Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Making Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You were basically the 10th engineer at Facebook. I imagine there was a lot of pain and suffering that people don't often hear about. I didn't sleep for more than four hours at a time. I'd wake up every four hours and check the report and see if anyone was attacking the site. They don't tell you about that stuff in the movies. You worked 120 hours per week. You had no hobbies. I don't want to take away from the romanticism of it.

Starting point is 00:00:18 It's just that most often we hear those romantic stories from the successes. It's a healthy thing for people to want to throw themselves into something and take that risk. But it is not glamorous, like at the time. The news feed. That was one of your early projects. at Facebook. People did not want it. They were wrong, clearly. Now, Newsfeed was an easier case than people suspect. Everyone was outraged at the same time as they immediately doubled their usage of the product. In terms of the economic utility, the Venn diagram of Boz of News Feed and ads,

Starting point is 00:00:44 create a trillion dollars of value. Today, my guest is Andrew Bosworth, or Boz, as most people know him. Boss is the chief technology officer of META. He joined what was then called Facebook in early 2006 as one of the first engineers and during his 18-year tenure at Meta, he created some of the most impactful and important products in internet history, including the Facebook News Feed, which was the first ever algorithmically ranked content feed of any social network, and is basically what people think of as Facebook today. He also built the original Facebook mobile ads platform, which he then ran for another four years. He also helped build and scale the Facebook messaging system, the profile, the timeline Facebook groups, and even,

Starting point is 00:01:28 Even the internal engineering boot camp. Most recently he served as VP of ads and business platform, where he led engineering, product, research, analytics, and design. And in 2017, he created the company's AR, VR, VR organization, now called Reality Labs. These days, Andrew leads met his efforts in AR, VR, and mixed reality, along with consumer hardware across Quest, Rayband MetaSmart Glasses and more. In our wide-ranging conversation, we touch on so many important lessons and stories. What it was really like in the early days of Facebook, why you should be asking your manager

Starting point is 00:02:01 for help more often, why communication is the job, lessons for Meta's turnaround over the past couple of years, bosses thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro, a bunch of leadership and career advice, what it was like to build the very first news feed and lessons from that experience, and stories of failure and stories of success, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Andrew Bosworth, aka. Baws, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you

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Starting point is 00:03:25 slash plenty. That's VA mta.com slash Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next generation AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Muro, ClickUp, and Draft Kings rely on Epo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance

Starting point is 00:03:52 of new features. And Epo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous rigorous. deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I left most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Epo does all that and more, with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time and accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytic cycles.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Epo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the AB testing flywheel. Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Epo at getepo.com slash lenny and 10x your experiment velocity. That's get ePPO.com slash lenny. Baws, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. I've been a long time fan of your program and all the things that you've put in out. So I'm glad to finally get a chance to join. Same. I'm really excited to have you here. I have at least a billion questions I want to ask you. But I want to start with a few fun facts that I've found about you. And what if I go through them and then just pick one that stands out and then tell the story behind it. How is that sound?

Starting point is 00:05:17 It sounds good. Okay. You went to 14 proms. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to keep going. Okay. Wow, that's a strong opener. I'm either one. You're a national Taekwondo champion in college. You're Mark Zuckerberg's Tia in college in a class on AI, which isn't actually how you landed at Facebook, for my understanding. Harvard was recruiting you to play football for them.

Starting point is 00:05:42 You were very active in the 4-H club, and you raised animals and showed them at county fairs when you were growing up. You once shared a stage with David Copperfield. That's true. MC Hammer once told you that your outfit was stylish. And President George W. Bush complimented you on your shoes and the shine of your head. Yeah, these are all true. I want to say, wow, first of all, I got to make sure that people understand it.

Starting point is 00:06:07 I was a national collegiate champion in as a green belt, which is like a very, that's like being the JV champion. Just so everyone's clear on what that is. It's a heavyweight, heavyweight sparring. I will tell the prom story is a funny one. It's related to the 4-H story. It was a big time 4-Her National 4-H kind of Hall of Fame, did all this stuff there. As a concept to that, I was, you know, it's co-froachers a wonderful program, youth program. It's a co-ed program.

Starting point is 00:06:32 And I was all over the state, all over the country, doing, you know, leadership events and doing these conferences and doing a lot of public speaking. And almost every 4-H event has a dance. I don't know that. They have like at the end of like the conference at the end of the, literally like camp. You'd go camping for a week at the end. There's a dance. And so as a consequence, the most important thing, if you want to go to a lot of problems, I was a good dancer.

Starting point is 00:06:54 And it turns out when like the high level bit, at least in the 1990s for girls selecting who they might want to go to prom with was will he and can he dance. And the answer with me was yes. And it combined that with the fact that I knew a bunch of girls who went to different schools. That's a recipe for success right there. If that's the goal of it somebody has to my junior year and 12 my senior year. I was with the three and one weekend, a Friday, a Saturday, and a Sunday night. Another fun fact about you is you were basically the 10th engineer at Facebook initially, way before it was a clear success story.

Starting point is 00:07:29 I imagine there was a lot of pain and suffering and struggle that people don't often hear about those early days. They see a movie like the social network. It looks like, oh, that was so much fun. I got to start a company. It's going to become a trillion-dollar success story. I'm curious just what those early days were like, are there memories that stand out to you? Yeah, there's a bit of a joke in the 10th thing, which is me and five other guys all

Starting point is 00:07:49 joined at the same time and there was nine people, nine engineers before us, we joined the same day, so we're all the 10th engineer. So somewhere between 10 and 16, depending on how you want to, how you want to do the numeration on that. I've written this about this in my blog and I tell this story a lot, which is, it was fun and there was tremendous camaraderie and, you know, memories that were formed, but they were formed in a kind of a forge of really intense times. You know, at that time, almost all of us lived within one mile of the office. We ate most of our meals together because we were working, not to say that we weren't also friends, but because we were working, it's like, oh, cool, it's like just roll into a meal and roll back into work. And there's little things that

Starting point is 00:08:27 you don't appreciate, which is like, there was nobody to help you. There was no expert. And so it wasn't like, hey, I'm struggling with this one tricky problem. Who should I talk to? It's like, nobody. You should talk to yourself and figure this out. Or it's like, oh, man, like my servers are out of capacity. It's like, cool, you should go to Fry's Electronics. You should buy a bunch of components. You should build a new server and then you should run it. And like maybe drive it into the Kolo rack it and then get back and run it. People really undervalue the fact that when you go to work, even a moderate mid-sized corporation today, especially with the tremendous growth of startups supporting startups,

Starting point is 00:09:01 things like payroll and finance and IT and HR, and, you know, these things are professionally handled in many cases. That was just not the case in the early 2000s. It was just like you and like your personal car and like whatever you wanted to do with your time. I don't want to take away from the romanticism of it. It's just that most often we hear those romantic stories from the successes. We so rarely hear somebody who went through really sacrificing a lot of my 20s from any kind of social or, you know, like outgoing fun environment.

Starting point is 00:09:37 It paid off for me, so no one feels bad for me, nor should they. But there are other people who do the exact same thing. Maybe they worked harder. Maybe they were smarter. Maybe they did better. And it didn't play out for them. And it's a big sacrifice. And so I like, I love that people, I love the enthusiasm for startups.

Starting point is 00:09:51 I love startup culture. I think it's a healthy thing for people to want to throw themselves into something and take that risk. But it is not glamorous, like at the time. In retrospect, it's like, oh, we have a little halo around it. But at the time, it doesn't feel glamorous. Yeah. In this post, you mentioned you said that you worked 120 hours per week. You had no hobbies and you gained a lot of weight.

Starting point is 00:10:13 And yeah. We drank a lot to make up. for it. So I gained up a lot of, you weren't eating healthy. It was, it was crazy. There's a time, I think I said, I told this before that there was a time where one of the first things I built was an anti-spam, kind of anti-scraping defense mechanism. But we didn't have any ops support. There was no like 24-7 online support. So I built this tool. I had to wake up every four hours for about two years. I didn't sleep for more than four hours at a time. I'd wake up every four hours and check the report and to see if anyone was attacking the site. And if they were, I was up

Starting point is 00:10:47 and it had to go battle back. And if they weren't, cool, I'd go back to sleep. But that's not, they don't tell you about that stuff in the movies, you know. That's like worse, almost as worse than having a kid, a new born. And nobody asked me to do it. It was just like, I took it up. Nobody even asked me to do the anti-spaim, anti-scraping stuff. I just like, that was a problem.

Starting point is 00:11:05 And I went and did that. And that was the solution I come up. If I was a better engineer, maybe I'd have solved a better problem. So maybe just to close out that thread. When you talk to founders, what advice do you give them along these lines? I want to be cautious about this because the first thing I tell founders is that I've never been a founder and I want to recognize the difference like I joined in January 9th, 2006. That's almost two years after Mark started the company. I didn't have to do, I wasn't involved with fundraising.

Starting point is 00:11:32 I didn't have to do any of that side of the things. And I didn't have to deal with, you know, the board or like the business side of the things. I really was lucky in a way to have joined when I did. That's the first thing I tell founders is like, you should take my advice to the greatest salt. I have not actually been in your shoes. If I can compliment you really, one of the things I like about your program is there's a whole system of professionals in our industry. And I was, when I grew up in technology in the Valley, right, you always heard about like the ACM, right, the Associated of Computing Machinery. You're these legendary professional organizations that supported people in our fields.

Starting point is 00:12:09 And by the nature of the rapid pace of change in the technology and the nature of the engagement of those institutions, even academics, even academia broadly, kind of are out of touch that the tools that you got from those places weren't useful in our field. So I do think the mentorship that we give each other has been a critical and sustaining resource. There is today now resources like your podcast and your newsletter that are actually really designed to help people who are professionals in our industry in a way that has almost kind of missing for 15, 20 years. I love to see that because if you're an up-and-coming PM, literally you used to have to know somebody. And ask them a question. And so a lot of times what I'm helping founders with, I can help them

Starting point is 00:12:50 with the technology choices. I can think through the technology choices. I can think through the management, the organization structure. But I also try to be very clear. There's a bunch of stuff that I just was never had to expose to it. So even as we just talk about how tough it was for the average engineer joining, you know, Facebook in 2006, man, it was even tougher for Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 probably. And that's not that that's a story that's been told, I'm sure. But still, So I think these are both, it's just like, it's almost all scale and variant. No matter how far you dial back, the challenges kind of are interesting and are worth talking about. One of you may, maybe your most popular posts is this quote that you share about the advice you often give.

Starting point is 00:13:27 What you say is the advice I find I have to give more frequently than any other in my career as a manager, a board member, an advisor, and a friend is that for people to more directly leverage their leaders. Yeah. Can you talk about that and what that means and what that looks like? It's such a normal and natural healthy thing. and by the way, we do it in our personal relationships, like I said in the post, like we want to do it ourselves. We want to do it ourselves to prove to everyone that we can do it ourselves. And we think in our heads, if I ask for help, haven't I already given up that goal? Haven't I just admitted defeat on one of my top level goals, which is to demonstrate that I can do it myself? But what's so often

Starting point is 00:14:04 we forget is like more often than not, your job is not to do it yourself. Your job is to get it done. is to have the thing done, done well, done right, done competently. And a lot of times the tools that you need to do that live with your manager, with your partner, with your advisor, with your mentor. Like, that's where they live. So it's like, you know, how many times as a manager have I gone through and somebody's, you know, I've told them, here's the job. They're like, I got it.

Starting point is 00:14:32 They go off. They come back. It's done. It's wrong. And I'm not blaming them for it being wrong. They didn't check in with me. They misunderstood. We miscommunicated.

Starting point is 00:14:40 I'll take the L on that. That's no problem. But here we are, six months later, it's not done right. Because they misunderstood the brief. We miscommunicated over the brief. Or they come back and it took a year. And I'm like, why did this take a year instead of six months? And they're like, oh, man, I had all these things I had to deal with where if they had

Starting point is 00:14:55 emailed me, I could have bulldozed that stuff. I could have cleared the path. I could have said, oh, no, no, no, no. Don't about that. This is the thing. And then we'd have been done six months sooner and they would have been less frustrated. And so light touches. Now, I do think as a manager, we also have a job to say, hey, you know, that's kind of the work.

Starting point is 00:15:13 So you've got to go figure that out. And one of my things I always tell my managers is one of the most powerful things we do is refuse to rule. Someone will bring me a thing. A lot of times we feel obligated to like weigh in and help. I'd be like, nope, I think you've got it. Like, I think the challenges you're facing are the right challenges. I think you're approaching it in the right way. Like, just do your best there.

Starting point is 00:15:32 And like, that's what it is. And so there is a responsibility as well for those of us who are leaders, mentors, advisors, board members to do that. But by the way, we did, that's a personal relationship, right? Like, you're with your partner and you're trying to do something the right way,

Starting point is 00:15:45 but you're not talking about it. You're just taking a huge risk there. And for very little reward, like, they're not going to be mad if you ask them. Like, hey, do you want to, is this how you wanted it to done? Like, I don't know. And so I do think it's kind of funny

Starting point is 00:15:58 how much we build these castles in our mind, these little silos that keep us from engaging the structures that are built around us, that are designed to, help us succeed. I saw this great quote actually just yesterday. I saw Patrick Stewart, who was one of my favorite actors of all time and whose characters I love. And he talked about people going on casting calls. And this is a brutal thing for actors, right? You're going on 30, 40 things. You're getting rejected. It's tough. Everyone's kind of heard about this. And he said,

Starting point is 00:16:26 no one wants you to succeed more than the person you are auditioning for. Because they want you to be awesome. Because as soon as you're awesome, they're done. Like, they want you to be amazing. That's like your manager. Nobody wants you to be more awesome than your manager does. Because when you're amazing, your manager, his life gets easier, her life gets easier. So I just think that's like the mentality we get into is like, no, no, no, like they're testing me. They're not. They are rooting for you.

Starting point is 00:16:51 I promise you that. I love that advice. I imagine the reason people don't do this, as you said, is they don't want their manager to think they don't know what they're doing or they can't solve it. Do you have any advice and guidance for when it makes sense to go reach out and ask? One of the things I think for people who are timid about this especially is I think you can put a framing around it that's really easy for your manager to engage with it. You can say, hey, I'm making progress on this.

Starting point is 00:17:16 This is what I'm blocked on. This is the current program. And I'll even say like, hey, if this all looks good to you, no response required. If there is something here that you want me to do better, different, that you think you could help with, you know, let me know. I love a type, you know, like a five, ten sentence email, no response required. Here's where things are.

Starting point is 00:17:40 Even if I, even if everything is going really well, I feel, am I cool? This is a, this is a, this person understands the urgency, they understand the assignment. And they're giving me a little heartbeat, a little ping back. And then also if two weeks later, let's say the blocking issue is bad, then you say, hey, I am sorry, but I do actually need your help now. I'm actually blocked on this thing. I have the context. I have a mental model of you, you know, toiling away on the right thing,

Starting point is 00:18:10 on the thing I asked you to do over there. Even then, when you're blocked, you can make my life super easy. Like, hey, what I'd love for you to do, if you could send an email to this person, here's a draft with like this thoughts, that would help. Or it's like, here are specific questions framed up. Like, I think this is what you want. Is this right? Yes or no?

Starting point is 00:18:30 If no, okay, we'll come back and we'll spend more time. If yes, we're all good. It makes it. So now it's like, not only am I up to speed, I have a mental model. I'm engaged. Also, you've made it super cheap for me to help you. I just like, takes, and people are always surprised. People who work from you are always surprised when I tell them how big a part of my job is

Starting point is 00:18:50 doing these little types of things. It's a little spinning plates at my scale. I don't know, I've got 10 or a half. 15,000 employees, depending on how you want to count different things. And so you're just like, every now and then I got to get a whole new plate, a whole new rod and just really put the effort into it. But for the most part, I'm just like trying to touch everything and keep the momentum going. And so if something falls and somebody didn't tell me that, hey, we're losing rotational

Starting point is 00:19:15 velocity here. We got to losing momentum. Oh, I'm bummed. I'm like, ah, now that plate fell. I've got to start a whole new thing over here now. So I think, well, just underestimate, I think of my job differently than my job actually. My job is actually tons of little touches. So I think a key takeaway here is one, index more towards asking your manager and leaders for help.

Starting point is 00:19:35 And I love this way of framing it of doesn't always need to be like, here's what I need from you. It's here's what's happening. Here's things that might be blocking me. Here's questions I have. Here's things that are going on. This is actually similar to something I found really powerful that I'll share real quickly, this idea of a state of, I call it the state of Lenny email. And I sent this email to my manager every week. The state of Lenny, it's kind of like state of the union.

Starting point is 00:19:55 and it's here's my current priorities, here's what's on my mind broadly, and then here's blockers that I need your help with. We actually used to have a format for that. We called HPMs, highlight people me. And every manager at Facebook from like 2008 to like 2014

Starting point is 00:20:15 would send to their manager or even their leadership group. I mean, at one point when I was running what we called Com Apps, I just sent it to like Zuck in the whole leadership group. It's like, what's the highlights? And it highlights a flow, like what's the big ticket things you need to know? Where are people?

Starting point is 00:20:30 Like, is somebody in trouble? Is somebody at risk? Is somebody doing really amazing work that needs a shoutout? And then me, how are you personally doing? HPMs, we call them. Actually, it's funny. I hadn't thought about that in a long time. But yeah, I think this kind of thing can work.

Starting point is 00:20:42 And look, every manager is different. So even at the meta level, by the way, is another success. I don't think people do is they want to treat every manager the same. And that's not going to work because every manager is different. So, but every manager you can ask, how do you like to get updates? Like, you can ask them when you first start working with them. Like, hey, like, what's your cadence? Like, how do you like, how do you like to stay informed?

Starting point is 00:21:04 And so for me, like, I do regular one on ones as I've gotten the orgs gotten bigger. Those have gotten more distant. So people have replaced those with more written things. But like, no manager will get pissed if you. It's like, how do you like to get information about me? Like, that's a totally reasonable thing to ask. I love the specific idea you shared of just like drafting the email to, say, the other team leader of like, here's what I need you to tell them that would really unblock

Starting point is 00:21:25 this thing. That's such a cool idea. By the way, and I always put my own, I don't take that copy, paste it. Like, you know, I'm always looking at that and be like, okay, I understand. A lot of it is actually not about what you want the other person to hear. It's about like the voice, the tone. It includes a lot of history. I don't know. Have you been going back and forth with them for 12 rounds? And this is going to feel to them like I'm really come over the top? Or is it like, hey, first time you're hearing about this, my bad. here's what we're doing, need your help. So a lot of it isn't even about,

Starting point is 00:21:55 oh, making my life easy because I want to copy, paste. A lot of it is actually there's a rich set of information in how you tone and how you draft that note. That's going to help me land it correctly and not feel like I'm just out of band, you know, heavy coming in. This touches on something that I often hear is very core to the way meta works, which is transparency.

Starting point is 00:22:17 Anyone can ask Zuck questions at the Q&As. People are encouraged to post constantly. internally of what they're thinking, what they're working on. All the data is shared publicly, which often leads to leaks, which I hear you're very, you hate. And that is a pet pee of yours. It just feels like a violation of the team trust. It just feels like, I grew up with playing sports, right? It was football, soccer, track.

Starting point is 00:22:38 And like, you just can't imagine one of your guys like calling out the play to the other team. It's like, can you imagine what you would do in that case? Like, you're off the team. I'm sorry. You can't be here. Anyways, sorry, carry on. Yeah, and there's so many more people. It's hard to find.

Starting point is 00:22:50 Who is this? So with this downside as an example, and it's also, I mentioned there's other downsides also takes a lot of work and it puts people on the spot a lot of times. Whatever you've seen as benefits and why is that such a big part of meta's way of working? Yeah, this kind comes back to, I think, the principle that really good, talented people, you want to leverage them fully. You really want to make sure that they are fully leveraged. And so anytime they have the wrong information or they don't have the information,

Starting point is 00:23:19 you've now blocked one of the economically most valuable things that your company possesses, which is this person's time, attention, talent. Not only that, you've also made them more frustrated, and now they are more likely to leave. If the lifeblood of any company are the people inside of it who collectively commit to some kind of a goal and mission and work together, then you want to maximize that potential. and creating this really open information ecosystem is one of the ways that we do that. So often great phenomenal work that has happened that our company has not come from this one top-down mandate, but has come from people understanding not just like what we're trying

Starting point is 00:24:05 to accomplish top-down, but also having way more information at their disposal to be able to act on it. And so it's, you know, people have talked about to. about top down or bottoms up culture. It's a bit of a myth in my opinion. If you've ever met Mark Zuckerberg, he is not a bottom's up thing. The ideas that we're pursuing

Starting point is 00:24:25 are Mark Zuckerberg's ideas, first and foremost. That's not to say that he's not open to new ones, and of course he is. And that's a form of bottom up. People can bring ideas to him and he internalizes them and acts them or not. But when he brings things top down,

Starting point is 00:24:39 he doesn't, he's not micromanaging. He's in the details. I'll be careful on that. But he does create the same. space for you to bring back three or four versions of the thing that he's talking about, and then he shapes it from there. And you can't do that if you don't have degrees of freedom, sure, but also if you don't have the information. Otherwise, if you don't have the information available, what we're trying to accomplish, why we're trying to do it, what the infrastructure is

Starting point is 00:25:04 like, what the availability is like, what the performance is going to be like, well, you just are stuck. You're just going to have to follow the script. That's very boring for high talent, high creativity, high engaged people. Now, it does come at a tremendous price. You have to get really good at managing information on the incoming. Most people and most companies consume all the information that's given to them, but the information itself is carefully managed. Right?

Starting point is 00:25:28 Like they're getting all the information they're intended to get. We've turned that on its head, and it sounds great, but it's not free. Even somebody senior coming from outside the company to the company, one thing I have to coach them on is like, How do you find signal amongst all the noise? You have to have a system for managing your information. You have to have a system for triaging the incoming, getting rid of a bunch of stuff that is on the wrong channel

Starting point is 00:25:56 or it doesn't matter to you, figuring out what's the groups that you want to be a part of, but you consume only when you choose to and where are the things where you're getting push-notives. Like, that's the real-time thing. And that takes some time. This point you made about bottom-up first top-down is really interesting because when I think of meta,

Starting point is 00:26:11 I think it's a very bottom-up culture. I hear everyone comes up with their ideas, runs experiments, it's very encouraged to just try stuff, and it's really interesting to hear that, and it makes a lot of sense that most of the big ideas actually do come from the top. It's a bit, it's just like one of these mythology things. I don't think it's the wrong, as a contract.

Starting point is 00:26:30 It's more bottoms up than many other companies because you do have these degrees of freedom within the construct. But like, make no mistake, like Mark or me or Chris Cox or Javie, like they have very strong opinions about what we should be doing as a company. And you have to, your bottoms upness works within that framework. But we are also, it is true that you can ask Mark any question and he's going to answer it. Same with me.

Starting point is 00:26:52 Same with Chris. Same with Harvey. And also that like we certainly take inspiration from the discussion that we have with employees. So I don't know. It's just not a black and white as people kind of tend to paint it. I think one of the biggest lessons here is making it at least feel like you have a lot of say.

Starting point is 00:27:05 Like even though a company is very, here is the big strategic pillar. There's arena. You're very good at making people feel like they can have an impact in the same. And can I tell you, the most important thing is just giving people clear guidelines. So they know where they, where can they, where do they have space and where do they have no space? You know, one thing is that we go in these reviews with Mark or my team with me, I'm sure. And I'm like, this is weird. Like for this part of the UI, it is going to hear like, I will draw it for you.

Starting point is 00:27:31 It's going to be like this. And another part, I'm like, cool, that's important to. I don't have a clear vision of it. Why don't you do it? So you like, so there's just really clear. guard rails of like, okay, like, where are we just on assignment and where do we have more flexibility? Is there an example of that that comes to mind where you were just like very in the details and drawing the screen? Over the course of time, there's been quite a few examples. I think early on

Starting point is 00:27:54 when we were working on News Feed, you know, Mark was absolutely whiteboarding every single like pixel that, you know, the team had to put on the front end. On the back end, he was like, make it rank, like have some ranking, you know? So I felt like I was lucky. I was lucky. there because I was just like, cool, like I'm off to the races on some ranking stuff and like, you know, all these other Chris Cox and all these other guys are having to like really pixel match these things. But it's not always that way, by the way. So now fast forward and we're talking about ranking. It's not like markers always hands off on that. When we got into modernizing our ranking systems, which we've done over the last five years, Mark was heavily

Starting point is 00:28:29 involved. Like, hey, what's the what's the mix shift and like, how are you weighing different things? And so, you know, if you can go both ways, for me personally, I've gotten really involved in kind of some relatively esoteric things, I was really adamant, for example, that hand tracking and mixed reality make it into the headset. That's not that there weren't any supporters in the team. Obviously, we had a hand tracking team,

Starting point is 00:28:48 which was phenomenal mixed reality team. But there was a lot of people who were like, they did not feel those features were going to be critical for this to become a mainstream device. I always believe that they were for ease of use and for kind of thing. So like, I just like really forced the issue and didn't give anyone any room and held really high standards for the performance benchmarks.

Starting point is 00:29:05 We were going to hit on the hand tracking. And teams told me it was a problem. possible. And it wasn't. It did great. This touches on something that comes up a lot on this podcast, and there's this debate between how in the weeds founders and exec should be, whether they delegate, empower, versus, no, we're just going to do it this way. I'm going to be very involved in every mock. And there's always this like up and down that happens where it's like, okay, cool, we're going to let people run and do their thing. And then things start to not work as well often.

Starting point is 00:29:33 And then, cool, we're going to take back control. You have just a perspective on when it makes sense to go deep, how founders exact should think about that? Such a useless answer for founders, but it depends on the weeds. Like, you know, like there are some weeds that really matter and there's some weeds that really just don't. And I should say, like, that doesn't mean they don't matter at all. You have to do them. But like, they aren't the hinge upon which success or failure will happen. Yeah, like, there's people I really respect, Brian Chesky's been on and said, like, look, the Airbnb is going to work only on the things that I can work on. Like, it's just that's the

Starting point is 00:30:07 extent of what it's going to do. And that's a super extreme form of it. I have a lot of respect for him and how they're working things. I think that if you have great super talented people that you can trust who can own bigger pieces, that's one option. If there are ways to structure it so that you can check in effectively and make sure that it's on track, that's another way to structure it. And there probably is still work happening at Airbnb that has to happen, finance and accounting and HR, that like Brian isn't personally managing. So there are clearly non-technical areas that, that we do illegal, there are areas that we already, we do trust that this is happening at.

Starting point is 00:30:41 And so I think a lot of founders regret delegating too much from what I, you know, my conversations and I totally get that. Or they delegated something critical that really turned out to be the most important thing. For me, the judgment is like, how do you most important determine what is what matters the most? And so Mark, we joke inside of meta, to this day, we call it the eye of saron,

Starting point is 00:31:06 When Mark has determined that the thing that you're working on is the most important thing, there is no detail too small for him to notice. Like, he will be in a review and in the same review will be like strategically, I think we're off course. And also this one pixel is definitely wrong. You have to fix that. Like, you know, that's a big range. Frankly, if I'll be a little bit self-congratiate, I pride myself to be able to do the same. And I think people who work with me often comment that the style of leadership that we have,

Starting point is 00:31:39 and I think Chris Cox is the same, is that where it's like we will go high to low on the things that matter a ton. And there's a bunch of other things that certainly matter. Like we're glad we're doing them. But either they have pretty clear roadmaps, pretty clear examples in the industry, or it's like that's a feature that you have to have but isn't going to determine success or failure. So getting it into rough shape and then iterating on it is fine. And so I think it really does depend on the weeds how deep you want to get. It's so funny. I use exactly that same metaphor that I have Sauron when I talk about working on things at Airbnb that matter a lot to Brian.

Starting point is 00:32:15 And my advice to people is you don't want to be in that I of Sauron for too long in your career because you're just going to burn out if you're working the most important thing all the time. But you want to be close. You don't want to be in the shire, but you want to be like around the... That's right. They're both. So I worked for years in an ad. I read from 2012, 2017.

Starting point is 00:32:32 I ran ads in business platform, this big ads group. And it was an area where certainly was very important, but Mark had so many other things going on with the transition to mobile. He did kind of delegate to me. And it was awesome. And it was so cool to have that kind of, you know, trust from him. And also, you're constantly terrified because, like, Mark does not know. Like, what if this is all, you know, it's like, my leads to be worried because like,

Starting point is 00:32:58 they just had had a review with Mark in a while. And it's like, yeah, you suffer in the intensity of the, the gaze of Sauron, you also suffer in the shadow of its absence. There's no perfect place to be. That's hilarious. I'm trying to think of like the part of Middle Earth that has a metaphor for for that. Yeah. Okay. So you talked about the news feed, which was one of your very earliest projects at

Starting point is 00:33:20 Facebook. Here's a couple of fun facts I know about the news feed. One is that it was the very first algorithmic news feed of its kind of any social network and maybe of any sort of product like this. Yeah. And two is the very first AI code that was written in Facebook to rank the actual newsfeed. So there were a lot of firsts. And clearly this became a huge deal. The newsfeed is essentially what people think of when they think of Facebook now.

Starting point is 00:33:44 But it was super controversial when it came out. People were very against this. They did not want to be sharing this much information on people or so they thought. And then they realized eventually, oh, this is actually exactly what I want. What did you learn from going through that experience of building something that people initially reject and then later realize that they actually do want this and this is exactly what they're waiting for. This is a story that you tell a lot actually in through your interviews, which is just like,

Starting point is 00:34:11 you have to have conviction in what you're building. You're choosing your customers as much as your customers are choosing you is one way I think about it sometimes. And one mistake that you do see sometimes startups make is they get an early cohort of users whose needs actually take them kind of orthogonal to a larger market. And so they become kind of held hostage by their early, customers. Now, so we've time and time again, we've had a vision for what we thought this

Starting point is 00:34:37 should look like. And it wasn't the thing we were delivering right now. And so people who are using the thing we currently had were not sure that that changes what they wanted. But we had a confidence that over time they would. And we're not always right, but in these cases we were right. Now, Newsfeed was an easier case than people suspect because everyone was outraged. At the same time as they immediately doubled their usage of the product. So we had a few advantages there,

Starting point is 00:35:06 which was literally like, everyone was like, I hate this so much, and they would refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh. And so we're like, okay,

Starting point is 00:35:12 wait, this is a, there's cognitive dissonance here between what the stated preferences and what the revealed preferences are in the economic sense. So Newsfeed was a little easier than people suspect to stick with.

Starting point is 00:35:23 But people sometimes misunderstand that. They think, oh, the lesson is don't listen to your customers, not at all. And we certainly care tremendous about. And even with Newsfeed, we did actually screw some things up.

Starting point is 00:35:31 I kind of always make this joke that it's almost like, you know, you're at the party and music's loud, you're talking to somebody, and the music cuts out right when you're saying something at a super high volume, and so everyone in the party hears the last thing you said. Now, you were saying it in a public place, so it wasn't like it was a private comment, but you also didn't mean to broadcast it at that volume.

Starting point is 00:35:49 We kind of did that to the entire user base, because we took what had been wallposts, which sure anybody could have gone to that profile and seen and then put it kind of on blast, like on Maine, you know, as the kids say these days, put it on main. And so we did that. I do think we like, I don't want to say, like, we did screw things up.

Starting point is 00:36:06 Like it wasn't like, oh, this is a clause execution. So another thing to know is like, when did you screw something small up and when did you do something big up? Like, when is the thing itself wrong versus when were the details wrong? That is an art. That is a real art. And you don't always have user data to determine it like we did. And so a lot of that is do you have a clear vision and intuition for what you expected

Starting point is 00:36:29 it to happen and then what happened instead and can you diagnose the delta there. So in the news feed case, we made a bunch of little mistakes. The thing itself was right. And I really am quite proud of the work we did there. Me and Chris Cox at the most core, probably in the engineering side, which he saw on the bus the PM. There was no ranked feeds before that. We did have some AI that I'd built before for the anti-spam, anti-things, but it was pretty rudimentary. So it was probably the first consumer AI that was in a website of that kind around content. And we built like the most efficient monetizing surface in history, outside of search, I think. For those who are curious, I don't use monetization because I think money is the most important

Starting point is 00:37:07 thing. I do think it suggests the economic power you've created, which I do think correlates very strongly with human utility, although, you know, obviously I respect that some people may disagree. Yeah. In terms of the economic utility, the Venn diagram of Boz of News Feed and ads, create a trillion dollars of value. It's not, well done.

Starting point is 00:37:25 It's not nothing. We're proud of that work. You have this quote in one of your posts about the news feed where you said it consumed me more fully than anything in life had ever consumed me. It opened up to me the truth that when you're passionate about something, you do better work, you do smarter work, and you're an order of magnitude more productive. There's no substitute for it. One thing I've learned about myself since that post, actually, is just the degree to which I am somebody who is inclined to be passionate about things. It's a gift that I'm very lucky to have. I understand that's not every person.

Starting point is 00:37:54 And so, like, actually, the ads thing is a good example. Mark told me to go work on ads, I was like, no, I don't think I have a passion for that. I had this idea of myself, I had a very strong identity of myself as this like AI infrastructure product guy and I was like working in this space. And nope, I was wrong. I just like I'm a guy who gets excited about things. Once I get into ads, it's like, oh, this is fascinating. It's a three-sided marketplace and there's always different.

Starting point is 00:38:19 It was like a real, you know, it felt like I was playing chess times in terms of of the moves or the other players in the industry. And I was like super pumped about that. And then when you wanted me to work on hardware, I was like, no, I'm a software guy. I'm a software guy, Mark. And I love this work. I just like, that's such a fascinating space that I mean, I've learned so much.

Starting point is 00:38:34 So I do think that's right. I do think when I find something I'm passionate about, that's good. What I have learned since then is to give myself the space to understand if I can get passionate about it. Now, there are parts of jobs that I've had before where I just never found the passion. And after six months, I just have to move on. I literally, it's like I'll either quit, get fired like I'm doing bad work. I don't care about the work, you know.

Starting point is 00:38:55 And so I do have a self-awareness. It's not that I can get passionate about anything, but I do have a pretty broad palette, it turns out. I think that's a really interesting career lesson of don't assume you won't be excited about something that may come up. Is there anything there that you'd share with folks of just like, explore it, give it six months, see if you can get excited about it? Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:39:14 So I have a very unusual career arc in some ways, which is like I really almost changed jobs, like every six months for a long time. I was working on this integrity stuff with newsfeed in the background. Then I was working on newsfeed for about a year. Then I worked on site speed and infrastructure and like detecting salves and issues. And then I worked on boot camp. And then I worked on messaging and groups. I was like I just, you know, I had this really funny thing.

Starting point is 00:39:42 I was kind of joke. It was like for those who were old enough to remember karate kid. I felt like I was, you know, painting a lot of fences, waxing a lot of cars. And at the end, I knew karate. I was like at the end, at the end, at the end I had the payoffs. off is I'd gone through, and I'd met a lot of people, and I'd worked in these different areas, and I understood different dynamics. Well, other people who joined in my cohort were getting promoted, but they were like in a

Starting point is 00:40:04 single track. Like, they just stayed in one place and they got promoted. Whereas I kept moving around, and probably at some point early in my career felt like I was moving more slowly relative to my peers. And then when I finally turned the corner, really with the ads appointment, which I did for five years, I went vertical. I just like my career went vertical. And I've kind of since then I've kind of been on that trajectory.

Starting point is 00:40:26 And so advice I most often give people that this for me at least, the lesson that I take from this is just like, I just was willing to learn aggressively. I would move because I wasn't learning enough. I was bored until I wasn't like learning enough new stuff. And it was cool about finding getting to the ads job and likewise in the job I'm in now is like those jobs I learned a ton for five years. I never stopped learning in those jobs.

Starting point is 00:40:46 You will occasionally find those jobs where they're super deep and you can just keep learning. Meanwhile, a lot of my friends who's, careers were on a better trajectory to me than earlier. They literally got bored of what they were doing, but they didn't have any place to jump to. There wasn't like some other, they'd become domain specialists in a domain

Starting point is 00:41:04 that they'd kind of exhausted for themselves. And maybe they'd even stuck around longer than they wanted to because it was comfortable or because the company wanted them to. And it ended up kind of being a hindrance to them in the middle of their career. And so for me, it's like, don't

Starting point is 00:41:20 be jumping in new things. Give it six months. if it's not the thing, no problem. You just built a ton of new skills. That's going to come in handy. I promise you that. Keep going. Likewise, when you do make that jump, early career,

Starting point is 00:41:34 optimize for learning. Think about it compound interest. It's like the first like 10 years of compound interest don't look that impressive. It's like after 10 years, it starts to look good. I love that advice. It's similar advice.

Starting point is 00:41:45 I always give a variety of experience often ends up being the most valuable thing you build over time, just trying a bunch of stuff, doing some internal. tools, maybe working on customer support, I don't know, trust and safety, user-facing products, infrastructure. I'm thinking from a PM's perspective, maybe in engineers and other functions. One question along his line.

Starting point is 00:42:03 So we talked about the I have Saran and working on like the most important thing at the company. Do you have any advice on how much of your career you should be working in that center? Yeah. Listen, all that's being equal, I think there's two really good places to be. I think one is carrying a lot of water in areas that the company is not paying attention to, but you know are important. And it needs to be a lot. Like you gotta, you gotta own that stuff and like really move mountains over there.

Starting point is 00:42:28 Because like I promise you as an executive, when there's a huge dam holding up, you know, the floodwaters, you respect the heck out of the person who is holding that dam up. Like you're like, you know, you keep doing that Atlas. Like that is good work over there. The second place to be, or maybe this equally big is like on the most important thing. And on the most important thing, that's where you get like, to. to the advice that Eric Schmidt gave Cheryl Sandberg, which is like, hey, it's a rocket ship, get on. Like, don't ask what seat I'm in.

Starting point is 00:42:57 Like, just get on. If it's the most important thing, you're going to get a smaller piece. Everyone wants to be there. Get the piece. If it's the most important thing, get the piece that you can crush, kill, do a great job at and grow from

Starting point is 00:43:09 because you're going to get a ton of visibility. You're going to get a ton of experience. You're going to see what it looks like in the fire, like in the fire. And that is invaluable. You will use that everywhere. And so I say that that's at, project selection time.

Starting point is 00:43:23 But now I want to be cautious. Understand. Projects that start in the fire, hopefully, are forged in some manner of metal that cools and is no longer in the fire, like God willing. And likewise, things like dams that are holding up floodwaters have a tendency to crack or break or floods overcome the, so I think you do want to be at selection time in one of those two places. But then you also get to stick with a ride.

Starting point is 00:43:50 And again, to my point, like, if you're not. engaged. If you aren't doing great work, if you don't love it, then move on. If you've exhausted it, you used to love it, but you don't need more. Move on. If you still love it and you're engaged, great, that's cool. That's a great thing. You deserve to go from the forge to the dam and back over time. You don't have to always just keep jumping out of the latest fire. I tried to do that once. After the ad business, actually, so I spent six months and we built the first mobile ad product in 2012 and kind of saved the IPO, which had gotten pretty grim, but you know, at that point. And I told Mark, I was like, this is like,

Starting point is 00:44:26 maybe you can just keep doing this. We just putting me on the biggest fire every six months. And he turns to me, he said, pause, that's not a real job. He's like, I need you to stay here and usher this forward, which I did for the next four and a half years. And it was amazing. It was amazing. And again, I do give him such, it's funny, I'm going to get a hard time of this. I'm one of the, one of our biggest critics as well as being one of his biggest fans. I have both those jobs. But today we're talking about stuff that I think Mark really demonstrates really well. And he did a great job of pushing me in my career to different places where I didn't think I could succeed. And he saw the opportunity that made it happen.

Starting point is 00:45:01 What have you learned about giving Mark like negative criticism, anything that he accepts? So what do you learn about that? Mark's voracious for all information and all points of view. One of the things that's pretty interesting. I talked to earlier about how much as a founder, I think especially you have to have to have tremendous conviction. You just have to. You have to a tremendous degree of confidence. And I think Mark is somebody who is like, maybe the strongest willpower of a person I've ever met just in a pure willpower sense. And so one thing is you'll give him feedback. He listens. He's not, he's a very, it's a kind person to work for it. So you'll give him feedback

Starting point is 00:45:35 and he'll listen, truly. He'll most often tell you that you're wrong, why you're wrong. That's just like most often. And what will happen is it's uncanny. It's like over the course of the next like week or two, you'll just see shifts. and I don't think he's like doing it. I've always kind of joked if the information gets to him, so much information every day gets to him and then like at night he like recompiles the whole world

Starting point is 00:46:03 with all that information and comes back. And by the way, this is not just true about product work. In my head I was thinking about product stuff where he was like, hey, I think this product is doing this wrong. He's like, no, no, that's why it's not that way. And the product was such a, also if you give him feedback just on his own presence in a meeting or delivery, he'll be like, oh, well, here's why I did it that way.

Starting point is 00:46:19 and then like a couple weeks later, you'll get a similar situation and he will moderate, like how he shows up. So I actually find him somebody who's really, it's really satisfying to give him feedback. It really works. It's very effective.

Starting point is 00:46:29 But you do have to like take the long view on it. Like, and he will have a, he will have, the things he did, he didn't do an accident. He will have a reason why he did in the way he did them. It's a great example of strong opinions loosely held. Yeah,

Starting point is 00:46:43 that's right. It also makes me think, I think use the compiler analogy. I'm thinking like the model training, like the re, he's retraining. That's right. Overnight.

Starting point is 00:46:50 Yeah. It's funny. One of the things that's so funny about Mark is he, if you give him some feedback in the morning, the next like six meetings he has, whether it's about that product or not, he will ask people what they think of that feedback. He won't attribute. He's just like, hey, what do you think about this in this product? And so you'll be in a meeting with him and you'll see him doing it.

Starting point is 00:47:08 He'll come to the meeting with you about some other topic. You're like, hey, boss, what do you think about this product and this idea? And so he will like, over the course of the day, take that little note and kind of pressure And he loves a triangulate. Where are all the points of view on this that maybe he didn't see? So it really values a broad perspective on each thing that's being discussed, which is pretty fun. Trying to get more training data for his model. I get it. You can't get me to call Mark and LLM. That's not fair. That's easy. We could all hope to be as smart as Mark. As you were talking, I noticed your tattoos. And it reminded me that you've got at least two tattoos that I'm aware. One is of California, which I completely understand. I understand California is a very special place. But you have this other tattoo that is just the words veritas. Can you talk about what that's about and why that's important to you?

Starting point is 00:47:58 The funny thing was tattoos in general is I came out of high school as like, I don't know, I don't know what my, I don't know if there was an archetype for me, but I didn't drink until I was 21. I was a very rule following person. I was like, why are you going to get a tattoo, you know, you just like affect your body? Like people who die, why you dye your hair? Like just like let it be what it was. And some of this was like, I think I was somebody who was privileged and had a great deal of self-confidence and who I was and what I wanted to be and that was fine. But some of it was also like weirdly judgy about other people in a way that's kind of off-brand

Starting point is 00:48:30 for me, certainly today, but at the time, getting a tattoo is a big deal for me because I was like, oh, like, this is just like the vehicle for my life and like you can do whatever you want with it. And it doesn't have, it's not like a, you know, it's something that you possess and you can if you feel like if you want to decorate it, you can decorate it. And so getting a tattoo was a big deal to me, actually. And I kind of completely shift of my mindset of how I thought about my body and how I thought about people's body and the presence and the time.

Starting point is 00:48:59 Maybe to some degree even like an understanding of mortality. Like, hey, this is like, can't take it with you. Like, it's all, it's all going to go. You know, when you're 18, you think you're going to live forever. And when you're at the time of 22, a grizzled 22 year old veteran. You're like, ah, tattoo that bad boy up. It's all going down. And so, yeah, so I got the very tough tattoo,

Starting point is 00:49:15 which is Latin for truth, which is, you know, I will say it's a little cheesy because it's also Harvard's motto. And but I got it in a monotype font as you know, there's the programmer's font here. The other thing is interesting to me about tattoos

Starting point is 00:49:29 was it's also part of a generational shift. You know, we grew up in a time when tattoos were really seen by adults as, you know, gangs or bikers or sailors or like, you know, certain types.

Starting point is 00:49:41 Now, my understanding, I saw a stat recently that more people my generation have tattoos, that don't have tattoos. And so I think we also just culturally shifted positions in a way that I find, I find richness of self-expression wonderful. I really think it's great.

Starting point is 00:49:54 And so I'm here for all of it. My assumption from what you're describing is this idea of truth is very important to the way you think and work. My reputation does precede me on this point, I'm afraid, which is, you know, I think when I was young, I saw being honest,

Starting point is 00:50:08 and I was wrong, by the way. I saw being honest as like kind of a get-out-of-jail free card. You could say whatever you wanted, as long as you're being honest. That's just not the case at all. I've read this before, but by far, my biggest professional regrets were me not being kind. And I used to think, like I wrote this note a while back called be kind, where being nice, that's like patronizing or or telling somebody things that are half truths or just like getting by. And I'm against that.

Starting point is 00:50:39 But being kind isn't that. Being kind is like, hey, how can I deliver this feedback in a way that is actually productive? and helpful in a way it is going to help them and not cause them just to feel bad and helpless. And I think I did that wrong a lot as a young man. And so being honest is still a big part of my personality. No one would ever accuse me of being dishonest who knows me. And I think people understand and respect that I'm pretty direct. And if I have concerns or issues, I'm going to bring them up.

Starting point is 00:51:04 I'm just much better at bringing them up now and expressing a true care and belief. I wouldn't bring it up if I didn't think we could do better. If I didn't think we could fix it, I didn't believe in the situation. And so being honest is still a huge part of my identity. And I think that's something I'm very proud of. But I will say the contextualization of how I'm honest has changed immensely since I got this tattoo. That seems reasonable. This touches a little bit on something I definitely wanted to talk about, which is one of your most classic pieces.

Starting point is 00:51:35 And this is the way I first learned about you is a piece that is called Communication is the Job. Yeah. I know many people have read this. Many people haven't. I'd love for you to just talk about what this means and why this is important, why this is something that you wanted to share. Yeah, it's one of the things that, especially if you aspire to be a leader, and leadership isn't management, and leadership isn't being the only person responsible. It's not a reason always the same as accountability. But if you want to have an impact on the world around you, it is exclusively done through the creation of artifacts or,

Starting point is 00:52:13 or verbalizations that affect other humans. Like that's the only, that is all there is. That's all there is if you wanna have an impact, if you wanna create some kind of a lasting change. And it could be in your little relationship. It could be in your team, it could be in your company, it could be in the world. It is down to communication.

Starting point is 00:52:34 And so often you hear people saying like, oh, like yeah, that was like, I had that, I wrote that up a year ago. It's like, yeah, but you did a bad job writing a year ago. or we would have not wasted a year not doing it. Like, it's like, you know, it's like the, you know, people always think, oh, I had that idea and that's like means anything. It means nothing.

Starting point is 00:52:51 It means absolutely nothing. Or it's like, oh, like I wrote this post. Like, well, you didn't break through with it. So that's like, that's on you. It's not on the audience. People want to blame the audience. Well, the audience is just there. And so I mentioned this even earlier and I hope people caught it when, when I said,

Starting point is 00:53:05 hey, if somebody's, I give somebody a piece of work and they come back six months later and they have done the wrong thing. Now, I'll take the L. I will take the L on that. It's not great for them. They'll be pissed. They wasted their time. But like I said, that's my responsibility.

Starting point is 00:53:20 I did not communicate clearly what I wanted, what the expectations were. Could they have also helped themselves? Sure, they could have. And that's a thing that takes all sides. We should work on this problem for both angles. I have another post called listening is the job, which is the other side of this. But like communication is job. I really believe it actually has a relationship to this idea that came out of

Starting point is 00:53:41 the US Marines and seals of extreme ownership, which is like, so whenever something goes wrong, I ask myself, what could I have done differently in terms of how I communicated things for this to have gone better? Could I have set priorities better? Could I have set expectations better? Did I need to have a better metric that I pointed the team at?

Starting point is 00:54:03 Did I put the wrong people on it? By the way, I think I talked about is org charts are communication devices. They don't exist. There's not a physical string between you and your manager. they're just communication tools that are supposed to give people a rough sense of how things are organized and where to go with who. And so all these things are communication. Silence is communication.

Starting point is 00:54:23 Me not reaching out to you to check on you, to check on your project, right? We talked to the I of Sari earlier. What does that mean? That means trust. That means responsibility. Like the absence of check-ins has meaning. You cannot not communicate. You are always communicating something.

Starting point is 00:54:41 with your face, with your clothes, with your body. What are you communicating? I'll give you a funny example, which I hope we get to put in the podcast, because if you're watching this on video, you will have noticed that my camera cannot stop adjusting light. It's just constantly too dark or too bright. I'm trying a new camera.

Starting point is 00:54:59 I'm a nerdy guy. I try a lot of camera gear. I try a lot of microphone gear. I love to have all the latest gadgets and gizmos, so I'm trying something new, not working. And in my head, I'm like, what is this communicating about me? people are going to think that I don't care or that I'm not competent.

Starting point is 00:55:13 So it's a little, little, that's what I'm talking about. And now I felt compelled to explain it in the podcast so that I can communicate clearly that that's not the case. So I really just think so much of what I try to do in my professional life is understand the mental model of other people. Where are they right now? And I mean specific people like my managers or my key technical leaders. And I mean general people like teams.

Starting point is 00:55:36 I mean broadly like just the average human. where are they at in this conversation and how can I craft my language, my presence, my persona, everything to usher them from where they are to where I want to get them. And that requires me to have a very clear idea of where I want to get them,

Starting point is 00:55:55 have to have a clear idea of where they are. And I want to tell you, it's not as much work as it sounds like, this isn't like, I think no one would accuse me of having this big fabricated persona, it's not that, but it is like having tremendous empathy

Starting point is 00:56:06 for where people are starting. And I think, and that, that was the leap for me. All the rest of it, all the rest of how I show up in meetings and trying to smile more because I'm like a big, scary guy. Those things are little things

Starting point is 00:56:19 that you work on. Those are, and they become second nature and they're easy. The hard thing is just having the empathy for your audience and being like, where are they, where are they starting? And when you miss, taking responsibility for that, extreme responsibility for that. There's so much good advice in that. There's so many threads I want to follow.

Starting point is 00:56:35 But let's just follow this last one of trying to understand how someone is best communicated to? Is there an example to make that a little more real for people of just what you've done to like, oh, here's I'm going to communicate with this person? I'll give you a couple. So one is like multimodality. There's an old saying, right, repetition never spoil the prayer. And I think most experienced communicators, whether they be writers, whether they be public speakers, talk about the importance of reiterating a point several times and in several different ways to make sure that people have a chance to internalize it. You want to say it directly? You want to use metaphor. And so for me, it's like, I will give an all hands and then write a post with the

Starting point is 00:57:13 content of the all hands because different people are going to respond differently to these modalities and are going to absorb information at different rates on these different modalities. That's a trivial one. Another one that I think of all the time is making sure that you address people's fears and concerns. People will not listen to you if they think you don't know what's going on. And so one of my favorite things to do when we're talking about some kind of issue is right up top and say, hey, let me be clear. This is the issue we're having. I know we're having it. I know it matters.

Starting point is 00:57:46 And then I'll say the same thing that I would have said, but they would have literally ignored me because they're like, how can they trust my conclusions if they don't accept the premise? You know what I'm saying? So I think there's a whole piece there. Obviously, when you're in person, it's a lot easier. you're reading facial expressions, even on this, right? I'm reading you nodding on that. Like, okay, he's got it. He's, he's with me. And then I throw in a, you know what I mean. Whereas if you were kind of like, give me a cocked head, I'd have bring a second example to try to like drive the point home. But you build yourself up. Most people are going to realistically

Starting point is 00:58:21 start in their careers trying to influence one or two people. That's where you start. One or two people. That's who you got to communicate with. Your manager, one teammate, that's what you got. and then you build up and build up and build up a skill set to do it at larger and larger scale. I love so much of this advice. I think it's also helpful for relationships. Here's what you're upset about. Totally. Here's what I think we can do.

Starting point is 00:58:45 Being a, again, the work that I've had so graciously supported to do on myself at Meta with great mentors, Cheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, a bunch of others and coaches absolutely made me a better partner and husband to my wife. and then by the way vice versa having kids and getting deep in the literature around raising children congratulations to you by the way getting deep in that literature made me a better manager absolutely made me a better manager in terms of thinking about how people are managing their emotions and how to engage with them in those times amazing we need a second edition of this boss's parenting advice that's right and relationship it's like it's all the good stuff it's you know no bad kids uh landsbury it's it's a good inside uh dr becky like it's all it's i really i really i really think that the modern parenting canon is really rich.

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Starting point is 01:00:42 That's EXPLO.com slash Lenny. Okay, you mentioned this gadget and these cameras you like to play with. Let's talk about the Vision Pro and VR headsets. Have you tried the Vision Pro? Thoughts? Actually, Mark and I tried it together. And I want to say, first of all, when the headset came out, we breathed a little side of relief because the stuff inside of it didn't represent a fundamental breakthrough.

Starting point is 01:01:08 So everything inside of it wasn't that we probably could have gone and done with the exception of Apple Silicon, which is a, you know, is a Marvel. But it's worth not like Apple Silicon is like a 2X Marvel when doing things like scaling display resolution is, unfortunately a quadratic proposition. And so a 2x linear scaling advantage doesn't buy you as much as you might expect when you're trying to scale resolution. And so that was step one. But we still assumed at that price point, you know, with their legendary attention

Starting point is 01:01:36 to detail and polish, they probably, you know, produce a great product. And the line that I said, actually, you know, my own podcast with Matthew Ball, a week ago was like, look, I was prepared to come to market and say, we have the best value headset. Like, if you want an outstanding best possible headset for the money, we've got it. It's the Quest 3. And I was so thrilled when I tried the AVP next to Mark. We were like, no, no, no. We think we have the actual best headset.

Starting point is 01:02:03 Now, we're not saying it's the best at all things. If you're sitting still and watching a movie in high-resolution movie, yep, Alphibovision pros is really great. It's really great. The resolution shines. The way they've tuned the pass-through shines. stationary and looking straight ahead. And they've done some really nice things with the UI.

Starting point is 01:02:27 It's one of these things that we do get annoyed about it. It's a mild aside. We get a little bit annoyed about it as product people. This happens to all of us. It happens to Apple. It happens to Google. It happens to us. We have a bunch of internal things we've been playing with, which will at some point ship

Starting point is 01:02:39 and we will be accused of having stolen them when we actually, you do not steal the bill. If you want, you can go see my Cora answer on the history of the like button, where this happened previously, where we had built the like button internally before it was launched elsewhere. Anyways, so the whole thing. So this happens in our industry a lot, and I really shouldn't care as much.

Starting point is 01:02:56 It's a little bit of my ego peeking through, which I should control and tamp down by being responsible. But yeah, so the beautiful UI polishes, they did a tremendous job with eye tracking. One thing that's interesting with the eye tracking is to do it the way they've done it, that's why you have to have the prescription inserts. So it doesn't support your glasses.

Starting point is 01:03:14 You have to get prescription inserts. They're kind of expensive, and they can shoot the cameras that track your eyes through the lens as well as the light around it. Ours go from the side on the Quest Pro, and that allows you to wear corrective lenses. And so different choices like that have tradeoffs, but it's still cool.

Starting point is 01:03:30 It's great that they got that in there. At the same time, our hand tracking is better. Obviously, App Library we knew was going to be better. That's not totally fair to them. They've just launched and they have small volume still. But I just find the comfort, the thing that really got me the most, the field of view is really small on the Applevision Pro.

Starting point is 01:03:46 And some people are characterizing it incorrectly in the internet. they're doing a characterization up close to the lens. Once you factor in the eye relief, the distance between where the lenses are and where your eyeball is, their field of view gets pretty narrow for almost all faces relative to ours, which I find distracting.

Starting point is 01:03:58 Their displays are much dimmer than ours. And I find the motion blur really distracting when I'm in mixed reality use cases. And as I mentioned earlier in the past, I'm a huge mixed reality buff. Like, I'm a huge fan of that potential. For exactly the same reason that they are, by the way, which I think hands in mixed reality

Starting point is 01:04:13 make it feel much more accessible to more people. I'm pretty glad we have the controller in our set, though, because it really expands what you can do. And we don't just like operate our computers with just like one thing. We have a keyboard, we have a mouse that we do multiple modalities all the time. So I really feel like the comfort, the lack of persistence and motion blur in our past through,

Starting point is 01:04:33 the brightness of our displays. I was like, oh man, like if you gave me one to take, I would take Quest three. Now, people have rightly said, that's pretty biased position. Of course it is. Go get your own opinion.

Starting point is 01:04:44 But what kills me is most people haven't done that. They have not tried the Quest 3. That's what kills me the most. If you go and try Quest 3, ask yourself if you'd rather have seven of those, one for you and six of your best friends, or one Applevision Pro. I'm sure the answer isn't Quest 3 for every person. There are people for whom there are use cases that really fit their life. But Applevision Pro, I'm cool with it.

Starting point is 01:05:05 But people don't even know that the Quest 3, you can do remote desktop. You can do it both through an app called Remote Desktop, which is very popular, or you can go into workrooms and you can have three monitors surrounding you. streamed from your machine. I think some of this is just like people have not even done the work. They haven't even tried it. So I welcome all you who think I am biased to prove one way or the other what you think, but don't do it without putting the Quest 3 on and giving it through its paces because it's a pretty great device.

Starting point is 01:05:34 And you can do a lot with $3,000 extra dollars. How did they get away with that, by the way? We launched a headset that was like $12.99 and people lost their money. minds about it. And they're like, ah, $3,500, it's fine. This is fine. No one cares. I don't know. It says, you know, but fairness is too much to ask, and I don't care about that. Apple has earned the great brand they've built. They truly have, I think it's tremendous. And I, I certainly celebrate a large number of Apple product. I'm a huge fan of their work. I'm a huge fan of what they do. That's probably why I expected more from the AVP. Well, I'll show you my favorite AR device,

Starting point is 01:06:09 which is these Raybans. I actually bought them. We, here, I'll put them on it here. I'm going What I'm going to do is I'm going to record it. I didn't tell you I was going to do this. I'm going to record this as we're talking. Look at this. I like that. They look so good on you too. This is a good fit.

Starting point is 01:06:23 My mother-in-law is like, you look so sophisticated. You look really smart with these on. And we bought these actually to watch to film our kids to like, or our kid to like instead of having a camera in his face. And it's really the best. It is so hard to look at a phone screen and have the real thing be like in between you. Like it's like, no, the glass is the way to do it. Look at this.

Starting point is 01:06:43 My new look. She's got to get you the multimodal. I've been playing with that since December, where you can use the camera to ask our meta AI assistant about things. It's really good. I was in a ski village recently with my family, and I had them on.

Starting point is 01:07:01 I just like, hey, you know, take a look to what you see. And like, I had found a sign and it gave me directions, like, hey, the bathrooms are down those stairs to the right. Like, if you want food, it's over to the right. It couldn't tell what village I was in, but it was like, you're in a ski village somewhere. Like, here's the amenities. I was like, wow, you know, there's some real magical here.

Starting point is 01:07:18 I feel like I need this for my podcasting interviews so I could just have little voice tell me, like questions to be asking and where I'm at. Totally, yeah. I'm going to cheat on this one and say, we got, we have, obviously, we've been talking for a while but playing with glasses that have full AR capabilities. And we've got one that is rumored to be coming internally soon, so heavily rumored, in fact, that you might even say it's almost been confirmed. And what's been really fun is being able to play with these really time machines, really, in terms of what they are.

Starting point is 01:07:50 That is amazing, amazing technology. And yeah, people were giving speeches, like big company-wide speeches and had all their notes on the glasses. And they could control the slides just using a gesture. So there's exciting things afoot. The future is looking pretty bright. something that I wanted to touch on, which is when Mark put out this whole video of here is what I think of Applevision Pro versus the Quest, a lot of people are just like, oh man, because he's putting out this video, he must be so afraid of what's happening and it's like it's not the right move. What went into thinking? Was there like strategic thinking there? Was it just him like? Here's what I think. You know, this kind of does murder me about the modern era. Everyone's in there, met ahead about everything.

Starting point is 01:08:32 Everything's like a four-dimensional chess. That was just what Mark thought of the thing. That's what he thought about it. I think he wanted to make sure people remembered, hey, Quest 3 is literally a better device. And people haven't even tried it. And so, you know, we're not always playing four-dimensional chess over here. Sometimes we're just like, here's a thing that I believe is true.

Starting point is 01:08:52 I'm going to say it out loud with my mouth. Like, that's what we did. It's like, that's not that hard. And I think, I guess people, When I do it, everyone expects it because of my persona or brand or everything is. I guess people are surprised when a CEO does it. All right, I get that. That's cool.

Starting point is 01:09:05 There's like other sets of societal expectations there. And like we're all familiar with like, you know, Apple putting the welcome IBM ad in the New York Times and then Slack doing the same thing with Microsoft and like the bomber iPhone comments. None of those were true discussions of the technical merits of a product. Right? Those were all just like big,

Starting point is 01:09:27 rally the troops like gestures this is not that like we've like Mark is deep he's an expert in this stuff I'm an expert in this stuff like I feel great about our choices

Starting point is 01:09:37 I by the way when I use it I could get myself completely into the head of the person who designed it and what I can tell you from using it what instructions they were given that team was given I can tell you what they were optimizing for

Starting point is 01:09:51 I can tell you what constraints they were under by all the choices they made I can tell you all those things and I understand it coheres in that way. We made different choices. It shouldn't surprise anyone. We like our choices better.

Starting point is 01:10:02 We could have made those choices. We didn't make those choices. We made these other choices. And so for me, like the weight, the wire, which just always brushes against my ear, like the pocketable thing.

Starting point is 01:10:13 Like, I get it. It's not what I would have done. And I know that because I had the chance to do it and I chose not to. So it's like, I don't know, I don't know what people are surprised.

Starting point is 01:10:21 But, but yeah, so I think, I think this wasn't like, this wasn't some big, savvy, strategic move. This was just like,

Starting point is 01:10:27 Mark's like, got a chance to use it. He's like, oh, man, like, I think we should tell people what the real story is here. And we did. I love that insight. And I know a lot of people watching are like, oh, shit, he's right. Wow. I didn't think of it that way. And so I think it had a lot of that impact. I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about meta's journey over the past couple years. It feels like there's a huge downturn. It feels like there's a huge downturn. It feels like there's a huge downturn. And it feels like there's always a lot to learn from these. periods. So just an example of the stock price, I was just looking at it. It was down to $80-ish. And now today it's $487. Yeah. I'm curious just what you've learned from going through that downturn and turnaround. And I know it's still in progress, but just what have you learned from that journey? Yeah. Well, there's a lot to take away. I got to tell you. I think we had the single largest, the largest single day stock drop in history, followed 18 months later by the largest single day gain in stock market history. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 01:11:27 As the legendary Lou Holtz said, you know, you're never as good as they say you are when you're winning and it never as bad as they say you are when you're losing. Mark has always brought that quote out to guide us internally to try to insulate ourselves a little bit from the vagaries of external opinion. And that's not just true with stock prices. That's true with media and press. It's true across a lot of things. One of the things I told my team, and I still have to repeat it to them, is like, one thing is it's a time. hard to remember when you're in it is that you know more than the critics do. You know more than the analysts in the marketplace do. You know more than the media does. You know more than the podcasters

Starting point is 01:12:09 do. You know more than the Twitter does. You know more about what's real and substantial of value about our company than they do. That doesn't mean ignore them because they have a different perspective and you need to understand it. And it may contain even if the totality is less than what you know, it may contain parts that you do not know. So I'm a huge fan. I read the criticism of everything, and I read it very carefully, looking out for confirmation bias, looking out for things that I might be inclined to resist, but are maybe true. I invite all critique, but I also don't accept the critique blindly.

Starting point is 01:12:50 I don't just say, yes, this is obviously true. There's a great... Gil Manning Amnesia is a great concept for everyone. to understand. Gell Manning Annesia is this property where you'll read a newspaper article, let's say, newspaper, why not, about a thing about which you are an expert. So, and you'll be baffled because here is an article that is not just wrong. It's like, it's inverted causality.

Starting point is 01:13:14 It's a, what's it, Michael Crichton, I'll steal Michael Crichton's quote on this. It's a wet sidewalks make rain story. And you'll be like, what a terrible, bizarre story. And then you will turn the page of the newspaper and it'll be another article about a topic about what you know nothing, and you will read it as if it is the gospel truth. You'll tell you, it's, oh, no, look at this information about, you know, this foreign situation. Look, it's a perfectly true.

Starting point is 01:13:37 We should be smarter than that. And so does that mean you don't read the thing? No, you read it. You just read everything with that perspective of like, wait a second, like, this is another point of view. And how do I integrate that into a whole perspective that I can have and be informed about? So that's the first, the macro thing is, is taking the, long view, realizing that when you're in the dumps, it's not as bad as you think. When you're at the top, it's not as bad.

Starting point is 01:14:01 It's not as good as you think. It's like somewhere in between at all times. The second thing is, communication is the job. We really did not communicate effectively, I think, with the market around our future investments. And listen, we've had two 10-year-long huge investment areas. One has been AI. One has been reality labs. And AI is looking pretty good today.

Starting point is 01:14:27 I think we could all agree with Lama 2, with Fair, the breakthroughs that we've had. People don't know us that Fair, our AI research lab is the second most cited research lab and AI behind Google. So we've been doing this work. We didn't come here casually. Like, we've been doing it. And so that's looking pretty good. I don't think we did enough to explain those bets to people. Previously, the core business was going strong enough that they kind of were willing to ignore them.

Starting point is 01:14:54 And with the old Warren Buffett quote, it's only when the tide goes. out, we see who's not wearing swimming trunks. And so it's like, when the tide went out, when you have the Ukraine war and an interest rate hike and recessions spent in recessions, now everyone's scrambling for that incremental dollar and they're like, get rid of this stuff. And we had to tell the company, you don't want to work at a company that when times are tough kills all future growth and just like shores up in the core business. That's a company that's just committing itself to dying at some point a little later than

Starting point is 01:15:27 but like dying at some point. You want to work at a company that has a balanced portfolio of investments, which we had. We didn't explain that well. And so we spent that time explaining that to the market, to the press to everybody. And now it's, you know, now it's, I think as people understand the size of it, the scope of it. And of course, it helps that the core business is kind of overcome its challenges there from ATT and the other kinds of stuff. It's looking pretty good. So, yeah, I think, I do think one part is as an internal person really moderating your attachment to the external narratives and

Starting point is 01:15:57 swings, that's super important. And you do that based on understanding your own expertise. And the second part is understanding why is there a delta? Like, what is there? And it's usually communication. There's also a big flattening of the org. This was something a lot of people talked about where managers became ICs. Is there anything more there that you've learned of just how to adjust the org to be more efficient? Yeah, of course. And I should have included that in the first section. I was a bit eager to wrap it up elegantly in the two, but you're right. I appreciate. We did make, we made significant shifts in how we operated the business, which is super painful. And listen, this goes back, uh, I, you know, this goes back to the boom times of COVID,

Starting point is 01:16:41 when it looked like there was a, a real lasting secular shift in things like e-commerce and in working remotely and these tool sits, which are exactly what we build. and it's primed us until we built up a huge workforce to pursue those opportunities. We still believe in those opportunities, but they're back on their original timeline. And actually, literally, if you look at a bunch of graphs that we have internally,

Starting point is 01:17:06 it literally, the COVID boom, and then kind of as it, not a bust, really, as it receded, everything's back on its original trajectory. So we didn't like lose ground or lose time, but the pull forward didn't happen. Well, that means to much your economics don't make any sense anymore. Now you made a bunch of

Starting point is 01:17:24 of investments that are going to yield too distant in the future and getting there faster isn't going to help you and you're carrying a much extra cost. That sucks, man. It sucks. And we don't feel great about it. We really don't. And it's a business. It's awful and it happens. I do think one thing that was interesting at that time was for those of us who I grew up and saw the dot com boom firsthand, I was born and raised in the valley. So that was like all around me when I was graduating high school, going to college, and then in the 2008 major recession on the housing crash and the market and all that stuff. Now let's imagine you graduated college in 2009 and got a job.

Starting point is 01:18:05 Well, shoot, you're 15 years in your career. You could be a director and you've never seen a downturn. So I think we also had, in addition to, you know, what is very unfortunately conventional, misforecasting in the business that caused us to overhire that we had to correct for, you also had a workforce that was just not at all of a mentality that this could ever happen. Like this felt like it was a, you know, an act of God. When in fact, it's like a cyclical nature of all businesses that this will happen at some time. And you hope it doesn't and you wish it didn't, but you have to deal with it.

Starting point is 01:18:38 And so I think we've been a bit of a tough storm there for the whole industry. And we're still feeling it. I think, you know, we're still feeling it. Certainly we're happy at Meta to be beyond that point. and we're growing again and executing at a stable rate and feeling really good about that. But quite a few of our other companies

Starting point is 01:18:56 in the industry aren't. And it's a very uncertain time for engineers, for PMs, for designers, for everyone, and all the support functions around them. So I'm super sympathetic for that. I think obviously the misforecasting that happened inside of Metaswalls happen everywhere.

Starting point is 01:19:11 And now that you have, especially with higher interest rates and cash isn't cheap, runways are tighter, like people are just making those pragmatic calls. I think we'll rally back from this. I think this is a normal thing that happens to industries, but it doesn't reduce my sympathy and empathy for those who have been affected by it

Starting point is 01:19:26 or who live in fear of it. Yeah. I was talking to a friend who works at Meta, and I was asking them what it's like to work at Meta, and she was just like, it's intense. And it used to be more chill. There were people that were coasting here and there, and now she's like, no, all those people are gone.

Starting point is 01:19:42 No, it's just only the intense people left and things are working really hard. Does that bring up anything? Yeah. I don't want to comment on people who left. People left to matter for all kinds of different reasons. And likewise, you know, role elimination happened in many cases because we just decided not to do this work at this point. We were going to do it two years from now and don't need to carry a team to do it.

Starting point is 01:20:01 So I think it's really hard to generalize because each of these is a specific person, the specific life and a story that is rich and deserves to be told. But I do think that, yeah, if there was somebody coasting and you as a manager have to make tough calls on who you're bringing in, like, you know which. way you're going to bias. My profound suspicion, and again, I don't know your friend who you spoke with, my profound suspicion is that person was probably already working hard.

Starting point is 01:20:27 You know what I'm saying? Like, that person was already probably working hard. Like, I don't think we like changed how hard any individual worked. I really don't believe that. I do think there was a selection bias as to like, like what was going to happen. And I think that's probably what you saw playing. In fact, if there was, if there is a generality that can be found. Maybe as a last question, I have this segment where I call Failure Corner,

Starting point is 01:20:47 where I ask people to share a failure of their career and what they learned from that experience. Is there something that comes to mind? I've failed tons of times. I've built products that nobody used. I've built technical architectures that didn't scale. I've failed at kinds of times. I don't regret most of those.

Starting point is 01:21:05 Almost every one of those I learned from, it was a stop on the path to a better solution, or it was a recognition that this thing wasn't going to work ever, which is its own kind of a gift. all the failures that I regret that I take seriously are personal failures, where I affected a person in a way that I'm not proud of, maybe I wasn't proud of the time, because I wasn't in control of my own emotions removed. I was feeling fearful. I was feeling scared. And there's a bunch of these. One or two that stand out that I don't feel comfortable sharing because the person affected, I think,

Starting point is 01:21:44 would be, would prefer I didn't share. I'll share one that was, yeah, I think the person's an hour tight now. We had this really silly discussion. I remember it so vividly. In the early days of client server architectures, which Facebook obviously is a website, so you're calling to a server to get the webpage,

Starting point is 01:22:04 but then that server's going to call to other servers to gather things. And I was one of the major kind of clients of remote procedure calls. because News Feed ranking was all done on this other set of servers that had its own special requirements and special build and how it was put together. And so your main web server would put a call out over a remote procedure call to the remote server

Starting point is 01:22:24 and get a response back. And we had this really janky RPC system that I won't say who built it, but it was built. And it was just a piece of garbage, constantly failing, was not robust at all. And one of our best engineers,

Starting point is 01:22:41 Mark Slee, built a new, one called Thrift. It was a great, really great RPC infrastructure. And one of my, one of my best friends, Dave Federer, one of my really good friends and a brilliant engineer, we were talking about how to do the encoding. And I was like, I wanted to be binary encoding. I was like, you should binary encoding. I wanted to be super efficient on the wire because I'm storing these RPCs. They do two jobs for us, one of which is the active RPC. But I also stored the RPCs in a log and replayed them to do the work that we were doing in Newsfeed ranking. That's how it was done back in the day. It was all kind of asynchronous offline.

Starting point is 01:23:14 And so I wanted to be as tight as possible because my memory bandwidth is very limited. And memory was so expensive back then. And Dave Federer was like, no, no, no. That's short-term thinking, boss. Like, we should be using Linux-style descriptors that are plain English language. Then you can look at the log. You can see what it is. It's parsable.

Starting point is 01:23:32 Like, memory bandwidth will get cheaper. But like, these logs being scrutable to development is going to be a better thing. This is a totally, this is nerd bait. Those who have those who those of who have been engineers in this call. This is like VIMEMAX. This is nerd bait. This goes deep. This is like a long

Starting point is 01:23:47 old thing. Keep it coming. I think I like it's a room full of engineers at the company and the company's not that bit. And so you probably half engineers the company in this room. And I just like absolutely I was like yelling at day. I'm like I'm literally like I'm turning red. I'm like sweating.

Starting point is 01:24:05 I'm so angry at Dave Federman for like for like countermanding my proposal. And I'm the major RPC customer. A couple of things. This is so dumb. Marcily just built two encoders. It's not that hard. You just build.

Starting point is 01:24:18 You pick which encoder you want for your things. That's the easiest solution ever. Second thing is, Dave was right, by the way. Within a year, the memory bad with definitely didn't matter relative to,

Starting point is 01:24:28 like, how inscrutable it was to, like, try to get into these logs. I had to build a ton of extra custom software to, like, parse the logs and, like, understand what's going on.

Starting point is 01:24:35 But also it was just like, it was a case where my identity was caught up being right. Like my identity, and for those you don't know, identity threat is just the biggest, the most, your worst behavior is always going to come out when you think you are under identity threat. When you feel like some core part of how you see yourself is in question, you will react with every ounce of your fiber to defend that conception of yourself because it's so expensive to reconceptualize who you are that you like defend yourself. So like my identity

Starting point is 01:25:05 was being right. I got a very tough on the wrist. And it caused me take like one of my best friends one of the best engineers I knew a guy I literally lived with and getting like a really embarrassing for me conflict which everyone was just like scratching their head like what is going out with Bob's right now like it looked like an unhinged crazy person yeah I remember so I remember the room

Starting point is 01:25:23 I remember where I was standing in the room I remember everything about that moment and I had to go home and be like what the fuck was that like what happened I'm asking myself like what happened there and that was kind of one of the many steps on the journey

Starting point is 01:25:38 to re contextualizing what it was was not to be right and to be open-minded and curious and how to engage in this conversation. I was 22, I don't make excuses for it now, but I remember,

Starting point is 01:25:50 there was a couple other examples like that in things that were less technical and more personal that I won't share, but I remember each of them vividly. And, you know, those are the real failures for me. I love how this story is like for so long ago at this point

Starting point is 01:26:03 and it's still stuck with you and such an impact. Oh my God. Yeah, I'll never forget that. It was embarrassing. And for those, it's the old quote,

Starting point is 01:26:10 it's really one of the truest quotes, and I know it's cliche, and sometimes cliches are cliches because they're good. It's like people, they don't remember what you said. They just remember how you made them feel. That's all, that's all anyone remembers is how you made them feel. And I think in that room I made people feel like unsafe, maybe, like it was bad, you know? I like this concept of identity threat. I was a bit call this podcast episode identity threat.

Starting point is 01:26:31 There you go. Boss, we started this episode with a billion questions. I have like a billion and one questions now. I wish we could keep going, but I know we have to wrap this up. Is there anything you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning around? Well, in the off chance that we do end up labeling this episode, identity threat, let me give you what really was, I made a lot of breakthroughs with coaching, learning about the feeling inside of my own body when I was feeling that identity threat and learning techniques and tactics to reduce the likelihood that I would feel it and how to deal with it when it happened and how to repair when I did. Like, I went through all that stuff. I would say the greatest lesson I learned would come years later.

Starting point is 01:27:13 And it was just from observing somebody, Ami Vora, who was a legendary long time, came in and worked on our developer platform, then worked with me on ads for a long time. And then it was the PMLeeper WhatsApp for a long time. She's since gone on to do even more great things outside the company. Working with her, it was like working with, like watching like an alien,

Starting point is 01:27:33 because her and I were so different in our approach. And she approached, she could have the most profound disagreement with somebody in the world. And they would say the thing that she thought was not just like wrong, but like crazy wrong. And she would respond, she would say, fascinating. You have to tell me more about why you think that. And I can't do it justice. She meant it.

Starting point is 01:27:56 Like from the core of her being, she was like intensely curious. She saw this schism between her and that person. And it could have been personal. It could have been professional. It could have been anything. She saw this schism and how they saw. the world and how she saw the world. And rather than reacting as if it was a threat that somebody saw it differently, or rather than reacting afraid that maybe she was wrong and had done things wrong

Starting point is 01:28:17 before, she reacted with the most genuine and profound curiosity. And I just watched it absolutely tear down walls between points of view. People felt immediately her genuine, heartfelt curiosity and would lean in. And that would cause them to be open-minded. And if she was right, which by the way she usually was, then they would leave being like, oh, okay, I was wrong about that. But she also would change your mind. And that was the key. I really, ever since then, I just, I really have tried to model that. It's just reacting. When I have a strong internal clench, I try to embrace curiosity. Like, wow, we do not see this thing the same way. Like, that is fascinating. Tell me why you see that. And that can be by personal feedback. Someone's like,

Starting point is 01:29:03 hey, boss, I don't think you talk enough. Wow. You don't think I talk enough. That is. It's unexpected. I would love to hear more about that because no one's ever said that to me. So I wanted to give that to anybody who might recognize this behavior in themselves. There's lots of things that you can do and you should do that work. The work of improving yourself is always fruitful and satisfying. And it pays off as we discussed in every aspect of your life with your family, with your friends, and professionally. This is one that I really thought was so great, was just curiosity, embracing curiosity in those moments of

Starting point is 01:29:36 challenge has really completely changed my life. And I owe that to Ami Bora. Wow. I love this example. It's basically an example of yes and, but in a really, like, no one's going to be like yes and. It's like a really nice way of saying it's just fascinating. Tell me more. Fascinating. You've got to tell me why, how I want to understand it. I love that. Maybe that'll be the new title. Fascinating. There you go. Anyway, with that, boss, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay. First question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? The Dream Machine, which is a tremendous history of,

Starting point is 01:30:12 prehistory really, of modern computing, ostensibly following the life of JCR Licklider, but really much broader than that, is a tremendous missing piece of history, in my opinion. I think in my discipline in computer science, we were not properly educated. We learned about Alan Turing, and we learned about some of the technical underpinnings

Starting point is 01:30:28 of computer science theory, but the modern computer and the path to it is a profound and fascinating one, and it has particular resonance today as JCR Licklider's observation was human-in-the-loop computing, and I think we are now in human-in-the-loop AI, and I think there's a tremendous resonance there.

Starting point is 01:30:46 The second one is good inside, which is Dr. Becky's book, and again, I think it's a tremendous parenting book, but more than that, it does contain lessons for how we think about our own emotions and how we manage those, which I find to be useful in any context. Amazing recommendations.

Starting point is 01:31:01 She's also got an online community for people that like... She's a wonderful online community. She's very engaged in it. And again, for those parents out there, you're a little early for this, Lenny, but you'll get there. Having little scripts that I'm reading like on Instagram that like when I'm in a moment of tremendous emotional challenge with my children, I have the words handy. They're just like top of mind for me. They've been cashed in, right?

Starting point is 01:31:21 They're primed. It's a big game changer. This will be for our parenting episode down the road. That's right. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed? Yeah. So this is super conventional, but, Mandelorian.

Starting point is 01:31:35 So one of the things that's been fun about that is related to my kids again is we watched it with my kids. So we had a chance to go on the Galactic Star Cruiser. Again, you all know I am a genuine and true nerd through and through. Huge fan of Scott Troberidge and his work at Star Wars, at Star Wars in Disney and also of that. And so before that, we got our kids who were nine and six and watched all the movies together. And then we were watching Mandalorian together as a family. And it's super fun. And it's fun to have that kind of lore connection.

Starting point is 01:32:03 So it's not just the classic kids movies, but there's something more. And I think for them, they feel like it's an adult kind of conversation that gets to be a part of. So I've really enjoyed that. And I think the world of Dave Flonay and John Fabro and the team that's building that universe out. This is the way. This is the way. Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates that you're interviewing? One of the most important things that I always ask people is what people who worked with them would say

Starting point is 01:32:33 are their greatest strengths and weaknesses. I like this for a couple reasons, not least of which is I often do follow up with references, and I like to triangulate their awareness of how other people calibrate, though. And also like how they respond to criticism. Are they saying, hey, like, sometimes Canada surprised me.

Starting point is 01:32:52 They say, hey, you'll hear this critique a lot for me. I don't think it's fair. That can be an okay answer, but they've got to be a pretty robust there. Or it's like, hey, this is something I'm working on. Here's what I'm working on. But I also like to hear what I'm working on. they think the superpowers are. And too often a lot of attention in interviews is paid to weaknesses,

Starting point is 01:33:09 which I care about because I want to know what the downside is. But way more important to me is like, what are you awesome at? Like, what is the thing that if I just like, I can just hitch a wagon and ride? Like that's what I want to know. Like, where's like, where's the superpower that you're like crushing it at? And what's funny is people are pretty rarely give by reference checks. They're not that often accurate about what the critiques are, but they are usually pretty accurate about what their strengths are. Interesting. I'm also a huge proponent of strengths and not worried too much about your weaknesses.

Starting point is 01:33:36 But asking people to contextualize their performance through the team, that's so important. We do not achieve very much on our own. Communication is the job. Yeah. Amazing. Is there a favorite product that you recently discovered that you love and meta products are acceptable answers? The Rayvan meta glasses would be a tempting answer.

Starting point is 01:33:57 the multimodal stuff, which I'm going to get in trouble because I've been teasing this for months on social media, and it's still a closed beta, and it's like, we're growing the beta slowly. It's like, people are really badly wanted it. It was probably one of the most magical things I've, like, gotten to try recently. It's not totally fair because it's also not, you can buy the right of my meta glasses, and very soon, I won't say when, but very soon, they'll have this capability. But it's more fun to think outside of the box. All right, this is such a, I'm going to get in trouble for this answer,

Starting point is 01:34:27 it's a bit of a pretentious one. I am not a car guy. Let me say that right now. I don't like cars. I don't care about cars. I want a car that works and doesn't like a brake. I grew up all my cars growing up. I had over 100,000 miles in them because we only ever had used cars.

Starting point is 01:34:38 They were constantly breaking down and the power steering would go out while you're driving and you have to like having the thing or the brakes would go out or you'd throw a rod. I've done it all. So I just wanted a car. And so then I drove a Honda cord that I bought for 10 years. And then I drove a Tesla Model S for 10 years. and a Tesla Model S had a thing happen to it

Starting point is 01:34:59 while it was parked I will get into that so I'd get a new car and again I'm like I want to get an electric car and I was like let me get something nice I'm going to get something nice

Starting point is 01:35:07 I'm driving a Mercedes Benz AMG EQS and I didn't know cars could be this nice is I actually like that I grew up driving used cars and like you know

Starting point is 01:35:22 whatever I did not know it's possible it is the best augmented reality product, I think you can buy in the market today. You know, when they had to display, it puts your turn in three-dimensional space. It's got cameras facing your eyes. So it's positioned correctly on this display relative to your eyes, the turn. And so when you've come up, like, it's like you're hitting a little wall.

Starting point is 01:35:40 You've got a turn before you hit the wall. And I was like, oh, my God. I think this car has a great augmented reality. So, yeah, not a car guy. And I'm not trying to flex on this car or whatever it is. I like it a lot. And I didn't know that could be that nice. The thing that I thought was so impressive was they did an amazing job with augmented reality in this car.

Starting point is 01:35:58 Wow, Mercedes-Benz, a player in the augmented reality, mixed reality space. Yeah, big time. They're out there. They're out there. They're out there in the lead. I sometimes think about having a contest where I give away products people mentioned in this segment, and now you've blown my budget way. Ray Van Bennis.

Starting point is 01:36:12 Ray Van Bennis. You can afford that. That's an amazing. I'm going to have to check that out. I think we're going to increase some sales for Mercedes. Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back? to think about share with friends and family, find useful.

Starting point is 01:36:27 Yeah, we have a funny actually how we came about this. The motto my family has, my immediate family, like me, my wife and kids, is just trust yourself. Just trust yourself. Actually, the reason we have that motto is when we have a house, we have a few nice art pieces and one of them is a Tracy Eamon, a famous UK-based artist, and she does neon pieces. And it says trust yourself. And so it's in our bedroom hallway where me and all the kids and my wife are says trust yourself. And every morning the neon lights up and it's trust yourself.

Starting point is 01:36:54 And then I had like a, I had the chance to have like a crest made in the UK and my family's English from way back. And so we have in the, so in the in the crest that says trust yourself. And I always talk to my kids especially. I think, you know, I really think people when you're experiencing peer pressure, like who do you trust like them or yourself? When you're having like a lot of self doubt and uncertainty, like you have to trust yourself. I just think so much of the success I've had, I think this is probably true of most people who went to startups and succeeded, was like,

Starting point is 01:37:26 I just had faith that I was making good decisions. I mean, this comes back to the conviction point I made earlier about how you do things like a newsfeed or controversial things or how you make big, expensive changes. Just conviction. You have to believe that your eyes, ears, and intellect have combined to give you a point of view that has intrinsic value

Starting point is 01:37:43 and deserves your respect. as opposed to reading that newspaper article about your company and believing it over what your own eyes and years have told you. So that's the model that we go with. And I think it's also important to say you won't always be right and that's okay. Totally. That's right. Trusting yourself also includes taking risks because you trust that you can deal and handle with what happens when the risks don't pay out. Beautiful. Final question. I know that you're an amateur photographer, maybe semi-pro photographer, a lot of travel photography. Amateur. Amateur. Okay. You also have this website that I came across that.

Starting point is 01:38:16 I don't know if people know about it. It's this funny name. I'm not going to mention that. I don't know if you want people. Warden Shortbo. It's an anagram of my name. Warden Shortbo. Anagram of Andrew Bosworth.

Starting point is 01:38:25 Yeah, wardenshorto.com. Yeah, I love photography. I love it. It's a real passion of mine. So here's the question. What's your favorite photo that you've taken? Ord is actually a great place to talk about trusting yourself, by the way. And I know it's cheesy to say it, but I think Rick Rubin's recent interviews on what art is

Starting point is 01:38:42 and how people make it is spot on. You have to make it for yourself and you have to love it. And if someone else loves it and it finds broader resonance, that's awesome. But that's not why you do it. And if you start to try to do it for broader resonance, then you're kind of chasing something else. It's media, it's entertainment, but it's not art, some other thing. And I say all this to basically tap dance and say, I kind of love a lot of my photos. And it's very hard to pick a favorite.

Starting point is 01:39:07 The one that is popping to my head, which has more emotional significance, is a picture I took of my son playing in the street, just jumping in a puddle, wearing, you know, kind of a rain boot, rain slick kind of a thing. And it's, it's not sharp,

Starting point is 01:39:23 it's not in focus. It's like, it's a vignette. It's an idea. And I really do think, Ansel Adams talked a lot about how the goal of the photographer is to create a capture

Starting point is 01:39:35 that expresses to the viewer what it felt like to be there. And people forget that he was a master of the dark room, much more, even more so than maybe than the capture of the print. The print was where he like, did amazing work. And I've had the pleasure to go to his dark room in Big Sur and spend time with the sun

Starting point is 01:39:55 and watch them do development in that room. And he had elaborate scripts of how he would highlight, you know, dodge and burn different parts of the photograph to get it to have the resonance that he wanted. And he fought for photography to be accepted as an artistic medium, which it wasn't, which I find so resonant in today's AI art conversations. where once again we're trying to gatekeep what is art and you just don't get to do that unfortunately. So this picture of my son,

Starting point is 01:40:22 no one would call it a technical marvel, but as a vignette of it capturing for me personally, but also I think in general for parents, the like ephemorality of these tremendously touching, charming human moments that you have with your children. That's the one that comes to mind. Amazing. We're going to try to find it and link folks to it. And on the point of Rick Rubin,

Starting point is 01:40:43 something he says along the same lines is that you think of art as like your diary. Like I'm just describing what I find interesting and important and nobody can come to me and say my diary is wrong. It's my diary. This is how I see the world and that's okay. And that's where the best art comes from is just. And we'll link to this. There's an awesome video of him saying exactly this that was recently watching.

Starting point is 01:41:03 Totally. This was so much fun. I am so thankful. They made time for this. I'm looking forward to our parenting and relationships podcasts in the future. Joking, not joking. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to follow what you're up to? And how can listeners be useful to you?

Starting point is 01:41:19 Sure. I'm at BosTank on Instagram and on threads and also on X, Facebook.com slash boss. And I also have my own podcast, which is a technical deep dive. So it's pretty different, I would say. It's technical deep dive to try to go deep on one or two topics each time. That's called Boss to the Future. You can find that on Spotify or iTunes. boss to the future, buy some Quest stuff. Yeah, buy us. Get yourself a Quest 3. Let's be honest. Do you treat yourself? There you go. Or these Raybaned sunglasses. I'm a big fan.

Starting point is 01:41:50 Buzz, again, thank you so much for being here. Cheers. Thanks, brother. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes,

Starting point is 01:42:12 or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Making Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO)

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