg, is employed as an entrepreneur-in-residence. (None of this is coincidence.) General partners at VC firms normally buy into the funds they invest; Benchmark Capital's most recent fund, raised in February, is an eye-popping $500 million.The amount Cohler would have to invest personally comes to roughly $500,000, by my estimates. Selling his Facebook shares seems like the most likely way he'll come up with that money. Isn't it likely that in exchange for making nice noises about Sandberg on the way out, Cohler got an assurance that Facebook won't make trouble about his share sales?

The fundamental problem with Sandberg's take-no-prisoners management style: It's exquisitely tuned for the zero-sum world of Washington, where you're either in power or out. She's treating her appointment as Facebook's COO like a new administration coming into the White House. Her years at Google, which was the only tech-startup game in town for the long years of the bust, reinforced the wrong lesson. Washington's bitter internal rivalries thrive on a scarcity of opportunity. Today's Valley has an abundance. Her employees have options, and not just the kind she can grant.

Which leaves the question: Why is Sandberg so determined to drive talent out of Facebook? My working theory: She wants to remake the company in her image. Here comes the Sandberg Administration! But to do so, she'll need to find skilled accomplices, not servile yes-men like Schrage (who wouldn't know an API if it extended his subclasses). And she'll need to articulate what, exactly, her new vision is.

For all of Mark Zuckerberg's flaws, he's created a website which will soon have 100 million users, and is worth billions of dollars according to a long line of Silicon Valley moneymen who are slavering to buy his employees' shares. What, exactly, has Sheryl Sandberg done, besides buy a lottery ticket by joining Google when it was still private?

Sometimes you have to tear down before you build. But no one knows what, if anything, Sandberg is building — besides fear and doubt. That's hardly the mark of a Silicon Valley leader. It's a tactic that may have worked in Washington, D.C., where Sandberg worked for the viciously political Clinton administration. But she's killing the company's morale with her Beltway tactics. If she has a bright idea, she'd better start talking about it. It will take far more than three days to rebuild this temple — and it's not clear she has time to spare.

We know Zuck was close to Adam D'Angelo. They went to High School together and even built the digital music software that first igniting Zuckerberg's entrepreneurial imagination back in his teens. Cohler was employee number five at Facebook — there when the company was one room big. Zuck recruited Hammerbacher, whom he knew from Harvard, to join the company from a presumably well-paying gig at Bear Stearns. With all his friends leaving, oon Zuckerberg won't have any Woz- or Allen-like buddy at the company.

The NVCA survey reveals why the problem will not self-correct over time. Most VCs are hired from outside the industry, rather than rising up through the ranks. Underlings, by and large, remain underlings, while VCs hire their buddies out of tech startups. A good example: The all-male, all-white team of Benchmark Capital, which recently added white male Facebook executive Matt Cohler as a general partner. That's not to say that Cohler's hire was undeserved — but it is utterly typical.

Cronyism is alive and well in the venture-capital industry, accounting for the active discrimination evidenced in its demographics. There's no doubt that women and minorities could make venture capitalists. The question is whether the dominant firms of Sand Hill Road will afford them the chance to prove themselves, by taking a shot on hiring someone who doesn't look like the rest of the team — or if those excluded from the industry will have to make the point the hard way, by making more money than the old guard. The latter would be very satisfying to watch happen.

2:07 p.m.: Zuckerberg says now that Facebook's available in Spanish, people are using Colombia to organize resistance against guerrilla armies. Wait — does that mean it's actually a tool of oppression?

2:08 p.m.: Facebook is about communicating "efficiently," Zuckerberg keeps saying. Efficient? Does he even use Facebook?

2:09 p.m.: Lacy asks Zuckerberg about terrorism. "Facebook has a relatively large population in London," says Zuckerberg. "Terrorism comes ... from a lack of empathy and understanding. People are growing up, they're relatively poor, they spend a lot of time studying with their imam. At the same time, they'll go out with their friends and drink on Friday nights and try to meet girls. Then they take pictures of themselves with their religious leaders holding guns. There are people who are at a point in their lives, a crossroads, deciding whether they're going to pursue terrorism. And people have told me that Facebook has helped them maintain connections with friends in Europe, in America, and maintain that empathy."

In other news, Zuckerberg's shoe:

2:13 p.m.: Lacy recounts the first time she interviewed Zuckerberg. "He's wearing a white T-shirt, and he was so nervous, he was sweating through his shirt," says Lacy. "The first time I inteerviewed Mark, I kept asking broader and broader questions, trying to get him to talk. Finally he said, 'I don't know how to answer that question. It's too broad.' I said, 'Mark, I'm trying to get you to say more than two words.' Mark said, 'That's really hard.' I said, 'Three words.'"

Right after Lacy's tale, Mark said, "What was the question?"

2:16 p.m.: I think Zuckerberg is talking about how antipoverty activists used Facebook to organize protests at a senator's church, home, and office.

2:18 p.m.:"We're running the business at breakeven," says Zuckerberg.

2:19 p.m.: Sarah Lacy just totally stole Zuckerberg's line. "So you're launching in France tonight," says Lacy. "How'd you get to that before me?" asks Zuckerberg. "Sorry, Brandee," says Lacy. Anyway: Facebook en français, tout de suite. Chouette!

2:23 p.m.: "There's this sense that you have this revenue from Microsoft that's not sustainable," says Lacy. "Are they happy with the deal?"

"I'm very sure that they're very happy with it," says Zuckerberg.

2:24 p.m.: Lacy asks Zuckerberg about his infamous "once every hundred years, media changes" line. "We got a little ahead of ourselves," he says. "We hadn't figured out as much as we thought we had."

2:26 p.m.: "Let's talk about Beacon," says Lacy. "WTF?" Zuckerberg's long answer:

Beacon isn't even a part of our ad team. It's part of our platform team. We think these large social networking sites are going from large monolithic sites like facebook.com ... to social services. A lot of them aren't even things we're building. Some of them are going to be inside facebook.com. An increasing amount of that is going to be outside facebook.com. What we were trying to do with Beacon was taking the first step with letting people take actions on other parts of the Web and feed back into what their friends are doing. It also ties into the ad system, because it can be an endorsement — someone you care about is doing something, that's much more effective.

2:29 p.m.: Lacy makes the apt point — argued earlier in Valleywag — that complaints about News Feed were much larger than Beacon protests, but suggests the larger concern about both features is privacy. Zuckerberg points out that people are much more likely to put their cell phone on Facebook because they're allowed to control which people see it.

2:32 p.m.: Why do I feel a strong urge to take a nap whenever Zuckerberg talks about "platforms" and "ecosystems"? I think he's saying he's trying to reduce application spam with algorithms. Because that worked so well with email, right?

2:34 p.m.: Lacy asks about rumors in the Financial Times that Facebook is talking to the record labels about building an iTunes killer. "What's up with that?" "I don't know," says Zuckerberg, deadpan. He then concedes that Facebook is talking to several companies, but there's "nothing to announce."

2:36 p.m.: "So you're Forbes's youngest billionaire," says Lacy. "We're just not focused on that," says Zuckerberg. Can't he just play a recording of the soundbite? That seems easier. The $15 billion valuation, he says, came about because the company wanted to raise the most money with the least dilution. "High expectations are tough," he concedes. "Having such a focus on money in the business can be tough for us, because it can self-select for people who are interested in that. We don't want people to join the company because they're going to make money very quickly."

2:39 p.m.: Ah, the IPO question. "It's not that we're opposed to going public," says Zuckerberg. "[The $15 billion valuation] throws down the gauntlet" to potential acquirers, observes Lacy. "For certain companies, that's the goal, to go public" or get sold, says Zuckerberg. "Yahoo offered us a billion dollars a few years back. The primary analysis that we were doing wasn't, 'Are we worth $1 billion?' We said, we have a chance to build a platform that fundamentally changes how people connect or communicate. How many times in your life do you have that chance? So we decided to go for it."

2:43 p.m.: "Did you get rid of some people who wanted to [sell to Yahoo]?" asks Lacy. "We made some management changes," says Zuckerberg. Is that a reference to recently departed COO Owen Van Natta? Or former CFO Mike Sheridan, who was replaced by Gideon Yu?

2:45 p.m.: "Let's talk about Sheryl [Sandberg]," says Lacy. "She's been called the token grownup." "We just passed this mark where we have 500 employees," says Zuckerberg. "That's crazy. I feel really lucky to have her."

2:46 p.m.: "How do you think she's going to negotiate that male-dominated environment?" asks Lacy. "She has a great track record of doing that. I don't think that will be an issue," says Zuckerberg. I note that Zuckerberg didn't dispute Lacy's observation.

2:48 p.m.: "Is it hard from you to step back from product management? Because you'd really be working on the product, right?" asks Lacy. (Zuckerberg recently tapped longtime Facebook executive Matt Cohler to run product management.) "CEO is more of a full-time job than I'd admitted," says Zuckerberg. "The CEO sets the tone for the organization. Being CEO is a good way to make sure the company focuses on that — that people keep their eyes on what's important."

2:52 p.m.: "You're a computer guy and you write longhand on paper," observes Lacy, who reveals that Zuckerberg takes notes in bound books. "Fantastic question," quips Zuckerberg, which provokes howls of laughter from the audience. Zuckerberg then takes away Lacy's glass of water, just to be safe.

2:57 p.m.: Audience questions. First one up is your typical privacy-and-sharing paranoiac. "I think the reason we don't have a lot of that stuff yet is that we haven't come up with both controls and good default settings so people don't have to do a lot of work," says Zuckerberg. "Facebook is still relatively constrained as a company. Things take time. We've realized that it's an issue."

3:00 p.m.: "Other than really rough interviews, what are the toughest obstacles Facebook faces?" asks a wiseacre. "Is he making fun of me or of you?" Zuckerberg asks Lacy.

3:02 p.m.: "Do you think Google's pissed that you have so much data trapped on Facebook?" asks an audience member. "They don't get pissed," says Zuckerberg. "They're nice guys." Then he gives some incredibly boring answer about "semi-private" and "semi-public" information. Five-word version: Good luck with that, Google.

Additional Coverage:

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Chamath Palihapitiya, the former AOL executive, now heads up marketing; having criticized Silicon Valley's white-male old boys' club, Palihapitiya must surely be pleased with Van Natta's comeuppance. Matt Cohler, the early LinkedIn employee cofounderwho jumped to Facebook some time ago, is now in charge of "business operations" and strategy. Gideon Yu, the recently hired CFO, is now free to fib about Facebook's finances, as he did as YouTube's CFO after that company was acquired by Google. And close Zuckerberg associates Dustin Moskovitz and Adam D'Angelo now have tighter reins on the company's products and technology.

But Zuckerberg could be setting himself up for a fall. By elevating Van Natta's rivals, he's going to find himself spending time on personality conflicts, infighting, and turf warfare instead of tending to the needs of his beloved users. Palihapitiya, Cohler, and Van Natta, for example, are, by their titles, charged with Facebook's "operations." The more Zuckerberg's executives spar over fields of authority, the less attention they'll pay to business. Zuckerberg has asserted his power — at the cost, potentially, of his abiity to get things done.