This mail is so very spot on. In large companies there are so many people trying very hard to sidetrack the company goals and would come up with a lot of excuses of why it should or could not be done. In a large company, adding a form field to an internal UI (yes internal UI which has much much less constraints than user facing) with an optional field takes so much back and forth and multiple committee meetings that the feature itself becomes secondary (Note that this doesn't happen if there is external pressure on the company for the feature, like competition or government mandates). I don't think this is a solvable problem easily other than keeping hiring very very selective and keeping the company as small as possible.
One example of this is the Bill Gates mail about MovieMaker where he points extremely obvious issues and in response none of the VPs says "This is unacceptable. We will take care of it". The response mail is just all of them saying not my scope.
I've definitely seen the same at other big companies.
I've wondered where the line is; what's the point at which the company grows too much and regresses to this sort of mess of needing to get bureaucratic consensus? Purely experientially, it seems to be at around the 40-50 people person mark.
I used to think it was an active founder/CEO that couldn't direct things anymore, but that happens at maybe 20-30 people, so that's not it.
What is the point where the company is eyed as stable for retirement goals? That’s where the subjective interests override the companies objectives and the growth of the company changes towards preservative rather than dangerous; wherein capital risk intrinsically is.
When you say 40-50 people, are we talking 40-50 employees, or 40-50 "director" level positions? Because 40-50 employees seems incredibly low for reaching bureaucratic mess levels. In my area, there're plenty of small-medium companies with 50-100+ employees that are essentially founder ran with maybe a few higher level leadership under them.
I'd even say if you're reaching bureaucratic mess at such low employee count, then it's strictly a company issue of adding too much management and too many silos so early.
i've worked at a 30-50 person company that was (is?) super inefficient. at some point there were more directors, managers and product people than actual engineers doing the work. i remember specifically that at one point there was a team of 4 people with 1 engineer and 3 different "stakeholders"!
Overall, the clarity and rationale of the email improves my impression of Zuckerberg.
I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but this sounds like he might be better to work with than the average tech industry executive.
Not knowing how they usually talk, I agree it's probably "non-hostile", but it might be a bit confrontational. And maybe that's appropriate for the situation.
being politely hostile isn't not being hostile, it's just being hostile while maintaining decorum. there aren't meaningful consequences for a CEO breaking decorum in negotiations with those under them; maintaining it is just a nicety
while prior context is absent, at least in this email zuck isn't offering assistance or asking what he could do assist, it's just a politely-worded "get it done, fucker"
i find a servant leadership approach far more effective, and better able to acknowledge that said team problems were quite likely caused by previous "stop complaining and get it done" leadership whose only skill is cracking the whip
no, he said it wasn't his priority. his business isn't in building teams, it's in advertising.
I don't generally like people like him, but I don't think he's done anything wrong here . he was actually very clear about what he wanted, a great feature in a boss.
He said he doesn’t care about fixing the team as a stand alone objective. Which is fine by me, because it’s probably a bullshit excuse for them not getting things done anyway.
In 2012, I created a photo app for the VK social network in 2 weeks. The app quickly gained 30k users and I was planning to adapt it for Facebook, but my partner disappeared. Later, it turned out that he sold the app to move to Thailand. If I had known back then, I would have sold the app to Mark Zuckerberg and become incredibly wealthy
I'm not close to these deals, but my understanding is you have to have some existing connection to the CEO or at least very senior VP's for it to be an actual reality. So I wouldn't feel too bad!
As I remember, there weren't good photo apps back then, and there were just a few good apps on Facebook, which was concerning, while Instagram was just becoming popular. Apparently, the managers were siphoning money from Facebook and sabotaging the work. My app was called InstaGo and offered filters like Instagram. I think it would have quickly become popular and reached the top and I would have met a lot of interesting people. Of course, the Facebook managers could have just copied it if there were no connections with the leadership. But I believe that in those days, it was still possible to reach out to someone in Facebook's leadership through Facebook
Yeah, this wasn't the first missed project. The most interesting story came from my music app for iOS in 2010, which I developed for a year and which was in the top 10 music apps in the App Store. But the managers killed it because they didn't listen to advice and tried to sell it to footballers (the boss just had a sports channel)
The more interesting question I have is how he knew the speed that IG user base was growing. The threat that Google may acquire IG when IG was barely a year old seemed quite paranoid, especially when Google had almost certainly ceded its Google+ effort by then.
If anything, the rumors in startup land at the time had Twitter as the likely buyer and IG was quickly integrating with them. It was a product that, to this day, never felt at home with the FB News Feed. Threads is the proof that it really should have been a Twitter product.
Zuck does make fair points, and his direct reports calling out "team issues" seems like excuses. If anything, the "efficient" mono corporate culture of Facebook makes launching a whole new product that isn't just a feature of a bigger product almost impossible. I was on a couple zero-to-one efforts that never made it past the prototype stage because it couldn't really find a home in the bigger orgs. Camera was no different.
> The more interesting question I have is how he knew the speed that IG user base was growing.
See the acquisition of Onavo by Meta/FB [1]. Onavo was a Spyware which allegedly provided the data to FB on which Apps they were loosing ground to. This very likely played a part in Meta/FB deciding to acquire Instagram and Whatsapp.
Interesting to see these companies before they became "infinite money generators". I'm sure Zuck today could call upon 500 engineers if he had something that urgent he wanted done.
That's because only one women can build a baby at a time. Whereas multiple people cann work on an app at the same time and ship it faster than one person.
I see how the urgency of this email can be appropriate or even admirable, especially in social media where the fastest growing apps tend to dominate. I just wish they shared the same urgency when it comes to protecting their users—e.g., the latest case of password storage negligence that hit the news earlier this week.
I think it's interesting that Threads was built in only about 5 months, and from my understanding did well in the initial flood of traffic it received.
Readit News
One example of this is the Bill Gates mail about MovieMaker where he points extremely obvious issues and in response none of the VPs says "This is unacceptable. We will take care of it". The response mail is just all of them saying not my scope.
I've wondered where the line is; what's the point at which the company grows too much and regresses to this sort of mess of needing to get bureaucratic consensus? Purely experientially, it seems to be at around the 40-50 people person mark.
I used to think it was an active founder/CEO that couldn't direct things anymore, but that happens at maybe 20-30 people, so that's not it.
I'd even say if you're reaching bureaucratic mess at such low employee count, then it's strictly a company issue of adding too much management and too many silos so early.
I hope to be this clear and concise some day.
Step 2: Have absolute control of the company
I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but this sounds like he might be better to work with than the average tech industry executive.
Not knowing how they usually talk, I agree it's probably "non-hostile", but it might be a bit confrontational. And maybe that's appropriate for the situation.
while prior context is absent, at least in this email zuck isn't offering assistance or asking what he could do assist, it's just a politely-worded "get it done, fucker"
i find a servant leadership approach far more effective, and better able to acknowledge that said team problems were quite likely caused by previous "stop complaining and get it done" leadership whose only skill is cracking the whip
I don't generally like people like him, but I don't think he's done anything wrong here . he was actually very clear about what he wanted, a great feature in a boss.
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If anything, the rumors in startup land at the time had Twitter as the likely buyer and IG was quickly integrating with them. It was a product that, to this day, never felt at home with the FB News Feed. Threads is the proof that it really should have been a Twitter product.
Zuck does make fair points, and his direct reports calling out "team issues" seems like excuses. If anything, the "efficient" mono corporate culture of Facebook makes launching a whole new product that isn't just a feature of a bigger product almost impossible. I was on a couple zero-to-one efforts that never made it past the prototype stage because it couldn't really find a home in the bigger orgs. Camera was no different.
See the acquisition of Onavo by Meta/FB [1]. Onavo was a Spyware which allegedly provided the data to FB on which Apps they were loosing ground to. This very likely played a part in Meta/FB deciding to acquire Instagram and Whatsapp.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
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https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41678840