Why Saying No to Good Causes Was the Key to Facebook's Early Success
Focus
As an early engineer at Facebook, I recall the brutal intensity of startup life, where extreme focus was our only survival mechanism. We learned that even unalloyed goods like charitable giving can create drag if they distract from our core product. Over time, small, reasonable digressions accumulated, cluttering our UI and diluting our team's energy. To survive and thrive, a company must prioritize its comparative advantage and be willing to say no to pleasing everyone.
The best time to stop a distraction is before it starts. The second best time is now.
- paxys
Takes some extraordinary lack of self awareness to write something like this while burning tens of billions of dollars a year spearheading the "Metaverse", which is as big a digression from the company's core competency as you could possibly get. And soon after publishing this he would go on to lay off a large chunk of the team and more than 20,000 employees total.
- JSR_FDED
Could this standpoint be any more unsympathetic?
I guess the culture at Facebook was set very early and we’re still seeing the effect of that play out today.
- andreygrehov
Boz, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts if you had become the CTO at Facebook after joining as the 10,010th engineer, not the 10th. Pretty much everyone on this forum would have become the CTO at Facebook if they had been employee #10.
- nlawalker
> Each individual digression from our core competency like this can probably be measured positively on ROI when considered locally. But I believe they collectively add up negatively.
I’d love to see the official internal leadership stance on what Meta’s core competencies are today.
- TheAtomic
Focus on making the world a worse place. Great. Please retire.