Making Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/aed5c088c56c5fb1

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 to 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. It's just that it's 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 newsfeed. 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 Newsfeed and ads create a trillion dollars of value.
Today my guest is Andrew Bosworth, or Boz, as most people know him.
Boz 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 newsfeed, which was the first ever algorithmically ranked content feed of any social network.
And it's basically what people think of as Facebook today.
He also built the original Facebook mobile apps 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 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 organization, now called Reality Labs.
These days Andrew leads Meta's efforts in AR, VR, and mixed reality.
Along with consumer hardware across Quest, Rayband Meta Smart 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 for help more often?
Why communication is the job?
Lessons for Meta's turnaround over the past couple years.
Baza's thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro
A bunch of leadership and career advice.
What it was like to build the very first newsfeed 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.
It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.
With that, I bring you Andrew Bosworth, aka Boz.
After a short word from our sponsors.
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Boz, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me. I've uh been a long time uh fan of your program and all the the things that you've putting 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 wanna start with a few fun facts that I've
Food.
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 does that sound like sounds good.
Okay.
You went to fourteen proms.
Ha.
Yeah.
Okay, I'm gonna keep going. Okay. Well uh That's a strong opener.
Mm-hmm.
I might do the one.
Uh, you're a national Taekwondo champion in college.
You were Mark Zuckerberg's T in college in a class on AI, which isn't actually how you landed at Facebook, from my understanding.
Uh, Harvard was recruiting you to play
Football for them?
You were very active in the four 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 these are all true. I I wanna say wow.
First of all,
Make sure people understand. I was a national collegiate champion in as a green belt.
Which like a very that's like being the J V champion, just so wherever just so everyone's clear on what that is.
Heavyweight heavyweight sparring. Uh
Uh I will I'll tell the the prom story is a funny one. It's related to the four H story. It was a big time 4 H National 4 H kind of Hall of Fame did all this stuff there.
As it comes to that, I was, you know
It's Co forage is a wonderful program, youth program. It's a co ed program. And I was all over the state, all over the
country doing, you know, leadership events and doing these conferences.
And do a lot of public speaking.
And almost every four each event has a dance.
People don't know that. They have like a at the end of like a conference at the end of the of the
Literally like camp you go you 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.
And it turns out when like
The the high level bit, at least in the nineteen nineties.
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 then combine that with the fact that I knew a bunch of uh girls who went to different schools.
That's the recipe for success right there. If that's a if that's the goal that somebody has.
Well uh two my junior year and and twelve my senior year. I was with the three in one weekend, uh a Friday, a Saturday, and a Sunday night.
Another fun fact about you is your
Basically the tenth engineer at Facebook initially.
Way before
It was a cle success story.
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 so much fun, I gotta start a company, it's gonna be become a trillion dollar success story.
I'm curious just what those early days were like, or there are memories that stand out to you. Yeah, there's a bit of a joke in the tenth thing, which is me and five other guys all joined at the same time and there was nine people nine engineers before us, we joined the same day, so we're all the tenth engineer. Mm-hmm. So somewhere between ten and sixteen, depending on how you want that.
How you wanna do the numeration on that?
I've read this about this in my blog and I tell this story a lot, which is um
We 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
Eight most of our meals.
together because we were working, not because not to say that we weren't also friends, but like 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 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 Electronics.
You should buy a bunch of components.
You should build a new server.
And then you should run it.
Uh like maybe drive into the Colo racket.
And then get back and run it.

really undervalue the fact that
When you're gonna work even a moderate, mid sized corporation today, especially with the tremendous growth of startups supporting startups.
Things like
Payroll and finance and IT and H H
And you know, these things are professionally handled in many cases.
That was just not the case in the early two thousands. It was just like
You
And like
Your personal car and like whatever you wanted to do with your time.
So I I don't want to take away from the romanticism of it.
It's just that it's most often we hear those romantic stories from the successes.
We so rarely hear
Somebody who went through
Really sacrificing
a lot of my twenties from any kind of social or, you know, like
outgoing fun.
Environment.
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.
It's a big sacrifice.
And so I I I like I love that people
I love the enthusiasm for startups. I love startup culture. I think it's like 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 I can be we like we have a 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 a hundred twenty hours per week.
You had no hobbies.
And you gained a lot of weight. And yeah.
We drink.
We drank a lot to make up to make up for it. So

Yeah, you weren't eating healthy. I mean it was it was we it was crazy. There's a time I I think I s I've told this before that there was a time where I one of the first things I built was an anti spam kind of anti scraping
Defense mechanism.
But we didn't have any op support. There was no like twenty four seven 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 and it had to go battle back.
And if they weren't cool, I'd go back to sleep.
But that's not the case.
They don't tell that stuff in the movies, you know?
That's like worse almost as worse worse than having a kid, uh a new a newborn.
And nobody asked me to do it. It was just like I w that was like
I took a bu nob even asked me to do the anti spam, anti scraping stuff. I just like thought it was a problem and I went and got and did that. And that was the solution I came up with.
If I was a better engineer, maybe I'd have solved a better problem, but
So maybe just to close out that thread, when you talk to founders
What advice do you give them along these lines?
I wanna be cautious about this'cause I you know when I tell fo the first thing I tell founders
Is that I've never been a founder.
And I wanna recognize the difference. Like you know, I joined in January ninth, two thousand six.
That's almost two years after Mark started the company.
I didn't have to do I wasn't involved with fundraising.
I don't have to do any of that side of the things.
And I didn't have to deal with, you know, the board or or like the business side of things. I really was
Lucky in a way.
To have joined when I did.
That's the first thing I tell founders, it's like you should take my advice with a 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

Uh system of professionals.
In our industry.
And I was when I grew up in technology in the valley, right?
Uh
You always heard about like the A Cm, right? The association of computing machinery. You heard these
Legendary
professional organizations that supported people in our fields.
And
But the nature of the the rapid pace of change in the technology and the nature of
the engagement of those institutions, even academics, even academia broadly.
Kind of out of touch they
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 uh your your podcast and your newsletter
that are actually really designed to help people who are professionals in our industry.

has almost kind of missing for fifteen, twenty years. I love to see that'cause if you're an up and coming
Yeah.
Literally used 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 with the strategy.
I can help them think through the technology choices. I can help through business. I can think through the management, the organization structure.
But I also try to be very clear stuff that I just
was never had to explode it. So even as we just talk about how tough it was
For the average engineer joining
You know, Facebook in two thousand six.
Man, it was even tougher for Mark Zuckerberg.
In two thousand four, probably.
And that's not a that's 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 invariant. No matter how far you dial back, the challenges kind of are interesting and are worth talking about.
One of may maybe your most popular posts.
Is this quote that you share about the advice you often give. 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 of it.
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
Wanna 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
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 it
The tools that you need.
To do that.
Live with your
Your manager, with your partner, with your advisor.
Uh with your mentor. Like that's where they live.
So it's like, you know, I how many times as a manager have I gone through and somebody's
Yeah, I've told them here's the job.
They're like, I got it. 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. I'll take the L on that.
That's no problem.
Here we are, six months later.
It's not done right.
'Cause they they misunderstood the brief. We miscommunicated with 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 emailed me, I could have
Bulldoze that stuff. I could have cleared the path. I could have said, Oh no, no, no, don't worry 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 kinda the that's kinda the work. So you gotta kinda 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.
So it'll bring you thing?
A lot of times we feel obligated to like weigh in and help.
I'm like.
No, but fksh.
Uh like
I think you 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 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 do this in a personal relationships, right? Like you're with your partner.
And
You're trying to
Do something the right way.
But you're not talking about it.
You're just taking a huge risk there.
And for very little reward. Like they're not gonna be mad if you ask them.
Like hey, do you want to
Is is this how you wanted it done? Like I don't know.
And so I do think it's kind of funny uh 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 uh
Yes, you did.
I saw Patrick Stewart
uh who was one of my favorite actors of all time and whose characters love.

People going on casting calls.
And this is a brutal thing for actors, right? You're going on thirty, forty
Things, you're getting rejected. It's tough. Everyone's kind of heard about this.
And he said, No one wants you to succeed more.
than the person you are auditioning for.
'Cause they want you to be awesome.
As soon as you're awesome, they're done.
Like
They want you
To be amazing.
That's like your manager.
You nobody wants you to be more awesome than your manager does. Cause 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. 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 like engage with it.
You can say like
Hey, I'm making progress on this.
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
Like a
A type, you know, like a
Five ten sentence email, no response required.
Here's where things are.
Even if I even if everything is going really
Well
I feel I'm 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.
You I I have a mental model of you
Uh you know.
Toiling away on the right thing, 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's here are specific questions framed up.
Like
I think this is what you want. Is this right, yes or no?
If no, okay, we'll come back and we'll spend more time. If yes, we're all good.
It makes it so it's now it's like not only am I up to speed, I have a mental model, I'm engaged, also you made it super cheap for me to help you.
I just like
Takes a
And
People are surprised.
That will work for me.
Uh are always surprised when I tell them.
How big a part of my job is
doing these little types of things.
It's a little spinning plates at my scale.
I've got ten or fifteen thousand employees, depending on how you want to count different things.
And so you're just like
I
Every now and then I gotta get a full new plate and a whole new rod and just really s 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 velocity here we got.
Losing momentum.
Oh, I'm bummed. I'm like, Oh, now that plate fell, I gotta start a whole new thing over here now.
So I I think people just underestimate 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.
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 st a statum.
I call it the state of Lenny email.
And I sent this email to my manager every week.
State of Lenin, it's kinda like state of the union.
And it's
Uh, 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 we actually used to have a format for that we called um
HPMs highlight people me
Mm. Um
And every manager at
Facebook.
From like two thousand eight.
To like two thousand.
Fourteen.
would send to their
Manager or even their leadership proof.
I mean at one point when I was running what we called com apps, I just sent it to like Zuck and the whole leadership group.
It's like what's the highlights?
Includ and it highlights it flash flow, like like what's the big ticket things you need to know.
Where are people
Like is somebody in trouble? Is somebody at risk? Is somebody doing really amazing work that needs a a shout out?
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, no, I I think this kind of thing can work.
And look, every manager is different. So you that's
Even at the meta level, by the way, is another success.
I don't know think people do is they want to treat every manager the same
And that's not
Gonna work'cause 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?
And so for me, like I do regular one on ones
As I've gotten the organs 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're 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 this thing. That's such a cool idea.
By the way, and I I always put my own I always I don't take that copy paste it like a 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 twelve rounds, and this is gonna feel to them like I'm really come over the top?
Or is this like
Hey, first time you're hearing about this, my bad. Like, here's what we're doing, need your help.
So a lot of it isn't even about
Oh here.
Making my life easy'cause 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 gonna 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 here is very core to the way Meta works.
Which is transparency.
Anyone can ask Zuck questions at the Q and A's. 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 I hear you're very uh you hate.
And that it's a pet pew of yours.
Just feels like a violation of the team trust. Just feels like I'm I grew I grew up playing sports, right? It was football, soccer, track
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 ever
Can you imagine what you would do in that case? Like I just
You're off the team, I'm sorry, like you can't be here.
Anyway, sorry, carry on. Yeah, and there's so many more people it's hard to find.
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.
What have you seen as benefits and why is that such a big part of Meta's way of working?
Yeah, this kinda comes back to I think the principle that
Uh really good
Talented people.
You want to leverage them.
Fully.
You really want to make sure that they are fully leveraged.
And so any time they have the wrong information or they don't have the information.
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 like are more likely to leave.
Like if if the 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 like you want to maximize that
Potential.
And uh
Creating this like really open information ecosystem is one of the ways that we do that.
So often
great, phenomenal work that has happened at our company.
Has not come.
From
This one top down mandate.
But it's come from people understanding not just like what we're trying to accomplish top down.
But also
having way more information.
Uh uh
At their disposal.
to be able to act on it.
And so
It's
Yeah, it's uh people talk about top down or bottoms up culture.
It's a bit of a myth in my opinion.
Uh if you've never met Mark Zuckerberg, he is not a butt it's not a bottoms up thing. Like the ideas that we're pursuing are Mark Zuckerberg's ideas.
First and foremost. That's not to say that he's not open to new ones, and he of course he is.
And that's a form of bottom up.
People can bring ideas to him and he
Yeah, internalizes them and and
Ask them or not.
But when he brings it things top down, he doesn't
He's not micromanaging.
He's
In the details. Be careful on that.
But he
does create the 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 there's
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 what the avail what the infrastructure's like, what the availability is like, what the performance is gonna be like.
Well, you just are stuck. You're just gonna 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 at most companies
consume all the information that's given to them, but the information itself is carefully managed. Right. Like they're getting all the information they're intended to get.
And
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 of the things 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.
Uh you have to have a system
For
Triaging the incoming
Getting rid of a bunch of stuff that
Is on the wrong channel or it doesn't matter to you.
Figure 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 notice like that's the real time thing.
And that takes some time.
This point you made about bottom up versus top down is really interesting because when I think of meta, 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's 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 a it's a it's one of these mythology things. I don't think it's the wrong as a
As a contract, 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 Javi 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 also are it is true.
That you can ask Mark any question and he's gonna answer it. Same with me, same with Chris, same with Javi.
And also that like
We certainly take inspiration from the discussion that we have with employees.
So it's I don't know, it's it's just not as black and white as people kinda tend to paint paint it.
I think one of the biggest lessons here is making it at least feel like you have a lot of say. Like even though a company is very
Here's the big strategic pillars we're going to
You're very good at making people feel like they can have an impact in the site.
And can I tell you the most important thing is just giving people clear
Guidelines. So they know where they where is like where can they
Where do they have space?
And where do they have no space?
Yeah, one of the things that we go in these reviews with Mark or my team with me, I'm sure
And I'm like
This is we're like for this part of the UI, it is going to be like I will draw it for you, it's going to be like this.
And the other part I'm like, Cool, that's important too. I don't have a clear vision of it. Why don't you do it?
So you like so there's just really clear guardrails 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're just like very
In the details and drawing.
In the screen.
Over the over the course of time there's been quite a few examples. I think early on
When we were working on newsfeed.
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 there'cause I was just like, cool, like I'm off to the races on some ranking stuff and like
Yeah.
All these other uh Chr Chris Cox and and all these other guys are having 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 Mark is 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 involved in like, hey, what's the what's the make shift and like how are you weighing different things?
And so you know.
It can go both ways.
For me personally
I've gotten really involved uh
in kind of some some relatively esoteric things, I was really adamant, for example, that hand tracking and mixed reality
Make it to the headset?
That's not say that there weren't any supporters in the team. Obviously we had a hand tracking team, which is phenomenal, makes your team.
But like there's a lot of people who are like
They did not feel those features were gonna be critical for this to become a mainstream device. I always believe that they were.
ease of use and for and 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 we were gonna hit.
on the hand tracking and teams told me it was impossible.
And it wasn't it did great.
This touches on something that comes up a lot on this podcast and there's this debate of between
How in the weeds founders and exec should be.
Whether they delegate
Empower.
Versus
No, we're just gonna do it this way. I'm gonna 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 gonna let people run and do their thing and then things start to not work as well often, and then cool, we're gonna take
Take back control.
Do 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.
Yeah. Uh 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 like the hinge upon which success
Uh or failure.
Uh will happen.
Yeah, okay, there's people I really respect. Brian Cheske'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 the extent of what it's gonna do.
And
That's a super extreme form of it. I have a lot of respect for him and how they're working things.
Uh
I think that like
If you have great
Super talented people that you can trust who can o own bigger pieces. That's one option.
If there are ways to structure it.
So you can like
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 we do are illegal. There are areas that we already we do trust that this is happening at.
And so
I I think a lot of founders
Regret delegating
Too much.
From what I yeah, my conversations and uh
I totally get that.
Or they delegate 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 we g we joke inside of Meta.
To this day.
We call it the Eye of Soron.
Uh 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 uh he will be in a review and in the same review
We'll be like
Strategically I think we're off course, and also this one pixel.
Is is definitely wrong. You have to fix that.
Like he you know, that's a big range.
I th frankly if I I'll be so a little bit self
Congratulations. I pride myself being able to do the same. I think people who work with me often comment.

of leadership that we have. 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.
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 gonna determine success or failure.
So getting it into rough shape and then iterating on it is fine.
And so that's 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.
And my advice to people is
You don't wanna be in that ISR on for too long in your career'cause you're just gonna burn out if you're working on the most important thing all the time, but
You wanna be close. You wanna be you don't wanna be in the Shire, but you wanna be like around
That's right. They're both uh so I worked for years in in ads from twenty uh
twelve, twenty seventeen, I ran ads and business platform, this big ads group.
And uh it was an area where
Certainly w certainly was very important.
But
Mark had so many other things going on with the transition to mobile, he did kinda 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'cause like
Mark does not know.
Like what if this is all
You know, it's like yeah, and and my my leads be worried'cause like they just had we had had a review with Mark in a while and it's like yeah.
You you suffer in the intensity of the gaze of Saron.
You also suffer
In the shadow of its absence.
Uh there's no perfect place to be.
That's hilarious. I'm trying to think of like the part of Middle Earth that
As a metaphor for that.
Yeah.
Okay, so you talked about the newsfeed.
Which was one of your very earliest projects at Facebook.
Here's a couple of fun facts I know about the newsfeed.
One is that it was the very first algorithmic
Newsfeed.
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 at Facebook to rank.
The actual new speed.
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.
But it was
super controversial when it came out. People were very
against this. They did not want to be sharing this much information with 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 uh through your interviews, which is just like you have to have conviction in what you're building.
You're choosing your customers as much as your customers are choosing you, is is one way I think about it sometimes.
And
Now 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 earliest c customers.
Now
Uh so we've t time and time again we've had a vision for what we thought this 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
We're not sure that that changes what they wanted.
But we had a confidence that over time.
They would and and
We don't we're not always right, but in these cases we were right.
Now Newsfeed was an easier case than people
Uh
Suspect.
Because everyone was
Outraged.
At the same time as they
Immediately doubled their usage of the product.
So
So we had a few advantages there.
Which was it was literally like
Everyone was like, I hate this so much. And they would refresh, refresh, refresh.
And so we're like okay, wait, this is a
There's cognitive dissonance here.
uh 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 s to stick with.
But the s uh 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.
I kind of always make this joke that uh it's almost like you know you're in 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.
We kinda did that to the entire user base.
'Cause we took what had been wall posts, 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 Maine.
And I was like, uh yeah.
So we did that. We I do think we like I don't want to say like we've we did screw things up.
Like it wasn't like oh this is a false execution.
So th an other 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?
There is an art.
That is a real art. And you don't always have user data
To determine it.
Uh we did.
And so a lot of that is do you have a clear vision and intuition?
For what you expected to happen.
And then what happened instead and can you diagnose the delta there?
So the newsfeed case
We made a bunch of little mistakes.
The thing itself was right.
And I'm I I I really am quite proud of of the work we did there. Uh, you know, me and Chris Cox at the most core, probably the engineering side, which is on the on the as the PM.
Like there was no ranked feeds before that. We did have some AI that I built before for the anti spam anti uh things, but it was pretty rudimentary. So it's the but it was probably the first consumer AI that that

website of that kind or on content.
And we built like the most efficient monetizing surface.
In history.
Uh outside of search, I think.
A for those who are
Curious
I don't use monetization because I think money's the most important thing.

suggest 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 is

Create a trillion dollars of value. Uh well done. It's not nothing.
Not nothing. We're proud. We're proud of that work.
You have you have this quote in one of your posts about the newsfeed 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.
That's a that's a it's a gift uh that I'm very lucky to have. And so like
Uh actually the ads thing is a good example. When Mark
Told me to go work on ads. I was like no, I don't want to
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 uh nope, I was wrong. I just like I'm a guy who gets excited about things and once I get into ads, it's like, Oh, this is fascinating. This is a it's a three sided marketplace.
And there's all these different
It was like a real you know, felt like I was playing chess times in terms of of the moves with the other players in the industry.
And I was like super pumped about that. And then when I if you wanted me to work on hardware, I was like, No, I'm not I'm a software guy. I'm a software guy, Mark.
And I've no, I love this work. I just think I've that's such a fascinating space that I mean, I've learned so much.
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 a 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.
Uh, and so I 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 can get excited about it.
Absolutely. So
I have a very uh unusual career arc in some ways, which is like I really almost changed
Jobs like every six months.
For
A long time.
you know, I was working on this uh integrity stuff with newsfeed in the background, then I was working on Newsfeed for about a year.
Uh, then I worked on integrit uh site speed and infrastructure and like detecting
Saving issues.
And then I worked on boot camp and then I worked on messaging and groups.
It's like I just you know.
I had this really funny thing. I was kind of joking it was like uh
For those who are 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 I had the payoff.
'Cause I'd gone through and I'd I'd met a lot of people and I'd worked in these different areas and I understood different dynamics.
Um
Well other than
People who joined in my cohort were getting promoted.
On the but they were like in a single track. Like they just stayed in one place.
And they got promoted.
Whereas I kept moving around and it 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 was the I've kind of since then I've
Kind of been on that trajectory.
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.
And so I wasn't like learning enough new stuff.
And what's cool about finally 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.
You will occasionally find those jobs where they're super deep and you can just keep learning.
Yeah.
A lot of my friends whose careers were on a

They literally got

But they didn't like have any place to jump to.
Like they there wasn't like some other they were they'd become domain specialists.
In a domain that they'd
Kind of exhausted for themselves.
And maybe they 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
Uh don't be f jumping new things, give it six months.
If it's not the thing, no problem.
Like you just built a ton of new skills. That's gonna come in handy. I promise you that. Keep going.
And
And likewise, uh when you do make that jump
That's early career.
Optimize for learning. Optimize for like think about a compound interest. Like it's it's like the first like ten years of compound interest don't look that impressive. It's like after ten years it starts to look good.
I love that advice. It's the it's similar advice I always give of
variety of experience often ends up being the most valuable.
Then you build over time just trying and dump a bunch of stuff.
Doing some internal tools.
Maybe working on
Customer support, I don't know, and trust and safety.
User facing products, infrastructure.
I'm thinking from a PM's perspective, maybe an engineers and other functions.
One question along those lines. So we talked about the I have Saron and working on like the most important thing at the company. Do you have any advice on
How much of your career should be
Working in that center.
Yeah, listen, odds 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 really gotta like you gotta own that stuff. Like really move mountains over there.
Because like I promise you, as an executive
When there's a huge
Damn.
Holding up.
You know the floodwaters.
You respect the heck out of the person.
Who is holding that damn up? Like you were like
You know.
You keep doing that, Atlas. Like that is good work over there.
The second place to be i or maybe that's equally basic is like on the most important thing.
And on the most important thing, that's where you get like to the advice that uh Eric Schmidt gave Charles Sandbreak, which is like, hey, it's a rocket ship, get on.
Like don't ask what seat I'm in.
Like just get on.
If it's the most important thing, you're gonna get a smaller piece.
Everyone wants to be there.
Get the piece.
If you if it's the most important thing, get the piece that you can crush, kill, do a great job at and grow from.
'Cause you're gonna get a ton of visibility, you're gonna get a ton of experience, you're gonna get to see
What it looks like in the fire, like in the fire, and that isn't valuable.
Uh you will use that everywhere.
And
So I say that
That's at
Project selection time.
But now I'll be cautious. Understand.
Projects that start in the fire, hopefully.
are forged into some manner of metal that cools and is no no longer in the fire. Like God willing.
And likewise.
Uh
Things like dams that are holding up floodwaters have a tendency to
Crack or break or
Floods overcome the
So
I think
You you do want to be
At selection time in one of those two places.
But then you're also gonna you're gonna stick with the ride. 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 anymore. Move on.
If you still love it and you're engaged, great. That's cool. Like it's we yeah, that's a great thing. You you deserve to go from the forge.
to the dam and back over time. Like that you don't have to always just keep jumping out of the 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 twenty twelve.
And kind of uh saved uh uh the
The IPO which had gotten pretty grim but yeah at that point.
And I told Mark, I was like, This was so fun.
Maybe you can just keep doing this, but you just put me on the biggest fire every six months. And he turns to me and said, Buzz, 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 I do give him such uh it's funny, I'm gonna get a hard time of this.
Uh I'm one of the
I'm one of our s biggest critics, as well as being one of his biggest fans, and both those I I I have both those jobs.
But today we're talking about stuff that I think Mark really demonstrates really well. And uh he he did a great job of of
Pushing me in my career to different places.
Right, I didn't think I could succeed.
And he saw the opportunity.
I made it happen.
What have you learned about uh giving Mark like negative
Criticism, anything that he accepts. So what do what do you learn about that?
Or it's voracious for all information and all points of view.
One of the things that's pretty interesting, I talked to you earlier about how much as a founder, I think especially, uh, you have to just have tremendous conviction.
You just have to. You have to have a tremendous
Degree of of confidence.
And I think Mark is somebody who is like
Uh maybe the strongest willpower.
Of a person I've ever met, just in a pure willpower sense.
And so one thing's interesting about Mark is you'll give him feedback. He listens. He's not he's a he's a very
It's a kind person to work for. So you'll give him feedback and he'll listen.
Truly.
He'll most often tell you that you're wrong.
Why you're wrong.
It's just like most often.
And what will happen is this a 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.
Some kinda
I've I've always kind of joked that like the information gets to him
So much information every day it gets to him and then like at night he like
Recompiles the whole world.
With all that information.
And comes back.
And but and I'm and by the way, this is not just true about product work. I'm I in my head I was thinking about product stuff where you're just like, hey, I think this product is doing this wrong. It's like no no, that's why it's not that way.
And the product for such ship.
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.
And then like a couple weeks later, you'll be in a similar situation and you'll 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.
But you do have to like take the long view on it.
Uh like
And and he will have a
He won.
The things he did, he didn't do an accident.
He will have a reason why he did them the way he did them.
It's a great example of strong opinions loosely held.
Yeah.
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 his model overnight. Yeah.
It's funny, one thing one of the things that's so funny about Mark is he
Uh, 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 re meeting with him and you'll see him doing it. He'll come to the meeting with you about some other topic.
And like, hey boss, what do you think about this product and and this this idea?
And so he will like over the course of the day
Take that little note.
And kinda pressure test it'cause he and he loves to triangulate. What is where are all the points of view on this
I maybe didn't see.
Uh so it really values a broad
perspective on each
thing that's being discussed. Just to be fun. Trying to get more training data for his for his model.
I get it.
You can't get me to call Mark an Ellen. That's not fair.
We can all hope to be uh as 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 of. One is of California.
Which
I completely understand California's a very special place.
We 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?
The funny thing about tattoos in general is I came out of high school
I was like, I don't know, I don't know what my
I don't know if there was a an archetype for me, but I didn't drink'til I was twenty one. I was a very rule following person.
I was like, Why are you gonna get a tattoo, you know, you're just like
Affect your body.
Like people who dye why you dye your hair, like just like let it be what it was.
And some of this was like
I think I was a
Somebody who was privileged and had a
great deal of self confidence in who I was and what I wanted to be and that was fine.
But some of us also like weirdly judgy about other people in a way that's kind of off brand for me certainly today, but even at the time.
Getting a tattoo was a big deal'cause 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 ha it's not like a
Uh you know.
It's it's something that you possess and you can if you if you feel like
If you want to decorate it, you can decorate it.
And so getting a a tattoo was a big deal to me.
Actually. And I kind of completely
shift of my mindset of uh of how I thought about
My body and how I thought about
People's body and the presence and the and the time.
Maybe to some degree even like an understanding of mortality. Like, hey, this like can't take it with you. Like it's all
It's all gonna go, you know, when you're eighteen, you think you're gonna live forever, and when you're by the time you're twenty two, a grizzled twenty-two year old veteran, you're like, uh
Tattoo that bad boy up, it's all going down.
And so yeah, that's why I got the Veritas tattoo, which is uh Latin for truth.
Which is that you know.
I will say uh it's it's a little cheesy'cause it's also Harvard's motto.
Um
And uh but I got it in a
Monotype font. There's you know, there's the programmer's font here.
The other thing that's interesting to me about tattoos was
It's also part of a generational shift. Uh, you know, we grew up
In a time when tattoos were really seen by adults as
um you know gangs or bikers or or sailors or like you know certain types.
Now my understanding, I saw a stat recently that more people of my generation have tattoos than don't have tattoos.
Uh and so I think I think we also just culturally shifted it positions.
That I find I find.
Richness of self expression, wonderful.
I really think it's great. And so I'm I'm 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 proceed me on this point, I'm afraid. It's just you know.
Uh I think.
When I was young, I saw being honest.
And I was wrong, by the way. So I'm being honest as like
Kind of a get out of jail free card.
Well you could say whatever you wanted.
As long as you're being honest.
Um
That's just not.
The case at all.
Uh, if I've I've read about this before, but by far my biggest professional regrets
Were me not being kind.
And uh I used to think
I I wrote this note a while back called Be Kind.
Web
Being nice.
That's like patronizing.
Or or
Uh, telling somebody things that are half truths or just like getting by.
And I'm against that.
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 that is gonna help them.
And not cause them just to feel bad and helpless.
And I think I was do I do that wrong a lot as a k 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.
Um who knows me.
And I think people understand and respect that I'm pretty direct.
And if I have concerns or issues, I'm gonna bring'em up.
I'm just much better at bringing them up now.
And expressing a true
Care and belief.
I I wouldn't bring it up if I didn't think we could do better, if I didn't think we could fix it, if I didn't believe in in the situation.
And uh
So
Uh
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 like 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, 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 something that you wanted to share.
Yeah, it's uh it's one of the things that especially if you aspire to be a leader.
And and leadership isn't management.
And leadership isn't uh
Uh being
Respond.
The only person responsible
It's not even always the same as accountability.
But if you want to have an impact on the world around you.
It is exclusively done.
Through the the
Yeah.
Creation of artifacts?
Or or uh verbalizations.
That like affect other humans.
That is all there is. That's all there is if you wanna have an impact. If you wanna like
create some kind of a a a lasting
Change
And it could be in your low in your little relationship.
It could be in your team, it could be in your company, it could be in the world.
Uh.
It is down to communication.
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 of writing for a year ago or we would have not wasted a year not doing it. Like it's like you know
It's like the
Yeah, people always think it's oh, I had that idea and that's like means anything. It means nothing.
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
Uh I mentioned this even earlier and I hope people caught it.
When uh
When I said hey, if uh
Somebody's
I give somebody a piece of work and they come back six months later.
And they have done the wrong thing.
No, I'll take P L.
I will take the L on it.
It's not great for them. They'll be pissed they wasted their time. But like I said, that that's my responsibility. 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 they you know we
Takes all sides, we should we should work on this problem from both angles.
I have another post called Listening is the job, which is the other side of this.
But like communication's job is I I really believe

Actually the relationship to the to this idea that came out of the US Marines and SEALs, uh
Of extreme ownership.
Which is like so when everything goes wrong, it's like I ask myself, what could I have done differently?
Uh, in terms of how I communicated things.
For this to have gone better.
Could I have said
Priority's better.
Could I set expectations better?
Then you have a better metric that
I to point the team at?
Did I put the wrong people on it? By the way, the thing I talk about is org 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 I'm
All these things are communication.
Silence.
Is communication.
Me not reaching out to you, check on you, check on your project.
Right. We talked about this the IF S earlier.
What does that mean?
That means trust.
That means responsibility?
Like the absence of check-ins.
Has meaning.
You cannot
N communicate.
You are always communicating something.
With your face, with your clothes, with your body.
What are you communicating?
I'll give you a funny example.
Uh 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. I'm a nerdy guy. I try a lot of camera gear. I try a lot of uh microphone gear. I'm like I I love to have all the latest gadgets and gizmo, so I'm trying something new.
Not working.
And in my head, I'm like, what is this communicating about me? People are gonna think that I don't care or that I'm not competent.
So

That's what I'm talking about. And and now I felt compelled to explain it in the podcast.
So they can communicate clearly.
But that's not the case.
So I I really just think uh 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.
Uh and I mean general people, like teams, 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.
Where I want to
To get them.
And
That requires me to have a very clear idea of where I want to get them.
have to have a clear of where they are.
And I wanna 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 is like
having tremendous empathy for where people are starting.
And I think and and that
The that was the leap for me.
All the rest of it.
All the rest of how I
show up at meetings and s uh trying to smile more.
I'm like a big scary guy. Like those things are little things that you work on. Those are they 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 I have there's so many threads I wanna follow.
Well 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 gonna communicate with this person.
I'll give you a couple so one is like multimodality.
Uh, there's an old saying, right, uh repetition never spoil the prayer.
And I think most experienced communicators, uh whether they be
Uh 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 wanna use it you wanna say it directly?
You want to use metaphor?
And so for me it's like
I will
Given all hands.
And then write a post.
With the content of the all hands.'Cause different people
Are gonna respond differently to these modalities.
And are gonna absorb information at different rates on these different modalities.
That's a trivial one.
Another one that I think of all the time is uh
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?
Uh, 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.
And then I'll say the same thing.
But I would have said.
But they would have literally ignored me.
Because like
How can they trust
My conclusions if they don't accept the premise.
You know what I'm saying?
So
There's a whole piece there.
Obviously when you're in person it's a lot easier'cause you're reading
Facial expressions, even on this, right? I'm reading you nodding on that. I'm like, Okay, he's g he's got 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 then bring a second example.
to try to like drive the point home.
But you build yourself up. Most people are gonna realistically start in their careers trying to influence one or two people.
That's where you start.
One or two people.
That's how you got to communicate with your manager.
One teammate, that's who 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.
Being a
Get the work that I've had
Uh the so
graciously supported to do on myself
Yeah.
Uh, with great mentors, Cheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, a bunch of others and coaches.
Absolutely made me a better
Partner and husband and 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.
uh getting deep in that literature made me a better manager.
Uh 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.
Mm.
Amazing. We need a second edition of this boss's parenting advice. That's right.
And relationships. It's you know, No Bad Kids, uh uh Lansbury, it's it's uh Good Inside uh Dr. Becky. Like it's all it's all it's like. I really I really think the the modern
Parenting.
Uh, Canon is really rich.
Amazing. So much good content.
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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?
Talks. Actually Mark and I tried it together.
And uh
I wanna say, first of all, when the when the headset came out, we breathed a little sigh of relief because the stuff inside of it
Didn't represent a fundamental breakthrough.
So there wasn't uh 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 a is a a marvel
But it's worth noting Apple Silicon is like a two X marble.
When
Doing things like scaling display resolution is unfortunately a quadratic proposition.
And so a two X linear scaling
advantage doesn't buy you as much as you might expect.
when you're trying to scale resolution.
And so uh
That was step one. And then but we still assumed at that price point
you know, with their legendary attention to detail and polish, they probably, you know, produce a great product.
And uh the line that I said actually on my own podcast with Natty Ball.
A week ago
Was like
Look.
I was prepared.

We have the best value headset. Like if you want to
Outstanding best possible headset for the money. We've got it. It's the quest three.
And I was so thrilled.
When I try the A V P
Next to to Mark.
We were like, No, no, no, we actually we think we have the actual best headset.
No, well I think it's the best at all things. If you're sitting still
And watching a movie in high resolution uh res uh movie.
Yep.
Apple Vision Pro is is is really great. Uh it's really great. The that the the resolution shines
Uh the way they've tuned
The pass through
Uh shines if you're st stationary and looking straight ahead.
And and they've done some really nice things with the UI.
Um, I'm a little bit it's one of these things that we do get annoyed about. It's a mild aside. We get a little bit annoyed about as product people. And this happens to all of us. It happens to Apple, happens to Google, happens to us.
We have a bunch of internal things we've been playing with.
Which will at some point ship.
And we will be accused of having stolen them when we actually
You'd have to get the
Uh, if you if you want, you can go see my Cora answer on the history of the like button.
What this happened previously, where we had built the like button internally before it was launched elsewhere.
Uh anyways, so whole thing. So this this happens in in the in our industry a lot, and I really shouldn't care as much. It's a little bit of my ego.
Speaking through, which I should control and tamp down.
I'm being responsible.
But yeah, so so
So
But
Beautiful UI polishes.
They did a tremendous job with uh eye tracking. One of the things that's interesting about the eye tracking is
To do it the way they've done it, that's why you have to have the prescription insert. So it doesn't support your your glasses. 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 the light around it. Ours go from the side on uh on the Quest Pro.
And it allows you to wear
Creative lenses.
And so different choices like that have trade offs, but it's still cool. That's great that they got that in there.
At the same time, our hand tracking is better.
Obviously half library we knew was gonna be better. That's not totally fair, uh to them. They just they've just launched and they have small volume still, but
Um
But uh
I just find the comfort, the thing that really got me the most, the field of view is really small on the Apple Vision Pro.
And some people are characterizing it incorrectly on the internet. They're doing a characterization up close to the lens. Once you factor 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. Their view is their their displays are much dimmer than ours.
And I find the motion blur really distracting when I'm in mixed reality.
Use case and y as I mentioned earlier in the back 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 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 you know, we don't just like operate our computers with just like
one thing. We have a keyboarding, we have a mouse. Like we do multiple modalities all the time. So
I really feel like the comfort
The the
The lack of persistence and motion blur in our pass through, the brightness of our displays.
I was like, oh man, like if you had if you gave me one to take.
I would take quest three.
Now people have rightly said
That's pretty biased. Of course it is. Go get your own opinion.
But what kills me is most people haven't done that. They have not tried the quest three.
That's what kills me the most.
If you go and try quest three, ask yourself if you've rather have seven of those, one for you and six of your best friends.
Or one Apple Vision Pro.
I'm sure the answer isn't
Quest three for every person. There are people for whom there are use cases that really fit their life.
The other vision pro, I'm cool with it.
People don't even know that the quest three you can do remote desktop.
You know, you can do it both through through an app called remote desktop, which is very popular, or you can go into into workrooms and you can have three monitors surrounding you.
Um
Uh you know, streamed from your machine.
It's like so we like.
I think some of this is just like people have not even
Done the work. They haven't even they haven't even tried it.
So I welcome all you who think I am biased.
to
Poof.
One way or the other, what you think.
But don't do it without putting the Quest three on and giving it through its basis,'cause it's a pretty great device. And uh
You can do a lot with three thousand extra dollars.
How did they get away with that, by the way?
Three.
We launched a headset.
That was like twelve ninety nine.
And people lost their minds about it.
And they're like ah, three five hundred's fine.
This is fine.
No one cares.
I don't know.
It's just uh you know.
But I uh 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 and I I I certainly celebrate a large number of Apple products.
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 A V P.
Mm.
Well, I'll show you my
Favorite AR
Device which is these ray bands. I actually think.
We uh here I'll put'em on it. Here I'm gonna what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna record. I didn't tell you I was gonna do this.
I'm gonna record this as we're talking. Look at this.
I like that.
They look so they look so good on you too. This is a good fit. My mother in law's like you look so sophisticated. You look really smart with his own
Uh and we bought these actually to watch to uh film our kids. Or our kid.
To like instead of having a camera in space and it's been awesome. 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, my new look.
She had glasses on all the time.
Uh, we gotta get you the multimodal. I gotta tell I've been playing with that since December, where you can use the camera to ask uh our meta AI assistant about things.
It's really good.
I was in a I was in uh
uh ski village recently with my family.
And I had him on and I'm just like, Hey, you know.
Uh 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.
I it did 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.
Wow. Yeah, it's uh we're there's some there's some real magical here.
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 how would that be. Uh
Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna cheat on this one and uh and say.
We got uh we have obviously we've been talking for a while about playing with glasses that have
uh full AR capabilities. And we've got one that is rumored
To be coming internally soon.
So heavily rumored, in fact, uh that you might even say it's it's almost been confirmed.
And uh what's been what's been really fun is is be being able to play with these
Really
Time machines really in terms of what they are. Amazing, amazing technology.
And yeah, people were uh
Giving us speeches.
Like big company wide speeches.
And had all their notes.
On the glasses.
And they could control the s the slides uh just using a a gesture. Oh my gosh. So uh there's there's there's there's exciting things afoot.
It's uh the feature's looking pretty bright.
Something that I wanted to touch on, which is when
Mark put out this whole video of here's what I think of
Apple Vision 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 the thinking? Was there like strategic thinking there, or was it just him, like, here's what I think. You know, this thing does murder me about the modern era.
Everyone's in there met ahead about everything. Everything's like a four dimensional chess.
That was just what Mark thought of the thing.
That's what he thought about it.
Uh, you know, I think he wanted to make sure people remembered, hey, Quest three is a literally a better device and it's you haven't even people haven't even tried it.
And so
Yeah, we're not always
Playing four dimensional chess over here.

Here's a thing that I believe is true.
I'm going to say it out loud with my mouth. Like that's what we did like that's not that hard. Like
And I think I guess people you know, when I do it, everyone expects it because of my persona or brand, whatever thing is. And I guess people are surprised when a CEO does it. All right, I get that. That's cool.
There's like other sets of societal expectations there.
Yeah, and like we've we're all familiar.
With like
You know, Apple putting the welcome IBM ad
in uh the New York Times and then Slack doing the same thing with Microsoft and like the bomber.
I forgot.
None of those were true.
Discussions.

Right.
Those were all just like big
You know, rally the troops like gestures.
This is not that.
Like we've we're 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.
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 I I can tell you from using it.
What instructions they were given?
uh that team was given. I can tell you what they were optimizing for, I can tell you what constraints they were under
By all the choices in a
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. Like we could have made those choices. We didn't make those choices.
You made these other choices.
And so for me like
the weight, the wire, which just always brushes against my ear, like the the the pocketable thing.
Like I get it.
That's not what I would have done.
And I know that.
'Cause I had the chance to do it and I chose not to. So it's like
I look a little while people are surprised.
But uh but yeah, so I think I think this wasn't like this wasn't some big savvy strategic move.
This is just like 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.
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 wanna zoom out a little bit and talk about Meta's journey over the past couple years.
It feels like
There is a a huge downturn in public perception of meta and the stock price.
And then over the past couple of years there's been a huge turnaround.
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 eighty dollars ish and now today it's
Four hundred eighty seven dollars.
Yeah.
I'm curious just what you've learned from going through that.
Downturn and
turn around and I know it's still in progress, but just what
What have you learned from that journey?
Yeah. Well there's a lot to take away, I gotta tell. I mean we I think we have the single largest
The largest single day stock drop in history
Followed eighteen months later by the s largest single day gain in stock market history. Oh my god. As the legendary Lou Holtz uh said, you know, you're never as good as they say you are when you're winning and never as bad as they say you are when you're losing.
Mark has has always
Um
always brought that quote out to guide us internally.
To try to insulate ourselves a little bit.
From
The
The vagaries of
External opinion.
And that's not just true with stock prices, that's true with media and press. It's not it's it's true across a lot of things.
One of the things I told my team
Well, I I still have to repeat it to them, it's like
What if it's it's hard to remember?
When you're in it.
Is that you know more
Than the critics do.
You know more than that.
Analysts in the marketplace do.
You know more than the media does.
You know more than the podcasters 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.
'Cause 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 uh
I might be inclined to to
Resist.
But are maybe
True.
I invite all critique.
But I also
Don't accept the critique blindly.
I don't just say, Yes, this is obviously true.
Um there's a great uh
Gilmanning amnesia is a great concept for everyone to understand. Gail Manning amnesia is this property where if you uh you'll read a newspaper article, let's say
Newspaper, why not?
About a thing about which you are an expert.
So uh
And you'll be baffled.
Because here is an article
That is not just wrong.
It's like it's inverted causality. It's a what's it what uh 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 bizarro story.
And then you will turn the page.
The newspaper.
It'll be another article a about a topic.
About which you know nothing.
And you will read it as if it is the gospel truth.
You'll tell you, Oh no, look at this information about, you know, this foreign situation.
Like I said, perfectly true.
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
Uh that's the 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, it's not as good as you think. It's like somewhere in between at all times.
The second thing is
Communication's the job.
We really did not communicate effectively, I think.
With the market.
uh around our future investments.
And listen, we've had two
Ten year long.
Huge investment areas.
What has been AI?
What has been reality labs?
And
AI's looking pretty good today. I think we can all agree.
You know?
With uh with Lama two
With Fair, the breakthroughs that we've had, we're the second people don't know this that Fair our AI research lab is uh
The second most cited.
Research lab in AI behind Google.
So we've been 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 best to people. Previously, the core business was going strong enough that they kind of were willing to ignore them.
Uh and what's the old Warren Buffett quote?
It's only when the tide goes out we see who's not wearing swimming trunks.
Um
And so it's like when the tide went out.
When you have the Ukraine War.
And re an interest rate hike and recession spent and recessions.
Now
Everyone's
Scrambling for the incremental dollar.
And then
Gotta 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 expected, 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 and the scope of it, and of course it helps that the core business is is kind of overcome its challenges there.
From ATT and the other kinds of stuff.
It's looking pretty good.
Yeah I think uh
I I do think one part is as internal person really moderating
Your
Attachment to the external narratives and swings.
That's super important.
And you do that based on like
Understand your own expertise. And the second part
is understanding
Why is there a delta?
Like what is there?
And then it's user communication.
There's also big flattening of the org. This was something p lot of people talked about where managers became ACs.
There anything more there that you've learned of just
how to adjust the org to be more efficient.
Yeah, of course. I should I and I should have included that in the first section. I was I was a bit eager to wrap it up elegantly in the two, but you're right. I appreciate it.
We made significant
shifts in how we operate the business.
Which is super painful.
And uh
Listen, this goes back
Uh
I it's just uh you know.
This goes back
to the boom times of Covid.
When it looks like
There was a uh a real
lasting secular shift.
In things like e commerce.
And in working remotely and these tool sets
Well which are exactly.
What we build.
It's
primed us and so we built up a huge work fate workforce to pursue those opportunities.
We still believe in those opportunities.
But they're little they're back on their original timeline. And actually literally if you look at a bunch of graphs that we have internally
It literally
The Covid boom.
And then uh kind of as it not bust really, but 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, I mean but your economics don't make any sense anymore.

Now you made a bunch of investments.
That are gonna yield
Too distant in the future.
And getting there faster isn't gonna help you.
And you're carrying a much extra cost.
That
Sucks man. It sucks. And we don't feel great about it.
Uh we really don't. Uh and uh
It's uh
Business, it's awful and it happens.
I do think one thing that was interesting about that time was
For those of us who I you know I grew up in so 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 and going to college.
And then in the the two thousand eight
Major recession.
on the housing crash and the market
Mm.
Oh that's a
Now let's imagine you graduated college in two thousand nine and got a job.
Well shoot, you're fifteen years into your career. You could be a director.
And you've never seen a downturn.
No.
So I think we also had in addition to
Yeah.
was very unfortunately conventional.
misforecasting in the business that caused us to overhire that we had to correct for.
Y'all had a workforce that was just not at all of a mentality that this could ever happen.
Like it's like
This felt like it was a
Uh you know, a ract of God.
Uh, 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.
And so I think we
But
Tough storm there, but for the whole industry.
And we're still feeling it. I think uh, you know, we're still feeling it.
Certainly we're happy.
At meta
To be
Beyond that point.
And we're
Uh, growing again and executing at at a stable rate and feeling really good about that?
But quite a few of our other companies in the industry aren't.
It's a very uncertain time.
for for engineers, for PMs, for designers, for everyone and and and all the support functions around them.
So um
I'm s super sympathetic for that. I think it w you know obviously the the misfore casting that happened inside of Metaswalls
It happened everywhere.
And and now that you have especially with with higher interest rates.
And cash isn't as cheap, runways are tighter.
Like people are just making those pragmatic calls.
Uh, 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 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 now.
It's just only the intense people left and things are
We're working really hard.
Does that
Bring up anything. Yeah. And likewise
No, roll elimination happened in many cases because we just decided not to do this work at this point. We were gonna do it two years from now and don't need to carry a team to do it.
So I I think it's really hard to generalize because each of these is a specific person.
The specific life.
Uh and a story that i is rich and deserves to be told.
But I do think that uh
Yeah, if there was somebody coasting.
And you as a manager have to make tough calls on who you're bringing in.
Uh like
You know which way you're going to bias.
My my profound suspicion, and I again I don't know your friend who you spoke with, my profound suspicion is
That person's probably already working hard.
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 gonna happen and I think that's probably what you saw playing effect if 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.
where I asked people to share a failure of their career and what they learned from that.
Experience is there?
Is there something that comes to mind?
I've failed tons of times. I've built products that nobody used, uh I've built uh
Technical architectures that didn't scale.
I've filled kinds of times.
Uh, I don't regret most of those.
Uh almost every one of those uh I learned from
You know, it it was a a a stop on the path to a better solution.
Or it was uh a recognition that this thing
wasn't gonna work ever, which is you know, 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 was proud of the time.
'Cause 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 would be
What prefer I didn't share.
I'll share one that that was uh
Yeah, I think the person's uh
And I'd tight now.
We have this really silly discussion.
I remember so vividly.
Uh
In the early days of
Client server architectures.
Uh, which Facebook obviously is a website. So you're calling to a server to get the webpage, but then that server's gonna call the other servers to gather things.
And that was one of the major
Kind of
Clients uh
Remote procedure calls.
Uh,'cause newsfeed ranking was all done on this other set of servers that had its own special requirements, its special build, and how it was put together.
And so you know, your main uh web server
We put a call out over a remote procedure call.

And and get a response back.
And uh
We're
We're this really janky RPC system.
That uh I won't say who built it, but it was built
Yeah, it was such a
Piece of
J garbage.
Constantly failing not robust at all.
And one of our best engineers, Mark Slee.
built a a new one called Thrift. It's a great really great RPC.
uh infrastructure.
And uh one of my one of my best friends, Dave Federman.
One of my really good friends and a brilliant engineer.
We were talking about how to do the encoding.
And I was like, I want it to be binary encoding. I was like, binary encoding, I want to be super efficient on the wire.
'cause I'm storing
These RPCs, they do two jobs for us, one of which is the the active r RPC.
But I also store the RPCs in a log and replay 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.
And so I wanted to be as tight as possible because my b my memory bandwidth was very limited and memory was so expensive back then.
And Dave Fetter was like, No, like that's
You know, that's short term thinking, Boz. 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.
Like memory bandwidth will get cheaper.
But like these logs being scruttable
to development is gonna be a better thing.
This is a totally
This is nerd bait. Those who those who
Those of you who've been engineers in this call, this is like Vim Emacs. This is Nerdbait. This goes deep. This is like a long old sort of thing. Keep it coming.
I
I think I like it's a room full of engineers at the company. And the company's not that big.
And so he probably half engineers the company in this room.
And I just like absolutely I was like yelling.
A day I'm like I I'm literally like
I'm turning red.
I'm like sweating.
I'm so angry at Dave Fetterman.
For like
For countermanding my proposal when I'm the major RPC customer.
A couple of things.
This is so dumb.
Markley just built two encoders, it's not that hard. Just build
You pick which encoder you want for your things. That's the easiest
Solution ever.
Uh second thing is Dave was right, by the way, like within a year the memory banner with DevO didn't matter relative to like how inscruttable it was to like try to get into these vlogs.
I had to build a ton of extra custom software, like
Log parse the logs, like understand what's going on.
Uh but also it's just like it was just a it was a
Case where I
My identity was
Caught up in being right.
Like my identity.
And for those who don't know, identity threat is just the biggest your the most your worst behavior
Is always gonna 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.
But you like defend yourself.
So like my identity was being right. I got a very tossed on the wrist.
Yeah.
It it causes me think like one of my best friends.
One of the best engineers I knew. I literally lived with
And get like a really embarrassing for me.
Conflict, which everyone's just like scratching their head, like what is going on with Boz right now? Like I look like an unhinged crazy person.
Yeah, I remember so v I remember the room. I remember where I was standing in the room. I remember everything about that moment.
And I like I had to go home and be like
What the fuck was that like what
What
What happened? Why I I'm asking myself, like what happened there?
And uh that was kind of one of the many steps on the journey.
to recontextualizing what it was.
Uh was not to be right.
And to be what we have to be open minded and curious and have engaged in conversations.
I was twenty two. I you know I don't make excuses for it now, but I remember I there's there's
There was a couple of other examples like that.
in things that were less technical and more personal.
That I won't share.
Uh, but I remember each of them vividly. And I uh you know, those are the those are the real failures for me.
I love how the story is like from so long ago at this point and still stuck with you in such an impactful way, I think now. Yeah, I'll never forget that. It was it was it was embarrassing.
And uh it' for those th the old quote. It's really one of the truest quotes, and I know it's cliché, and sometimes clichés are clichés 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.
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. Uh
Let's call this podcast episode identity threat.
I'm just going
Boz, 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 route.
Well it's
Yeah, the off chance that we do
uh end up labeling this episode identity threat. Let me give you uh what really was
I I made a lot of breakthroughs uh with coaching.
Uh learning about
The feeling inside my own body when I was feeling that identity threat and uh
uh learning techniques and tactics to reduce the likelihood 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.
And it it was
Just from observing somebody.
Uh Omivora.
who was a you know legendary long time, came in and worked on on our developer platform, then worked with me on ads for a long time, and then was the PM lead for WhatsApp for a long time. She's since gone on
do even more great things outside the company.
Working with her
It was like working with uh like watching a like an alien'cause she w her and I were so different in our approach.
And she approached
She could have the most profound disagreement with somebody
In the 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.
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 the 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 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 her mind.
And uh that was the key I I really ever since then, I I just I really have tried to model that. It's just
Reacting.
When I have a str strong strong internal
Clinch.
I try to embrace curiosity 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, you know, someone's like, Hey Boz, I don't think you talk enough.
Wow.
You don't think it's talk enough. That is
It's unexpected. Like I would love to hear more.
About that,'cause no one's ever said that to me. So I wanted to give that to anybody who to who
uh might recognize this behavior in themselves
There's lots of things that you can do.
Uh and and and you should do that work.
Uh the work of improving yourself is always fruitful.
And and satisfying and it's and it pays off as we discuss in every aspect of your life with your family, with your friends.
Uh and professionally.
This is one that I really thought was so great was just curiosity, embracing curiosity.
In those moments of challenge.
has really completely changed my life and I owe that to Ami Wara.
Wow, I love this example. It's basically an example of yes and
But in a really like no one's gonna be like Yes, Anne.
It's like a really nice way of saying it, just fascinating. Tell me more. Fascinating You've got to tell me why how like I wanna understand it.
I love that. Maybe that'll be the new title. Fascinating.
There you go.
Anyway, with that, Boz, we've 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.
Uh which is a tremendous history of uh uh prehistory really of modern computing. Uh ostensibly
following the life of J C R Lick Lighter, but really it's much broader than that.
Is a tremendous
Missing piece of history in my opinion. I think i in my discipline in computer science, we were not properly educated
We learned about Alan Turing and we learned about some of the technical computer science theory.
But the modern computer
And the path to it is a f f a profound and fascinating one and it has particular resonance today.
As J C Litter's observation was
human in the loop computing.
And I think we are now in human in the loop AI.
I think there's a tremendous uh resonance there.
The the second one is is Good Inside, which is Doctor Becky's book. And I 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. She's also got an online community for people that like it. 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 they've been cached in, right? They're primed.
Is a big game changer.
This will be for a parenting episode.
Down the road.
That's right.
Is there a favorite recent movie or T V show that you've really enjoyed?
Yeah, so this is uh super conventional, but Mandalorian. So w one of the things that's been fun about that is related to my kids again, is we watched it with my kids. So uh we had a chance to go on the Galactic Star Cruiser. Again, y'all know I am a genuine and true nerd.
Through and through. Huge fan of Scott Trobridge and his work at Star Wars at uh in
Service lands in in Disney.
And also of that
And so before that we got our kids uh who are nine and six and watched all the movies together.
And then we've been watching Mandalorian together as a family.
And it's uh it's super fun. Uh and it's fun to have that kind of lore.
a connection that so it's not just the classic kid movies
But there's something more and I think for them they feel like it's an adult
kind of conversation they get to be a part of.
So I've really enjoyed that.
And I think the world of of uh Dave Flone and John Favreau and the team that's building that uh that universe up.
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 uh what
Uh people who worked with them.
Would say
are their greatest strengths and weaknesses.
I like this for a couple of reasons, not least of which is I often do follow up with
references and I like to s uh triangulate their awareness.
Of how other people calibrate them.
And also like how
They respond
to criticism. Are they saying, hey, like uh sometimes can it surprise me, they say, Hey
You'll hear this critique a lot from 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 where they think the superpowers are.
And too often
A lot of attention in in
Interviews.
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 just like crushing it at?
And what's funny is people are pretty rarely
Give my 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 worry too much about your weaknesses.
But asking people to contextualize their performance through the team, that's so important. We do not
Achieve very much on our own.
Mm. Communication.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Is there a favorite product that you recently discovered that you love and meta products are acceptable answers?
Uh.
The Ray Van Meta glasses would be a tempting answer.
Uh the uh
The
The multi modal stuff, which I'm gonna 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 want 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 uh you can buy the Reta glasses and very soon, I won't say when, but very soon.
They'll have this capability.
But it's a that's it's more fun to think outside of the box.
Alright, this is such a such a
Uh I'm gonna get in trouble for this answer because 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. Like I want a car that works and doesn't like break.
Uh, I grew up all my cars growing up had over hundred thousand miles in them because we only ever had used cars.
They're constantly breaking down and like I like
The power steering would go out while you're driving and you have to like
How thing are the brakes would go out?
We'd throw a rod.
I've done it all.
So I just want a car.
And so then I drew up a Honda cord that I bought.
Uh
For ten years.
And then I drove a test the model S for ten years.
And a test the model S uh
Had a thing happen to it.
Well it was parked, I will get into that.
So I need a new car.
And again, I'm like I wanna get an electric car.
And uh I was like, I'm gonna get something nice. I'm gonna get something nice. I'm gonna go something.
Nice.
I'm driving a uh
Mercedes Benz.
A M G E Q S.
And
I didn't know cars could be this nice.
Is that
I grew up driving used used cars and like, you know, whatever. I did not know it was possible.
It is the best
Augmented reality product I think you could buy in the market today.
Uh, you know, it where they have the display, it puts your turn
In three dimensional space. It's got camera it's got cameras facing your eyes, so it's positioned correctly on this on this display relative to your eyes.
Oh the turn. And so when you come up like it's like you're hitting a little wall, you got a turn before you hit the wall.
And I was like
Oh my god, I got that.
I think this car has great.
Augmented reality. So yeah, not a car guy and I'm not trying to flex on this car or whatever it is. Uh I like it a lot.
I didn't know they could be that nice, but the thing that I thought was so impressive was
They did an amazing job with augmented reality in this car.
Wow, Mercedes Benz a player in the augmented reality mixed reality space. They're out there they're they're out there, they're the lead.
I sometimes think about having a contest where I give away
products people mention in this segment and now you've blown my budget way way out of the way. Ray Band Meta's Ray Band Meta. That's an amazing I'm gonna have to check that out. I think we're gonna 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.
Yeah, we have a
Funny actually.
How we came about this. The motto my family has, uh my immediate family like me, my wife and kids, is just trust yourself.
Just trust yourself.
Uh
Actually the reason we have that motto is uh when we uh have a house uh we have a few
Nice art pieces, and one of them is a Tracy Amen.
A famous UK based uh 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
Just trust yourself. And every morning
The neon lights up.
And trust yourself.
And then uh I we had like a
I had the chance to m 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 it says, trust yourself.
And I always talk to my kids especially. I think um
Yeah.
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 of most people who went to startups and succeeded.
was like I just had faith that I was making good decisions.
I mean this comes back to the conviction point I made earlier about uh how you do things like a newsfeed or controversial things or how you make big
Expensive changes, right?
Just conviction. Like you have to you have to believe that
Your eyes, ears, and intellect.
have combined to give you a point of view that has intrinsic value.
And deserves
Your respect.
As opposed to reading that newspaper article.
About your company.
And believing it over what your own eyes and ears have told you.
Um so that's 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. You also 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 a uh amateur photographer, maybe semi pro photographer, you'd love to travel. Amateur, amateur, amateur. Amateur, okay. You also have this website that I came across that I don't know.
If people know about it, it's this funny name. I'm not gonna mention it. I don't know if you want people.
Warden Shortbow. It's a it's an anagram of my name. Warden Shortbow. Anagram of Andrew Bosworth. Yeah, WardenShorbow.com.
Uh yeah.
I love photography. I love it. It's a real passion of mine.
So here's the question, is there what's your favorite photo that you've taken?
Orn is actually a great place to talk about trusting yourself, by the way.
Uh, and I I know it's cheesy to say it, but I think Rick Rubin's recent interviews on what art is and how people make it is spot on.
You have to make it for yourself.
And you're to love it.
And if someone else loves it and it finds broader resonance, that's awesome.
Uh, but that's not like why you do it.
And if you start to try to do it for broader residents.
Then
You're kinda chasing something else. It's a it's an it's a it's media, it's entertainment, but it's not art some other thing.
And I say all this to basically tap dance to say I kind of love a lot of my photos. Like I and it's very hard to pick
A favorite.
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 in a just jumping in a puddle.
uh wearing, you know, a kind of a rain boot, rain slit kind of thing. And it's it's not
Sharp, not in focus.
It's like
It's a vignette.
And uh I really do
Thank Ansel Adams.
Talked a lot about
uh how the goal of the photographer
Is to create a capture 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 the print.
The the print was where he like did
Amazing work.
And I've had the pleasure to go to his dark room in uh in uh
Big sir and and spend time with the son and like watch them do development in that room.
And he had elaborate scripts.

Uh highlight you know
dodge and burn different parts of the photograph to get it to have the resonance that he wanted.
And
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
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 ephemerality of these tremendously touching
Charming human moments that you have w with your children.
That's that's the one that comes to mind.
Amazing. We're gonna try to find it and link folks to it.
And on the point of the year.
Rick Rubin.
Something he says along the same lines is that you should 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 a awesome video of him saying exactly this that I was recently watching actually.
Boz, this was so much fun. I am so thankful they made time for this. I'm looking forward to our parenting and relationships podcast in the future.
Joking, not joking.
Two final questions. Where can folks find a line if they want to follow what you're up to? And how can listeners be useful to you?
Sure.
I'm at Boz Tank on Instagram and on Threads and also on uh X.
Uh Facebook.com slash buzz.
And uh I also have my own podcast, which is uh technical deep dive, so it's free different, I would say.
It's uh technices to try to go deep on one or two topics each time. That's called uh Boss to the Future. You can find that on Spotify or iTunes.
Boss of the future, buy some quest stuff.
Uh but I just have a question three, let's be honest. Treat yourself.
There we go.
Or these Ray Band sunglasses, I'm a ban.
Buzz, again, thank you so much for being here.
There.
Bye, everyone.
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