The Peterman Pod - Ex-Meta Staff Eng & YC Startup Cofounder | Rahul Pandey

Episode Date: December 27, 2024

Rahul Pandey (@rpandey1234) grew to Staff at Meta through a few interesting legs of his career:• Stanford to Startup - He joined a startup that one of his professors was starting right out of college. This startup was acquired within a year by Pinterest.• Junior to Mid-level @ Pinterest - His promotion was rejected twice. He appealed the second rejection and got the promotion.• Senior to Staff @ Meta - He interviewed for Senior at Meta and got a promotion through job hopping. From there, he worked towards his Staff promotion and got it.After getting to Staff at Meta, he started his own YCombinator-funded startup, Taro. In our conversation we cover:• What got him promoted to Staff at Meta• Joining startups and “two-way doors”• How his promotion was rejected twice and he appealed successfully• When job hopping is good and when it is bad• What real networking looks like—Where to find Rahul:• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rpandey1234/• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RahulPandeyrkp• Twitter: https://x.com/rpandey1234• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rpandey1234/Where to find Ryan:• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/• X: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/• Threads: https://www.threads.net/@ryanlpeterman• Instagram: instagram.com/ryanlpeterman In this episode, we cover:00:00 – Intro1:12 – Stanford to Startup12:25 – Jr to Mid-level at Pinterest 30:20 – Senior to Staff at Meta45:12 – Management (TLM) at Meta53:40 – Leaving Meta to create a startup1:05:32 – Career reflections To hear more, visit www.developing.dev

I have failed my way into success. That was Rahul Pandey. I had gotten offers from all big tech companies, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. He's a software engineer who went from almost getting fired through an acquisition. And they told me and said, hey, we are going to get a card with that. You're going to do a full round of interviews next Monday. To getting promoted to staff at Meta in his 20s. I interviewed him so that we could learn from that experience.

The thing I wish I realized way, way earlier in my career is that... And he was very honest with his entire career story. I came in with this attitude of like, okay, I should be one of the best engineers. And then getting rejected for the same promotion twice was a real setback. What portion of your career growth do you think was luck? The beginning of your career is unusual. You went to Stanford, but you joined a startup immediately. And it looks like a very small startup.

What's the story behind you joining a startup right out of college? The story is, in my fifth year at Stanford, I was at the school for five years, doing an undergrad and master's degree. So I met in that fifth year. One of the reasons I actually decided to stick around for that 50 year is because I felt like I hadn't really made any faculty connections. And Stanford, just like any of the top institution, is famous in part because of amazing instructors and faculty who were doing groundbreaking research. And I felt like, what a shame if I leave this institution and not really understand or take part in that. And so the 50 year, I'd was a RA, like a research assistant in a lab with a professor named Yuri Luscovic, who was like a rising star. And I thought it was a cool opportunity. And that led to a lot of the work we were doing the lab. He decided to spin it out into a company. And Stanford actually is pretty well known for being fairly generous or willing to allow their faculty to go out and do companies and like have this revolving door with academia. And so when that happened, I felt like it was

almost too good of a story to pass up. Like, I could be one of 10 or 20,000 engineers in big tech if I go join Google or Microsoft or meta. And I had received offers at all of them. But then I felt like, okay, this is a story where I had this connection relationship with a professor. He trusts me. I trust him. And it just feels like a Silicon Valley unique story that will, it could go really, really well, in which case, amazing. Or worst case, it's a good story to tell. Yeah, yeah. And so I felt like there was not an hour of reviews, and that's kind of why I ended up choosing that route. Makes sense. And you're early in your career, so if it fell flat, you didn't have a whole lot of responsibility. How many people were in that early venture? Like, was this just you and the

professor? Yeah. Was there more structure? Yeah, so as a professor, he had one industry veteran who had been around the block, and so it was like two founders. And then there was one other person in the lab with me. So two new grads, me and him. And it was one more person. So I think I had joined technically, aside from the two founders, I was like employee number two. So very, very early on into the company's formation. Right. How did you think about risk at that point? Because I think a lot of people they're evaluating big tech and versus startups. And big tech is kind of the, you know, the high expected value path. And then startups are kind of, you know, boom or bust type of path. So did you think about that at all or was it a no-brainer to go to the startup? Yeah, I did think about that.

I think the couple things I thought about is one-way door versus two-way door. Like, let me try it out. And startups, most things in your career are two-way doors in the sense that you try it out, you learn something, you experiment, and then you can always back out. You can always decide to leave the startup and then go to big tech if needed. So that was one consideration. And the other consideration, too, if I'm being honest, is that I felt like I had attained that level of success or that level of like approval from big tech. And if I hadn't had that, I honestly am not sure if I would have done the startup. But what I mean by that is like I had done an internship the prior summer at Facebook,

now known as Meta in 2013. And then after that internship, I had gotten offers from all big tech companies. I've gotten five offers including what I mentioned, like Google, Facebook and Microsoft, Twitter and Square. So five companies in total. And so that gave me a lot of confidence. said, okay, I can do it. Right.

I can, hopefully, with some preparation, I'm hopeful or confident in my ability to go back and get that opportunity. So it didn't feel like that much of a risk. Right. Whereas if I had never gotten that re-tech offer, I think I might have really thought twice. Well, let me go get a stable job, which is going to be much more kind of a known commodity to other companies

so that if and when I just had to move on for my first gig, I can get a really good job with my second gig. But because I already had that insurance policy of Stanford on my resume, along with these other offers, I felt like I could be a lot more risk on that early in my career. Right, right. That makes sense. So when you went into the actual startup itself, would you say that it was a good outcome from the acquisition, or was that kind of like, you know, aqua hire, maybe not the best outcome you're hoping for? Yeah, more of the latter, for sure. I think the thing with acquisition, but I learned, that acquisition is probably one of

the most overloaded terms in Silicon Valley. What do you mean? You could talk about acquisition as in like the most famous might be or one of the most famous might be like WhatsApp getting acquired by Facebook for 19 billion right right right in 2014 that's like an acquisition and like everyone became filthy right but you also have acquisitions or frankly the total opposite which is the company effectively failed yeah and they're calling an acquisition to save the dignity of the founder I think what happened to Jose the company I joined it was somewhere in the middle it was a little bit if I'm being honest closer to the failure And I mean, I probably shouldn't call it a failure.

It was basically like an opportunistic bet that, okay, the startup that I joined, like I mentioned, it was spun out of academic work. Right. And so I think the bet that we were making is that, hey, we have interesting IP, intellectual property. We have some interesting ideas that are more academic. But there's not really a clear pathway to generating revenue or building a product. Right. And so when the startup acquisition offer came along, like Pinterest, this hot company, which already

had 100 million users when they came along and said, hey, sharing your technology and your technology know-how with our core product and PMF product market fit that we already have, that could really create something where one plus one equals three. That I think was a really attractive proposition. And so I think that we never gave the company a chance to really fail. Like it just ended within like eight months of formation. And so I think to answer your question directly, I think if initially it wasn't like an FU rich outcome, like I'm never up to work again, it certainly wasn't that. I basically, you can kind of think of it as me entering in Pinterest with a slightly higher package than what a normal new grad at Pinterest would it receive. So certainly,

I mean, you can't complain. Like, I feel like I learned a lot about Silicon Valley. I learned a lot about acquisitions and I came in with like a financially better outcome. But it wasn't like a life changing amount of money. Got it, got it. Yeah, I think people, who hear the word acquisition, they assume that it's an insane outcome. But it sounds like in this case, it was kind of some sort of way to acquire the talent and the know-how and not be crazy good. But at least it's better than if you just went straight to Pinterest, it sounds like. Yeah. And I think one more thing I'll say, which I think is really often overlooked, is that storytelling and the story that you tell yourself and a story you tell other people, the narrative

that you can create about what you did, why you did it, and why it's interesting, that is incredibly powerful. And I think honestly, more than anything else, I feel like me being able to tell this story of how I was an enterprising young engineer, 22 years old, and I took a bet on a startup and I did this crazy story. Honestly, I get a lot of mileage out of that story. I mean, genuinely, I get, like, I learned a lot, but also just like being able to tell that story and explain to people what happened, what I learned from it.

that actually has a ton of value. And so one of the things I tell people on Taro or just in general, when I mentor people is that if you have a choice between A and B, and you feel like A is the one which will give you exposure to more unique opportunity, unique people, unique stories, that's a really good argument to pick option A because it just will broaden your perspective and give you that storytelling ability, which is so powerful. For sure. Yeah. And I think also going that path can allow you to piggyback off the social proof of kind of the crazy Silicon Valley startup trajectories. And I'm sure the story could be told in a way where it was a very good outcome.

And you learned a lot in your arising, you know, startup kind of software engineer. So that could let you be, you know, valuable in that social circle as well as big tech. So okay, so it sounds like looking back on that, even though the startup, I guess, you know, it didn't like succeed. It kind of like failed a little bit. It was actually a good outcome. You got a story out of it. So looking back on that, let's say I was a new grad, and I think there's a lot in the audience,

would you recommend that they pick this same opportunity if they had the same decision to make? Yeah, I think it depends. So a couple of things that made this story unique and why I felt like it was a right position for me at the time was, number one, I had a lot of social proof on my resume already. Like I went to Stanford. I had done internship at Facebook, which is already a huge company at that point. And I felt like the founder, of a startup was one of the best people in the field in the world.

Right. Right. Like undoubtedly, this person knew more about recommendation systems and big data. And, you know, we'd call it machine learning back then, but effectively machine learning back then. So it was like,

clearly a really good person to just be around and see how they operate. And so I think if those things are true, then yeah, I mean, I would encourage anyone who's that early on in their career, go do the crazy, risky thing, which might fail. But I will say this, honestly,

more of the exception than the norm. So if you're normal, like if you are the typical path, which is what I would describe as, like, you went to a pretty good school and you got a degree and you are like struggling to find your first job. Absolutely, I would recommend go and find the biggest brand name you can, like the biggest company, like reputable company, and go work there. Because I do think there's so much value and just accruing credibility. Right. Right. Like go work at Amazon. Go, I think your first job was Amazon. Right. Right. Like, that's a good. great first gig. Like go work at Amazon, go work at Google if you can get in. I think that will set you up well at a baseline for whatever else you want to do later on your career. And if you had this

exceptional opportunity and you're able to justify it by like an amazing founder and you already have some of that kind of backup plan because of your background, I think then it makes sense. But for the most part, I would just recommend the standard path is probably the best because it's a standard. It's a standard for a reason, right? So like probably the, that the end path is what I'd recommend from all steep. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I think, you know, big tech versus startups comes up a lot. And it just feels like, like you said, one of the big things about going directly into a big brand is instant step change in your credibility.

You just immediately, you have some prestige on your resume. Yeah, there's a lot of value. And just even if you just went to big tech for like a year or two and then you left. And even if your end goal was to go to startups, I kind of feel like developing the engineering fundamentals while collecting that stamp is one of the highest EV things that you could do. Knowing now your situation, that makes it. You had an extraordinary opportunity and you already had the stamps essentially. Stanford, Facebook, you're kind of already in there.

So that makes sense. You got acquired by Pinterest and so you're kind of, it was a pretty big company at the time, right? Pinterest is maybe a growth stage startup at the time? Yeah, around 400 people. Well, 400 people. Okay. So it was bigger than a true startup, startup, but it was still much smaller than big tech. You know, when you got acquired, what was the story there? Was it something that you felt like you were happy to get acquired to Pinterest or was it kind of chaotic? What was that like? Yeah, I think in the end, I was happy with it. But I will tell you, like, it was very chaotic and very stressful in the process to get there. Because like basically the way it worked, right, the behind the scenes is that, It was like my professor and this other industry veteran. And they were like much, much more senior than me and the other new grad who joined Kosei together.

And like, you know, they had 20 years and more experience. Clearly they were much more well connected, much more in the know. And so the way it work is that I came into work at Kosei, the startup one day. And they told me and said, hey, we are going to get acquired by Pinterest. They want to interview everyone on the team. You're going to do a full round of interviews next Monday, which was like a couple days away. And so that was like a. a big change in the company strategy, right? Obviously, I was like, we're really shutting down.

We're going to get acquired. And then the last 48 hours, the next like 72 hours or whatever, it was extremely stressful because I had, you know, I was like out of interview prep for almost a year of that way. And as you know, you talk about this later, but like interview prep is a very different scale compared to actually doing the engineering job. And so I was very worried that I wouldn't actually get the offer at Pinterest because I didn't do well on the interview. And in fact, that almost came true. Like, I remember I did the full round. Like, they took everyone basically immediately to file an out interview. Um, so I had like five or six interviews in one day. And I was borderline. They called me back in to the SF office again to say, hey, like, we know, we still had some doubts or like we had some questions follow up for you.

And I did two more interviews. And luckily, I nailed those. Like, I did really well on those. And then I got the offer. But like, I was very worried because like, There was a tech crutch article, and it was like a big news announcement about how Pinchus is acquired as hot technology company. And it would have sucked if it was like, oh, I joined the startup. I didn't actually take part in the acquisition. And all my friends would have texted me or messaged me. And like, oh, congratulations. I'm like, oh, well, I got nothing out of it because I didn't get an offer.

So it kind of worked out in the end, but it really was pretty stressful process and it was rushed. Right. Had you vested any options in your in Kose at the time? Okay, so you would have gotten. Because like Jose had only been around for about eight months at that point. Right. Okay. So if you didn't pass that, you would have gotten fired essentially and had gotten no upside from any equity after that. That's right. Yeah. And so like literally like after that on this whole like on-site interview, I was feeling pretty nervous. So then I like message back my old recruiters at all

their big tech company that I got offers from. I like start, hey like are you still hiring or can I join? That was worth. That would be a backup. Let me go back to Google. Let me go back to Facebook. Right. Luckily it worked out. And then I wanted to be part of that story. And I knew the people at Kosei, so I wanted to kind of join with them. So that was like a nice transition. But yeah, that was like, it would have been effectively start from scratch and become like a new grad all over. Right.

Was that leak code to just a standard Alco interview loop? Yeah. That was a pretty standard. Like I think it was, you know, leak code. They asked me like what I did on the startup, what projects I worked on. Yeah. I think it was like one behavioral interview, I think. And then a bunch of weak code.

Man, okay. You'd have a very different story if you failed that. Not nearly as good. So, okay, so you get into Pinterest. What was the, what was that like? Did they have a ladder system at that time? Did you get plugged into a certain level in terms of career side of things? Yeah.

They had just developed an engineering leveling system. And I came in at L3, which is like their entry level engineer. So effectively, they borrowed it from Google and Facebook. So L3 is entry level L4, is mid-level L5. senior. So I came in at L3 and then I transitioned away from recommendation systems or like data engineering, which is effectively what I was doing at the startup. And I transitioned into mobile development. And so I kind of did a career reset in some ways by joining Pinterest. And then that led to kind of a longer ramp up time. And I actually ended up getting rejected for promotion, which we can

talk about if that's interesting. But yeah, I basically came in at the L3. I see. So you mentioned that you were working in a different space. How did you choose what you're working on at Pinterest? And also maybe you can tell us a little more about what you were working on too. Yeah. I mean, the way they put you into teams is they actually modeled it off of Facebook. So Facebook has a thing called boot camp. At least they did back in the day where it was like a six-week program where you like learn about engineering fundamentals and you pick a team. They had something called base camp. It's like a dirt like a play on that. And the idea of base camp is like a bridged version like two or three weeks where you've learned about different teams at Pinterest and then you decide what to go. work on. By going through the base camp process and talking to a bunch of teams, I kind of made the call that I didn't want to do things that were more back-end. I wanted to be closer to the product. I wanted to actually be able to build something which I could deploy at Pinterest or on my own. Actually, one of the criteria for me is I wanted to be able to build things on my own end-to-end, like side projects. I felt like I wasn't able to properly do that with my background in my recommendation systems, which I had kind of built up an expertise in as. Stanford and at Kose. You wanted to do that because you had aspirations to start a company someday?

Yeah, I mean, I think vaguely I did have some aspirations. Like at Stanford, like everyone has a vague aspiration to start a company. So there was some element of like I wanted this at some point do the entrepreneurial thing. I think there's also just like a more fundamental itch of like I want to build something. And I felt like you can obviously build things on the back end too. But I did want to be an owner of the actual user experience as well. was important to me and just like I wanted to dabble I wanted to build things the idea of being able to to have my name on an app in the play store like the android app store that was really compelling and like my whole family was on Android so I could like go home and show them here's this app I built

and like thousands of people could use it that something that was like really compelling to me right and so I felt like if I could just learn Android professionally at Pinterest with really good people that could help accelerate my side project endeavors because that was not an option at Kosa there was no such thing as a mobile team. We were only three, four people total. So I just wanted to leverage the benefit of a bigger company to be able to double depth and do well professionally, hopefully, and also be able to do things on the side that I thought were interesting. That made sense. So I think the rationale made sense when you actually went through with it and you ended up on this client side team, did you learn what you wanted to learn or were you surprised that it wasn't

what you were expecting. Yeah, I think I did end up learning what I wanted to learn. Like, there was a really good staff level Android engineer who got hired a couple months after me. I learned a lot from him. Like, that was a huge kind of pivot, I would say, in my career. Like, I was able to just get a ton of mentorship. But I will say, for the first few months, it was kind of rough. I didn't know how to properly learn. I had not learned how to properly learn at that point in my career. And so Android, especially at a somewhat mature company where we had, you know, I think hundreds of thousands of lines in the Android app at that point. point already. It was not a small code base. I think I really did struggle. Like, as someone who

had never done Android professionally before, the first few months of transitioning were really difficult for me. And I think I, like that was the reason why I think I didn't do well. When I initially went up for promotion at Pinterest is that I was very slow to ramp up and I felt like I like read a lot of documentation. I read a lot of code, but I didn't actually modify. I didn't write much Android code in the first few months. That was rough, but I think eventually I got to the point where I felt comfortable. So what was the key change that took you from not landing code and not being effective in your onboarding to learning how to learn and being effective?

Yeah, I think a lot of it honestly was just being surrounded by really good people. In particular, this like L6 staff level engineer who would come from Facebook, who joined Pinterest. Like I think that person really, like, we started to prepare a program. and that was, I think, a really big change in how I approached the work. And I think just in general, like having a team where you're accountable to something, I think I did work pretty hard. So, like, it's not like I was fooling around and I didn't really learn anything. I was spending a lot of time.

I think when you have a team of people who are, like, kind of holding you accountable, or they're going to judge you, which is really what was happening. I think that was a really good fire under my butt to actually learn it properly. And eventually it kind of clicked, but the combination of mentorship and just enough time in the role. Got it. So for people who are looking to join a team, they're making a similar decision

of what team to join. Maybe they already passed interviews. What do you think is the most important thing in picking a good team? Yeah, I'll say two things. One is the people, part of it, again, is like the amount that you learn is going to be dominated by who you interact with and what kind of discussion or interaction you have with them.

And the second thing I would say is, how important is that team to the company? So one of the reasons, actually, additional reason why I picked Android at Pinterest is that one of the big initiatives for Pinterest in 2015 when I was working there was international grow. And you're going to try to grow a consumer app internationally. The number one way you do that, the key is going to be Android.

Right. Android is dominant outside of the U.S. And so I knew that the company would allocate a lot of smart people, a lot of resources, a lot of money, frankly, into that domain. And I felt like if you're adjacent to you, to or operating in an area of high growth, you will inevitably see some of that growth too. Right. So I think the combination of those two, people and where the company is growing, I think,

matters a lot in team selection. Yeah, that makes sense. I think, you know, common advice I see is like, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats. I've seen some people's careers where they went from, you know, new grad to director in like five years because they were working on the one of the most important things for the company, and they were really delivering. So the impact was insane, and typically career growth is proportional to your impact. So that makes a lot of sense. So going into the career growth side of things, you came in as a L3. You mentioned that you had a failed promotion. Can you talk me through how

you eventually got the promo and maybe the story behind what you were talking about there? I mean, it's a pretty difficult journey, honestly. So I got the failed promotion, I got the feedback. I think honestly, that was probably legitimate. I think it was a year after I was at Pinterest, and I wanted to go up a promo and I got rejected. And I think it was like valid feedback. Okay, you've only been doing Android professionally

for like, you know, nine months at that point. And you haven't really added, you haven't really been at that much. That was fair. I run up again six months later. And I got rejected for the promotion again. So that was Julie to Moraly. Because I came into Pinterest

with like this attitude of like, okay, I came in through an aquire, an acquisition, and I should be like on top of the world. I should be like one of the best engineers. And then getting rejected for the same promotion twice was a real setback. So luckily what happened in the second time is I, they had like an appeal process at Pinterest. So then I was able to work with a manager to appeal the promotion. And I got, I actually ended up getting it. So that was valuable.

One of the takeaways I learned in that second time is, A big feedback for me for the rejection was that, oh, on one of the projects that you listed in their promotion packet, you said that you've been working on it for like 16 months. And the promotion committee, this anonymous promotion committee, interpreted that to mean that I wasn't working with urgency or with deliberation enough. And that was like not true. Like I think the framing of it had that framing because they kind of interpreted this like long duration of the project.

but then when I clarified that with a manager and they were able to like kind of advocate for me or put up a appeal, it ended up working out. But I think that just kind of showed me the value of like you really need to be clear about what you think you're saying. It may not always be interpreted that way. Right, right. And so I suspect with things like career growth or like a one-on-one document or a promotion document. You have to really be clear about get it reviewed by people who have been around the block and like understand like, be open to feedback on how things might be interpreted differently because you want to avoid the situation that I ended up in back then. Was the promo packet something that you put all the initial

materials together and then your manager, you know, fit it into whatever promo template? Like, how did the 16th, the framing of the 16th months get into the promo packet? Yeah, I'm trying to remember actually how exactly it worked. I mean, I definitely go a promote packet. So there was like a normal self-review and at Pinterest it was a pretty heavy-handed process. I think, you know, a self-review, your promotion pocket and then your manager would add commentary on top of that and they would submit that to an anonymous promo committee who would then accept or reject your promotion. And so yeah, I mean, I think I was like the primary author behind this like promotion document which said that I'd worked on a project for 16 months.

Got it. Yeah, it's interesting. You talked about the duration of the project and how it being longer hurt you because I've heard the opposite as well. If you have a project that is longer, it's perceived. as larger scope potentially and therefore, you know, maybe a bigger undertaking. And so I've heard some people say, actually, sometimes it can be advantageous for a project to be a longer duration. So I think, you know, of course there's no one size fits all thing here.

It's all about the context and how the story is actually told. The color behind it matters a lot. Yeah. And this is by, I think, like you have to be really clear with your manager about what narrative. what story are you trying to tell, right? You have to make sure that you're aligned with them and also ideally get feedback from other like tech leads or other people who are in positions of influence because the same project, if you've been working on over 16 months, it could be really impressive or if it's like this minor experiment that people assume should have taken you three months, but you've been working out for 16 months. That could be held against you, right? So I think the devil is in detail and you have to be

really like you, I guess like the learning I had is that you can't make assumptions about how you are going to be evaluated or judged based off your own interpretation. Like software is during is like social endeavor. Like you have to be able to work with other people and figure out how are they judging you. What do they think are your errors for improvement? And make sure you figure that out ahead of time. So you're not surprised during a performance review.

Right, right. That makes sense. One of the last things I want to go for this, this leg of your career is usually from L3 to L4, it's all about engineering fundamentals. and technical growth. And you mentioned a little bit that having a really strong mentor was one of the key things

that helped you level up here in terms of your skills. Was there anything else that you did that helped you have a lot more impact or really develop those skills quickly going from three to four? One of the things I learned from this mentor, which was also incredibly valuable for me

when I was doing my own side projects or publishing apps, was this willingness to just operate outside of the code base. Like, for example, I mentioned how the Pagers could base, even though it was still relatively early, it was already quite mature. Like, compilation, like building the Android app and deploying to the phone.

It took, I think, sometime between two and five minutes. Like, it took a long time to actually do all this compilation. So it was like a very slow and painful debug cycle. One of the things that the mentor showed me is that, hey, you can actually create your own, like, mini Android app and make changes and, like, copy over themes as needed. But then you can have this sandbox environment

where the debug cycle is way faster. And I think that was really eye-opening for me because it felt like making a new app, that's like so much work. It's like this big ambiguous thing. I don't know how to do that. Right. But when you actually get into it,

it turns out that's not that hard and it will actually meaningfully increase your velocity. And that fear I had, I think, of like being able to dabble and like break things and, you know, copy, paste code and modify it over here and see what happens. I think that went away.

after a while, which is also, of course, very valuable for a side project because you don't have training wheels. You don't have any code to already modify for a side project. So it's very valuable for that. And I think that change of the attitude of like it's being able to go in and make things and break things, honestly, was probably the biggest mindset shift that led to the L3L4 promotion. That makes sense. Yeah, I think a lot of that promotion too is about, you know, contributing more code and having one of the most important things for that is like a very fast iteration loop like very tight iteration loop i've heard also you know at meta and other big tech like building the mobile app because it's such a massive thing can take really long time maybe you know up to an

hour in some cases and so yeah having that sandbox app or like any other things too where you have like a script that saves you know a few minutes you run it in the background and it's pre-compiling thing or anything like that can make a big difference when your iteration speed is what controls your learning speed and how quickly you're landing the code. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. So, okay, you got the promo of Pinterest and I believe at this point you left to Meta. Is that correct? Yeah, I left in mid-27. Got it. What made you want to leave Pinterest for Meta? A couple things. One is I think Meta was a much, much bigger company. And I felt like frankly the engineering brand of meta was still quite a bit stronger just in terms of like

name brand and being a huge company and it was value in that they were paying more and I felt like in terms of immediate growth at Pinterest I didn't see a clear pathway to okay like here's how my career is going to rocket ship from from where I am now and so the combination of those three led me to let me look around and see if I can get a meaningful bump in my career promotion or compensation. I do think in general, early on in career, job hopping is more effective at that. Later on in career, job hopping is actually counterproductive. What makes you say that job hopping's counterproductive later in career? And as you go up the career ladder, most of your impact is going to be derived through the

influence you have on other people, rather than actually just coding all day every day. It was rare for like, for example, a staff or principal engineer to just crank out so much code that it justifies their impact at the company. Usually what's going to be happening is you're creating frameworks or tools or systems that allow other developers to do productive work. And so for that kind of work, you need to be in a company long enough that you have those relationships and that trust built out. If you are a like staff or principal engineer, it's very hard to job hop your way beyond that. You have just kind of build out that trust and relationship and then you get promoted. Whereas early on career, as long as you show the competency of, hey, I can write high

quality Android code. I can write high quality production code. That might be enough, actually, for a company to bring you in at a higher level or at least a higher compensation. That makes a lot of sense. I think that aligns with my experience as well. I think my promotion from senior to staff, I think was unusually quick because I had a lot of relationships already. A lot of my peers had kind of switched companies like very, very fast, but I stayed in one place, one team for a long time. So actually that leg came a lot of it was from influence and people trusting me and knowing I could get a job done at a staff level and giving me those opportunities, which I was lucky to receive.

But yeah, staying at some place for a long time gave me more opportunities for influence and that kind of luck. So one thing I want to ask you about, because you mentioned one thing about Meadow was like more social proof, more prestige. your resume was already pretty loaded at the time in terms of in Pinterest is not a bad brand. You had Stanford. You had already been at Meta. So do you feel like there was additional value in another stamp or was it more for the other aspects of it?

Yeah, that's a good point. I do think part of it was like I still felt Meadow as a much bigger, like everyone in the role had heard of meta or at that point it was Facebook. Everyone had heard of Facebook. Not everyone had heard of Pinterest. Part of it was maybe like this ego of like, it's a more well-known brand, both for the common public and also in terms of engineering.

But I think you're right, that that was not the highest order bit of what I was optimizing for. Because like I had already technically had the Facebook name on my resume. I had already had these other somewhat well-known names on my resume. I think it was more, I think, focused on

this feels like a place where I can grow my career. a lot faster at Facebook compared to where I was. Makes sense. When you switched from Pinterest to meta, what were the cultural differences that immediately jumped out to you? I'll start off by saying, I think they were actually kind of similar.

Like, a lot of the Pinterest culture was influenced by a lot of ex-Facebook and ex-Google people. So it was similar in that sense, but Facebook culture both from my internship and from people who had joined Pinterest from Facebook,

and you could tell at Facebook it was like the authentic, like, paste of it had gotten, but on steroids. For example, like at Pinterest I remember, their culture was every code review, every change would be reviewed by at least two people. And they'd actually have these being called Harold rolls where if you modified a particular

part of the code base, it would automatically add reviewers and they were blocking reviewers. You can land the code until they took a lot. At Facebook, as you probably know, like it's actually very rare for that to happen. Usually all you need is one except, one LGTM, one green check mark, and you can land it. And so I was actually kind of shocked at, wait, people are just landing code that quickly without all the other like checks and balances. So then that was one big difference. I think people were more direct at Facebook,

at Pinterest, more of the common criticisms of the company was that it was kind of too nice, which is kind of a weird criticism. But like, I think what they meant to say was that people weren't saying the difficult thing around feedback or prioritization and then therefore projects or people

who had no business actually staying at the company, they stuck around a lot longer. Whereas at Facebook, I think they were actually quite, I don't want to say like they were more mean, but they were definitely a lot more direct around, hey, this doesn't make sense. Why are you doing this? Let's cut it or kill it. And I think there was a lot more aggressive like PIP culture, for example, at Facebook compared to Pinterest. Right, right.

That makes sense. How about the technical stacks? Like when you switch from Pinterest to meta, did you have any issues learning meta's very custom stack? I mean, it's kind of interesting because like on paper it was quite similar. Like as an ad or dev, both were using Java. there was no Kotlin, really, at the time. So Java there, and it was still using, like, Android tooling. But I think one of the things that was interesting is that Facebook was operating at such a scale

that they had, like, work around us for a lot of things. They had their own custom build system called Buck, right? That was very neat for me. And then a lot of the ways of doing compilation for Android at Facebook was different from what I had learned, which was exacerbated or, like, made even more pronounced, by the fact that I was working on a hardware team. So I joined a relatively unique part of Facebook called Portal. And it wasn't called Portal all the time.

It was called Building 8. It basically was a forked version of Android, along with like 30 different custom Android apps sitting on top of this custom operating system. And so the build system and the tooling for that was actually very, very different, not just for Pinterest, but also just for Quora Facebook. So that took some time, like probably,

it took me like four or five months to understand how that worked. Got it. Yeah. And for people who don't know, Portal is the standalone device that's a video-hauling device that has a screen on it. And it sits stationary. It's almost like a Google Home. That's the thing that you're talking about, right? That's right. Yeah. I see. So when you were actually building these Android apps and running it on hardware, it was one of those things. That's right. I mean, initially, you would have like, we had like literally like an Android tablet because we didn't have hardware for my first join. But then, yeah, like eventually we had custom hardware. which had our own OS. It was like, you call it flashing. You'd flash the device with your own OS. And on top of that, you would then put over optimized build of a 30 app. But then you're not going to build all 30 app.

That would take like literally three or four hours. Then you would take the app that you're working on. Like I was working on the calling app. So I would just build that app. I kind of put that on the device. There's a very kind of unique process, even for Facebook, which took a long time to understand. And that was an opportunity.

Like you can talk about this later if you're interested. But I built out this like debug tool, which was just for people on portal because of how unique the setup was. And that actually led to a ton of impact because I was able to understand deeply how the workflow was different compared to other internet engineers. And I was able to build something to help with them. How many engineers did that speed up? But at the time, built that tool.

Like Portal had grown dramatically. So I think by that point, like hundreds of engineers in the portal org or adjacent orgs were using that tool either every day or every week. And it was probably saving like 100. hundreds of hours of engineering time every month. Yeah, so I mean, to me, that sounds like IC6 impact or staff impact. So maybe we can talk a little bit about career growth at META. Were you hired as an IC5, so senior or?

Yeah. Okay. That was higher with that. I see five. So that was probably a big part of moving as well. Sounds like you got a promotion from switching from Pinterest to Meta. Yep. That's right.

Did you have to do anything special to get that job hop promo or, you just did the interview and that was what they proposed. Yeah, that's what they proposed. I mean, I knew I had done the interviews really well. Like I came out thinking, okay, I felt really lucky or I felt really good about, okay, I pretty much nailed every problem. And I came in in a position of strength in the sense. I already had, I think, a couple pending offers at that point. And I had interned at Facebook. I had worked at a respectable company before, which was Pinterest. because the market was hot for indoor developers. So the combination of all of that led to just like they wanted to give me a compelling offer.

Right. Did the offer come in IC5 right off the bat or did you have to? Okay. So you didn't need to negotiate. You didn't need to say, hey, I'm only interviewing here if it's IC5. You just took the interview without saying anything and happened to get IC5. You went from senior or IC5 to staff. Yeah, maybe you can talk a little bit about what you were working on.

I mentioned I work on a thing called Portal, which was a standalone hardware video calling device. And so prior to Portal existing, Facebook already has a long history of doing video calling, primarily in the form of doing it through Messenger. So Messenger, the Facebook Messenger, already had a fairly mature ecosystem or infrastructure around supporting cross-platform video calls between desktop and mobile Android iOS at different with different codecs, different qualities. different audio, video codecs, things like that. And so I think a lot of the challenge was, hey, the step zero is just effectively fork off of Messenger and do our own thing because we were just kind of an experimental project. But then once Portal had, you know, hundreds of thousands of people who were using Portal every day, then there was a need to now kind of come back into the normal infrastructure.

Because like, you know, obviously the RTC team, like the video calling infrastructure team at Messenger, they were constantly making improvements. And it would always be a challenge of how do we now stay up to date? And so the main project I worked on was moving the core Kali infrastructure back into what Messenger had already developed. So migrating the old infra to the new infra while maintaining compatibility with all the custom features that Portal had and adopting a lot of the new feature that the RTC infra had enabled for us.

So I kind of navigating that at a product layer and also the tech layer. That was the main project. I think one thing I tell people is at the staff level, you can have one big project that I think some people have that. But for me, I think having a portfolio approach worked out really well. Well, that was like the main thing. I was really cross-functional. And frankly, a lot of like bureaucracy where it was managing people from the messenger team,

managed people from portal, leadership, like getting everyone in line, PMs. And so I think the other project that I mentioned earlier, which was a debug tool, that was purely engineering driven. I knew exactly who I was building for, which was me and other engineers on the team. I think the combination of those two led to a pretty clear promo case when I was able to go out for it. Right, right. I mean, that makes sense. That sounds clearly like IC6 scope. You're you had to influence across teams. Sounds like a pretty big shared infrastructure initiative. I've heard a lot of other people getting IC6 promos off of shared infra because that central team

probably made it so much better in the interim when you were branched away. So when you merge together, it's almost like you unlocked all of theirs, engineers's work in this new product surface. So, Were you intentional about your growth to IC6? Like was that something you kept talking your manager about? You said, hey, I want to get there. Or it just happened naturally. Yeah, I mean, the way you phrase the promotion conversation matters a lot. So, like, I think for the first year at Facebook, my goal was really is, let me make sure I do well.

Right. Because I think a big turnoff and I learned this when I was on the other side as a manager later on. But like, if you have someone who just joined the company and they're immediately asking you, okay, like, I want to get promoted. Can you help me? Right. It's a big turn off. Because even, especially for someone like me who had felt some level of imposter syndrome,

but hey, I came in at a fairly high level. There's a lot of expectation. My first priority for the first year was really, let me just nail it. Let me make sure that I'm exceeding expectation or at least meeting expectation for E5 or IC5 senior level before I think about promotion. So after that year, and I felt like I now had developed some trust and I landed some good work. then I started to have a really clear conversation with a manager about what does it look like to grow on the IC ladder? What does management look like? Because even back then, I think there was some element of I enjoyed talking to people.

I enjoyed mentoring people. So there was even discussion back then on what would it look like to be a manager. I think the conclusion we came to and I think it was a right one was let me first go up the ladder as an IC, like the individual contributor. And then maybe later on try out the management path, which is what happened. But it was a pretty like thought through deliberate conversation with them. Makes sense. You mentioned that there were two kind of big efforts that helped you get promoted. One of them was the tooling that you made, which sounds like that was a bottom's up initiative.

You knew it was bad. You saw how many people it could help and you just went and built it. For the other, the shared infrastructure initiative, did you create that scope? Or was that something that maybe your manager came to you and said, hey, we got to do this. could you lead it? How did you get that opportunity? Yeah, that one was more of like, it was kind of obvious that had to be done by someone. And I think I had been around the team long enough and I had enough of a seniority and relationship with the RTC team, like the messenger team, to make it happen.

So it kind of felt like a natural fit of, okay, I can just step up and do it, rather than it being something like, I'm going to create scope. It definitely was like an obvious thing that both the RTC team on and the portal team wanted it was a question of who could step up and try and be the point person for this initiative. Got it. And you were naturally that person because you had been delivering, you had all the relationships and you'd been there for long enough. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was kind of very clear to everyone that if I wanted it, I would probably be one of the better people to take this on or maybe the best person to take it on just because I had been around long enough. And I had,

I knew the context of what each team was trying to do and how to make it kind of compatible, how to make it work together. Okay. And so you you talked a little bit. bit about management. And I know you got the IC6 promo and then later you switched to TLM and I was kind of curious. I think a lot of people want to make that same decision for their careers. So what was your reasoning for wanting to switch? I mean, I do think genuinely the whole point of like my company now is to try and help people. So I think good managers, I think genuinely have a desire to help people. Like they want to see people grow. And then I think as a by part of helping people grow, you also can actually have a lot of impact. Which of buy managers are

generally quite senior and respected at most companies, right? So that was the initial motivation. And again, going back to the idea of like I had a lot of context. I knew a lot of people. So again, felt like a kind of a natural transition in some sense. Like you have a growing team and you want someone to give them feedback and make sure they're working a high impact stuff. Okay, do you want to become a manager? And so it was a very, again, it didn't feel forced at all. It kind of felt like, oh, a very natural like is something you've expressed interested in the past and also it seems to be a natural fit here where the organization needs it, do you want to try out management? Right. So let's say someone's decided for themselves. They definitely want to try management.

What are those concrete steps that maybe you took, for instance, that got you to actually become a manager? Yeah, I think a couple things. One is just ask yourself the question of do you enjoy helping people? Do you enjoy working with people? Like if you hate one-on-one, you dread the one-on-one with your manager or one-on-ones with other people, you're going to have a really difficult time thriving as a manager because a lot of your time is going to be one-on-ones or even just reacting to pings and I do think one of the hard parts

of management is that you become more of a firefighter or you become more reactive rather than proactive like you can't guard your time as much so step one is like are you willing to do you like people enough and do you want to help people enough that you're willing to give up some of the autonomy or flexibility that you might have had as engineer

if you've clarified that with yourself and by the way you should test that too Don't just like intellectualize it. I think it's worth asked to be having one-on-ones of people and like start doing some of that motion now, even as I see, if you think you might want to become a manager. Another big part of management, honestly, is having opinions. You should have opinions not only about the feedback of like what quality of work people are doing on the team and like how they could do better. That's one part of having opinions. Another part about having opinions is how should the team and organization change based on different priorities of the company or

of the org. And if you feel like you haven't done that reflection or if you don't want to do that reflection, I actually don't think management is, again, like, it's not a good fit in the sense that you wouldn't do well. I think the best managers are the ones who come in with a very strong point of view and they're able to effectively bend the organization to help them achieve what they want. And so I think the combination about those two, like do you, number one enjoy helping people and like testing it out with one-on-ones and like leading meetings and things like that? And then number two, do you care and do you want to be part of like those kind of broader organizational decisions around what the team or what the org should do? I see. And when you say have an opinion,

I'm thinking from the IC perspective. So for someone to kind of get a sense of if they like that kind of work, it sounds more of like the directional work and the kind of like tech leadership work is the best simulation of that. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think even a a very senior IC, effectively, how's part of the expectation is that you should, should have very clear opinions that you can articulate and convince people about what the team should be doing for the next six months or next one year. And if you feel like you would really rather not have those kind of negotiations with other teams or other people about what the team should do, and you just want to be more of like a, I want to just execute and write code and like feel productive.

Then I think management, again, is like not a good fit. That was actually one of the big challenges for me, which is like when I became a TLM, TLM in particular is difficult because like you're kind straddling the line between doing IC work and management work. But I remember feeling a lot of the time where at the end of my day, I was like, what does I actually achieve today? And really, the way I spent my time was in meetings, doing one-on-ones, trying to figure out the road down for something. And if you are approaching your job with the mindset of let me just crank out code and let me ship an experiment, then you might not be satisfied with how your day or week. week is going if you don't do any of that stuff.

Right. As a manager. Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, managers, nine to five meetings. I think it can feel like you're not actually landing anything concrete that resonates. Was there anything that surprised you when you switched to management? I mean, so I think in my case in particular, because I was a tech league manager.

Yeah. I was like a hybrid role. I think that job was tough because it's okay to be a TLM as a transitory role where like you're deciding whether you want to be a full-time manager, like a full-time manager, like a full-time M-1 or M-1 or M-2, or you want to be a full-time IC. But it's not a good place to be in terms of long-term sustainability. It's like you kind of are not really clear about are you being judged or evaluated on your IC work and your ability to strip a lot of interesting code? Or are you being evaluated primarily on your people leadership? Right. And so that was difficult for me. I think

I was surprised how taxing that would be. Yeah. Yeah. And I ended up switching teams actually after that. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I switched to TLM too, kind of in the transitory state to EM. And I asked a lot of people before I switched, you know, what they thought. I talked to other TLMs. And every single TLM I talked to told me, hey, it's not a good idea to stay long term. I have not heard one person tell me that, hey, you should become a TLM and it's a great idea in the future.

Because you kind of just become this, you know, Jack of All Trades, Master of None. You're not specialized and growing long term in one of the two pads. And also it's like unsustainable to try to do two jobs at the same time. That definitely matches my experience in what I heard as well. I'm curious, why did those people who you talk to, why do they stick around as a TLM if they didn't like it? Oh, they didn't recommend it to you. Yeah. To me, I think the reason that they were TLM and they remained TLM was they loved the technical

side so much that they just wanted to still be involved in the technical strategy. And they were kind of specialists themselves. So I think that's one of the reasons. I think also in the last few years, growing as an EM is, you know, correlated to. to the number of recursive reports you have. And so for them, it was a way to be able to be, you know, TLM2, which would be a senior manager equivalent without the constraints of, you know, needing all that headcount.

So it was a way to unlock some short to midterm career growth and also kind of stay in that kind of technical role. But it was not something, you know, when they were giving me advice, they were saying, you know, you should go in one of the. two pads. And one of the TLMs, I remember, he said he wishes he would have just went pure EM faster because he stayed a TLM because of that personal satisfaction of wanting to be technical still. And it slowed his career growth. And he said he would probably have been a director higher at that point had he just went purely into people management. And he realized that at

meta and he was in an infrastructure org. Being EM is actually still a very technical role. And that was something that he wish he had put more faith into and that he could still be satisfied technically and challenged yet be a people manager. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, that's a good point that I feel like managers can still remain quite technical. Especially at a company like meta, which is so inch driven.

Yeah. I mean, I don't think managers write that frequently, but they can still have a lot of technical opinions. Yeah. They should have technical opinions. They should have technical opinions and they should be on top of what their team's doing and why the team's doing it. Well, they're not maybe writing design docs, but they should be able to explain everything pretty clearly. So at this point, okay, you got to staff, TLM, you switch teams. And after you switched teams, you ended up leaving meta. You left meta to start your own company. I'm kind of curious about the story behind that. What made you want to leave meta and how did that happen? Yeah, I mean, I think, like I mentioned

before, like, I think has tampered. There's like in the water somewhere. There's like this, well, kind of like everyone thinks I'll start an company or talks about starting a company. And so I had definitely fallen into that. And it just, in my mind, starting from like, I would say 2016, like fairly early on, I always had this idea like, hey, and I want to do a company, just a question of when. Yeah. And I finally felt like I was ready for it at meta for a couple the reason. Number one, probably the biggest reason is I felt like I found a co-founder who I wanted to try and explore an idea with. I trusted them. I enjoyed working with them. And that was a huge unlock because I finally found someone who we have validated our relationship and we like

working with each other and we have similar timelines. I think the second thing was I felt like I had reached a level in my career where I felt satisfied or maybe the maybe negative framing of it could be like I felt like I had plateaued. So that's okay. I made it. it and now like it's harder to see a pathway to like a director or like something very senior. So now it's a good time just to leave. And I mean, I also felt like, I mean, you have well paid as engineer in general. And I think I got lucky through a combination of promotion and just stop growth at meta that I felt like I didn't have to work for a few years. So that was obviously important in terms of optionality.

Like I didn't have to worry about finances. I could cover my life for a couple of years. And I mean, the third and final thing was like I called it, I had some signal of like, I had been doing tutorials about Android actually at that point. I've been publishing them on YouTube for a few years, starting in 2019. So I got like that was another input. By the way, there seems to be something here. I enjoy teaching.

I enjoy working with developers. Can we build something around that? Can we see what happened? So the combination of all three of those led me to feel confident about weaving and doing my own company. Right. That makes sense. You mentioned at Stanford, everyone's starting companies. were you unusual at the time for being in big tech as senior as you were,

had a lot of your peers already started companies? Yeah, well, I guess maybe, just to clarify, I don't think it's like everyone did a startup. I think they were talked about a disproportionately large amount of time. I do think like the median Stanford will end up probably just kind of doing a vanilla career path, if you will. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I will say like the median student will probably just go.

end up being a big tech engineer in Fang or maybe like a slightly smaller company and just grow with the company. That's a great light and they're doing good work. But I think that the people who, what people talk about in the hallways, right? And that that is like what about matters. I think in New York, they talk about money. In Silicon Valley, they talk about like, you know, innovation and tech. And in Southern California, they talk about like celebrity or fame, right? That's a, that's a common trope. So I think at Stanford, the common trope was like, okay, the people who got the most kind of respect or the most, they were the most aspirational or the people who had like a product won't get fit startup. And so I don't think I was unusual to answer your question on like joining a

big tech company, but certainly like I felt like, oh, I want to see what that world is about. And I had a bit of a taste of it with 2014 the startup I joined. But that was very different because like I was clearly like a founding engineer and not a founder. And I wanted to try it out on my own with someone who now felt more confident in their abilities. Right. Makes sense. Yeah, you had already built up that base of skills, money, a much stronger foundation to start a company off of. You know, co-founder is a big part of the equation. Where did you find your co-founder? Alex and I worked together on Portal in 2017. When I first joined the company, he was literally in the same exact team with me. He ended up switching as he relatively quickly.

But we worked together pretty closely for like a few months. And then we stayed in touch when he moved over to Instagram. So we probably met every week in person at Facebook pre-COVID. And then once COVID happened, we started talking like almost. almost every other day. Just like talking about different ideas and different things we want to try out together. Right, right. Okay. That makes sense.

When you ended up quitting, did you already have something built? Like, did you and Alex work for a little bit kind of moonlighting? And then once you had something, you quit? Or did you both just quit with a commitment to each other and then start the startup journey? Yeah, we had nothing built. I mean, I think what we had done before we quit was we had commitment to each other that we would work on it for at least, you know, six months or a year. The second commitment we had to each other was that we knew kind of the broad domain area that we wanted to operate in.

Because a big part of that was what we've been doing for maybe like six months prior to us quitting is we were just through community building and like research. Like during COVID, we ran these free webinars talking about different elements of career growth. And those actually did quite well. Like I think part of it was like people were really itching for interaction, social interaction at home. And so we had these webinars like literally 800 people who joined. It was a huge number of people who did join to hear us talk about different. elements of career growth. And so we felt like, okay, we are committed to this broad domain, we're committed to working on it for a certain amount of time. And we had this ambition of like,

let's figure out how we can get funding or at least build something once we quit. That was, that was the idea. I see. And so you guys ended up applying the YC and getting fundraising through that avenue. Is that something you'd recommend to, like let's say I'm a big tech employee thinking about starting a company, is why I see the best way to get fundraising or is there more behind that decision? It depends. When you say start a company, it's kind of like what we talked about earlier with acquisition. Abquisition is an overloaded term. Start a company is also a very overloaded term, right? You could start a company which is like, I'm going to build utility apps on Android, which has got a million downloads and then they make no money, right? Or you could build small

apps on on your phone with like 5k a month that's a pretty cool thing or you just cover your living expenses or you could try and make like a billion dollar company right and so if you are in that latter category where you have some ambition to make a huge company then i think yeah yc makes sense as like a funding vehicle i do think that it depends on like your network if you're a first time founder and you don't have that much of a network then yc is a no-brainer like it's such an obvious decision that you'll get credibility you got money you get the accountability of YC. But if you're a repeat founder or if you already have a network of other VCs, like you already know some of the top tier VC firm, then maybe you can make the argument that, you know,

YC is not worth it. It's because it is kind of that way it does for what they do. Right, right. Yeah, I have heard some people say that they take a little more equity than what in terms of fundraising terms. Like they take more than they're worth potentially. Again, like what you get out of the program, the value that you derive from YC is going to depend on your situation. And so for 95% of people, I do think it's more than worth it. But yeah, you might be one of those exceptional founders who has a huge network, a ton of money already and a ton of network. Then in that case, you could probably make the argument that YC is not worth it in terms of doubt. Right. So comparing, and so now you've been working on your startup for some time now. Maybe it's been years at this point,

right? Yeah, it's been about two and a half years. Two and a half years. When you compare that to your time in the industry, I'm curious, what do you see are the biggest, differences between the startup and that you're running for yourself and big tech. Oh, there's so many differences. I mean, good and bad. I mean, I think one of the big changes, which is both good and that is like, I think the structure or accountability is like you are in charge of it, right? There's no boss. There's no deadline. Me, Alex, and we're a team of three. So we're still actually quite small. We're three full-time people. And so we try to manufacture urgency. We try and manufacture deadlines. But unlike a company like,

Facebook or Pinterest or any other company really where almost always you have like a cadence of a quarterly release or some like big launch coming up that you have that going for you. You are in charge of creating a structure for yourself when you are doing a startup right. There's no manager. There's no boss. There's no one looking out for you. So that is both empowering and also very scary. Like you have to work with urgency.

Otherwise you could spend five years, you know, just like twiddling your. thumbs and that's not a good outcome. So that's one big change. I also think that there's kind of related, there's a lot more ambiguity in what to build. But even now, I think it took us a while to get to where Taro is now. And this is the idea we just focused on let's build something for developers. And we thought a dev tool could work like something in, I don't know, reviewing code, writing code, things like that. But then we felt like the community angle was more powerful. So we started going more into community and that ended up going into courses. And now we have like this pretty robust course platform along with some community elements. That product management thinking is something

that a lot of big tech engineers in particular have no idea how to do, like talking to users, iterating on the feedback, looking at data. You have to be willing to just dive into a new area and learn something a lot more, obviously, when you're a two-person, three-person company, compared to when you have a role of class data scientist or UxR person or, you know, whoever else sitting next to you at Meta. Right, right. That makes sense. Let's say you were, I I guess giving advice to people who are in big tech and they're kind of thinking about it. At what point do you think you would advise someone it could make sense to start a company? Like what do they need to see where they're like, okay, that, yeah, now it's probably a good, good idea.

I mean, I think this depends a lot on what you define as success, right? So here's the thing. Like, you can have a very, very amazing life if you stick around and you climb the ladder and you get to like director or hire at Meta. Like, that's an amazing, amazing life. And you're in the top 0.1% of the people in the world. But I think if you want to have a lot more control and autonomy over what you do and what you build, and you also want an outlier outcome, outlier meaning like you want to have a small, small chance of a huge outcome.

It's actually very hard to have that happen in a big tech company. Because like a big tech company, I mean, I could be proven wrong, but I don't think meta is going to like five X in value in the next five years. it might double, which would be amazing. But it's probably not going to fly the X or 10X. And so if you want to have something with this 10x thing and value, then I think that could be like a time. So like I was like,

you had the stability, this foundation laid. That's how I think about it. But like you work in big tech. You have the credibility. You have the finances now. Now you can go for a bigger swing. Then that could be one input into doing a startup. And the other thing is what we mentioned before.

It's like you have to really get along with your co-founder. It's like a marriage. And so if you find someone who you, really feel like you get along with. And critically, the timing works out. Because that's the other thing I noticed is that sometimes people have their dream co-founder in mind and they're kind of just waiting. And they're never on the same timeline where it's like, oh, one person is waiting for a bonus or a vesting period. So they're going to wait for six more months. And the other person, when they wait six more months, they have a kid. And now, now my kid is like, I'm going to wait

until they're in daycare. They wait two more years or whatever. And then the other person in two more is they're now like, oh, I have to get married. It's like having the alignment on the timeline and like your commitment to how long you want to do this startup, that is as you dare to find as well. Those are some of the considerations I would tell people in big tech if they're evaluating a startup or not. Right. Makes sense.

Yeah. I had a friend who was at Meta and then he left to go do his own company. And I asked him his motive. And he said he felt like he would regret if he looked back on his life and he had did that big tech trajectory the whole time. he would just regret that he didn't have a story worth telling as kind of boring sort of thing. So yeah, there's so many different ways to look at it. I think the last things I want to ask a little bit about, I guess reflecting over everything,

some high-level thoughts about your career. You know, looking back on all the different legs, you had a little bit of startup, big tech, a few legs of big tech, and now you're back in startup as a founder rather than an engineer. What period of your career did you feel like you had the most skill growth or career growth? I would say when I found that really amazing mentor at Pinterest, that was one period of dramatic growth where I was like paraprogramming and finding this person. And like there are a lot of things you learn by osmosis and you don't get taught. But just like seeing how he operated and made this separate mini app that we talked about, that was like eye opening for me. You are empowered to change your environment and do things.

That was powerful. I think I met up when I started, or Facebook before when I was there, when I was actually meeting a team and doing this migration, that was powerful. And along with that the debug tool, this like tooling change I made, that was the first time I felt like I built something, especially of the big tech environment where like I was creating value. Like I felt like I was creating value for the first time, which is kind of odd to say. But I felt like a lot of the other things I had done, I felt like a worker beat. I felt like, okay, this is like something which is being sent up, sent down from above. I'm going to be like a good Android developer or I'm going to be a good, you know, recommendation system engineer and just like do it.

And for the first time, I felt like I, an idea that I had come up with. Like it was my baby. I was able to ask you put out in the world and people were willing to adopt it. That was, I think, a crazy eye opener again for me, which probably led to like why I felt confident also doing a startup. And I mean, the third thing I would say, which is not really maybe relevant to a big tech audience, but I felt like the two months or three months of YC when we were doing like the actual YC period where you had a group check-in every week and you talk to people every week about what you've done. That was also very intense, but I learned a lot

in that process. Just because like if you don't perform, like you're kind of being shamed and like you have this intense pressure to like get things done. That makes sense. And what about looking back? I think this is something people always interested in. is if you look at everything, is there anything that you regret or that other people could learn from where you think, man, I wish I changed that. Your life would have been better if you had just changed that thing at that part in your career. And if so, what would it be? That's a good question. I feel like the startup I joined 2014. I think that I don't necessarily regret it because I think I learned a lot. I have a good story to tell from it. But if I'm living back at the reason I did it,

honestly I'm not sure if it was the best decision because a lot of it was like maybe somewhat ego driven of like I don't want to be one of many people in big tech I want to do the special thing I want to go do this thing which is unique to me and it was unique to me so that was true like I think I felt special doing it but at the same time I feel like I don't know if I had enough maturity as engineer to really handle this scenario like I did I think founder or struggle a bit both at the startup and also when I joined Pinterest so I think maybe going to to a more structured environment would have maybe been a better bet for me in terms of my maturation as engineer. So that's the one that comes to mind. But I think in general, I would say I don't

really have that many regrets. I just feel again and again in my career, I've been so lucky. Like, that's weird to say or think about, like, there have been so many jobs where I've been rejected for, which honestly, if I had gotten the offer, I would have taken it and the company completely exploded a year later. And then also, even, in the VC world. Like there were a couple of VC firms that strung us along so badly the Tarot. And they were like, oh, we'll invest in you at this valuation. We'll give you this amount of money.

And it didn't work out. Like we are, we eventually got rejected. And then I look back at like how Tarot has progressed and what we've been able to do. And what pressure we would have felt with those VC firms on our cap table. And again, I just feel so lucky. Like, I feel like in this weird way, I have failed. my way into success. Like, I've gotten so lucky again and again with getting or not getting opportunities and that's led me to where I am. Right. You know, when people see a career like yours,

they're going to say something like, it was luck. I guess my question to you is, what portion of your career growth do you think was luck? Oh, I think a lot of it was luck. And then we're lucky, like, with the opportunities and the people I came across. I will say, like, you can, manufacture luck in the sense of being curious about the people and the opportunities around you. I think a lot of the ways I would be able to find my co-founder, find that startup in 2014, get the opportunities at Facebook. I think one thing I do a relatively good job of is keeping in touch with people. Like, I try and just be friendly with, oh, you know, you take that class together.

What have you been up to? What do you like about your new job? Or, you know, let me know if I can help out with this particular project that you're working on. I feel like that's something I've always enjoyed doing. and it turned out that that has career value as well because you're able to get exposure to projects, people, ideas that you wouldn't know otherwise. Even like the thing that we talked about

in this conversation a couple of times, that debug tool I built at meta came from me talking to a bunch of people and it's like understanding their workflow. Me doing a lot of the job hops in my career have come from just again, being kind of in the know on what are the people doing that I respect.

And so I think that can be a repeatable algorithm or a repeatable process that's not independent of luck. I guess change your approach to networking, I guess, or like talking to people. And that's a really good way to manufacture luck. And I think actually, you know, one thing that's just like maybe present day. And I think both me and you are pretty active on social media. Right. Right?

Like we post a lot, maybe too much. And so I feel like part of it is, of course, like this genuine wanting to put out some value in the world, hopefully. But also part of it is like that's the way to create luck, right? like you are putting out content and people can see it and resonate with it, help them. And then they'll think of you when it comes to career growth. They'll think of you for a certain opportunity. And so that's a good example of, yeah, it's kind of luck because you don't know who's going to see your post.

But at the same time, that was a very deliberate thing. And we probably spend many hours per week or per month thinking about what that will look like and how we can help you. Yeah, definitely agree. And I've heard some people call this, you know, maximizing your luck surface area. And I think, yeah, social media is one thing. too, but even just, you know, wherever you are, maybe like internally at your company, I feel like, you know, writing or putting things out or reaching out to people, that visibility just gets you

more opportunities. Probably part of the reason why you got the project that got you to staff, the one where you were helping with the big shared infrastructure initiative, you were, you had relationships and credibility already because of, you know, you talking to people, you putting out writing that says, hey, I'm the person leading this initiative and, hey, it was successful. That's essentially giving people a reason to trust you and give you future opportunities, which increases your luck. So yeah, totally, totally agree with that. I think one thing you said was about how you're good at, I guess, like reaching out to people. And it sounded like what you were doing was really natural.

And I think, you know, when people talk about networking, it feels a little bit more manufactured. So do you have any tip on how to kind of, you know, quote unquote network with people? Yeah, I see that's a really good call out. Like I actually hesitated to use the word networking because I never really thought of it as networking for what I've been doing for most of my career. I think the things that I think about when I do it is one, genuine curiosity. Like I genuinely am interested in what you're doing. How are you doing? Like how are you enjoying it or not enjoying whatever you're up to as part of it?

And the second thing is being thoughtful about what are you sharing. I do think that one of the best ways to develop a relationship with someone is not just by asking a ton of questions or like asking for mentorship. A really good way to develop a relationship is say, hey, here's something I've worked on, which might be interesting to you. The best way to get inbound is like to show off, maybe not show off is not the right word, but like to showcase what you've been up. And like, here's why you have a unique insight or a unique project. That turns out to be a really interesting way or a really compelling way for people to, like, you create. gravity. Like you grab people gravitate toward you because they want to get your opinion on things too. So it's like a two-way street. And if it's always, if it feels like you're the one always asking

and it's not reciprocated, then it could just be that person that's not interested in you in that sign. But it could also be, hey, could you make yourself more interesting? And that that actually being a really good way to network. Yeah. Yeah. I remember when I was a new grad people would say, you know, networking is so important. And I thought, okay, so I'm supposed to I guess reach out to people and connect to them and this. And it felt really artificial. And so I never really did it. And then more recently,

I have all these side things that, you know, I'm writing content or I'm building like a keyboard on the side, this little project. And I've noticed that it has made conversations so much more natural because there's this unusual, interesting side mission that I'm doing that people kind of checking in on. And, you know,

also similarly, Like you have so much stuff too that you're working on that even when I just meet you, we've probably talked for hours just going over the stuff that I'm curious about that you're working on because you're doing so much interesting stuff. So yeah, I think that makes sense in terms of natural way to network. So I guess the last thing that I'd like to go over, and this is something that I ask everyone, is if you were to go back to yourself at the end of college, you're right about to enter the industry and you're going to give yourself some advice, knowing,

everything that you know today, what is something that you tell yourself at the beginning of your career that you think would make the biggest difference? I think the thing I wish I realized way, way earlier in my career is that there are no gatekeepers. Like, you don't need permission from anyone when it comes to learning a technology or trying out something near. Like, I think is school, like, I did well in high school. I did fairly well in college. Like, I think I was able to do that because I was very methodical and studious with whatever I was given. But I don't think I was as creative or like as exploratory as I could have. Like for example, like your project of building out a keyboard.

That's so cool. Like you didn't need permission. You didn't. No one told to do that. You just did it. And those are the things that I think are the most interesting. Even, okay, build out a mobile app for fun. Or like I had this recent project now where I'm building out some extensions for an app launcher on my map.

Like it's like random things. It's like I think if I had learned earlier that you are empowered and you should feel like this desire to do something unique based off of what you care about rather than just doing what everyone else around you is doing or what the instructor or the manager is telling you to do, that is how you get an outlier outcome. And I wish I had tried harder to cultivate more creative interests, I would say, earlier on, or at least allocated time to those creative interests in a much more deliberate way than what I did for most of my career. And it sounds like in the second half of your career, you started to take more of that initiative and kind of just will your way into creating the tools or this new company that you've been working on. And so it sounds like that's made a big difference. Is that right? And you wish you had done that sooner.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I got there eventually. But like, okay, I made tutorials on YouTube. And I remember feeling so much joy when people started commenting on my YouTube tutorial. I'm like, oh, that's such a magical, helpful tutorial. Thank you for making it. I love that feeling. I published Android apps. I started doing these, like, webinars with 800 people.

Like, it felt like someone lifted off the blindfolds and, like, you can do anything. Like, you're not going to be ready to go start a company. You're not going to be ready to go, like, publish an app. We're not going to be ready to go teach people. Just do it now. And I think I wasn't just like, wait and let me get better or let me get smarter. Let me, I don't know. So that's something about, like, just me being way more passive early on my career until at some point, I'm like, hey, I'm old enough. I've done enough. I like got a job already. Like, what am I waiting for? Let me just go do it. I always say had adopted that mindset way early. Even in like middle school or high school, I think it's not too early. But you can just start having that same mindset of creative expression or just like pursuing things that you care about way earlier.

Right. So it's kind of like the main character energy versus like the NPC energy. Is that right? Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I mean, you don't have to be a main character in every domain of your life. Those kind of people might be kind of annoying to be with. Like, in certain domains, like, I think it's good to try and be the main character in, like, certain parts of your life. At least, you know, like, for things that you care about or things where you have a neat take. I like that. That's maybe a, yeah, don't be the NPC.

It's be the main character. Awesome. Well, that's, yeah, that's everything. Thanks so much for sharing all this. I think there's so much gold in here for the audience. I really appreciate it. And at this point, if you want to plug anything, yeah, now's the time to do it. So anything you want to mention for the audience?

I mean, we touched on it for a bit. But like, I mean, I am working for the past two and a half years on this company called Taro. It is born out of my own experience in the tech industry. Like how do I grow my career? How do I figure out how to feel more confident, productive, get paid more money? And so if people are interested in that kind of stuff, they want to get feedback or advice from really smart people who I respect. I've been working on that every day from the past two and a half years

and I'm really proud of kind of the knowledge that we've been able to accumulate. So people can check that out at join tarot.com or, you know, just follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to do whatever I can to help people. Cool. Yeah, and I'll put all the... Or YouTube, I guess. YouTube is otherwise.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll put all the links to Rahul's YouTube, to Taro to his LinkedIn as well. So you can see that in the show notes. So, yeah, thanks for coming, Raul. Yeah, thanks for having me. This is super fun. Hey, everyone.

Ryan here. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Rahul. I really appreciated how transparent he was throughout the entire conversation. So I hope that it was really helpful. You can take a look in the show notes. I left a bunch of links to him if you want to get more from Rahul. And if you have any feedback about the show, anything that you liked or that you disliked, I'd love to hear it. You can leave comments on YouTube. That's where I've been checking. For feedback, I'll read every comment that I get. Also, if you have any requests for future guests or maybe questions that you wish I would have asked, would also love to hear that as well. Thanks again for listening, and I hope to see you in a future episode.