The Product and Design People
Ezra was Product. This is why he can’t send himself off to law
school. From well before my beginning, Ezra was making
important product decisions and coordinating whatever was
happening on the site. Ezra had no product management
experience before coming to Facebook. He was contacted while
backpacking Europe because Sean Parker had been randomly
sleeping at his house during the school year. He started working
the day he got back to the States.
Karel Baloun 43
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
Then Noah and Ezra alone were Product. And there are a lot of
products, so I can’t really see how they manage. The main critical
factor in all of his decisions is that Zuck needs to agree with them,
and none of the engineers go truly ape-shit. Most of Noah’s and
Ezra’s time seems to go into talking through the page layout with
the designers, answering engineers emails about whether to do
something this way or that, and entering hundreds of pre-release
bugs. Designers36 mean Zuck has 8 hands. Aaron was Zuck’s
first designer, and Aaron taught the organization that designers
should be very technical, since he creates new fonts and writes
Mac desktop software on the side. I’m not sure if Aaron is full
time at Facebook or UC Berkeley or both, but he’s the one person
who I never know where he is. When he’s focused, he’s the most
productive front end guy I’ve seen, but even The Man is
sometimes stymied on generating that focus.
One of my best engineer friends37 was Nico, who is old like me,
but runs marathons and is an accomplished drummer. Nico kept
me sane, as nothing ever pulls him out of his rhythm. Chris Cox
is also a musician and a philosopher with deep spiritual interests.
In general, these geniuses like the other engineers at facebook,
are talented in many ways, and it’s fun to just watch them. My
only talent was throwing empty bottles into the recycling from
44 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
36 Bryan, Sol and others. Bryan worked something like 96 hours in his first week
doing Facelift. Sol stands as he works, which just looks as cool as his salutation
(“take it light”) sounds, though he says it just keeps him awake.
37 in the Real, as well as facebook context.
across the room, but fear of injuring the graffiti forced me into
semi-retirement.
Two other members of my team I got to know quite well. Jordan
is a sophomore at Stanford now, and he is the brightest kid I
know. He’d always look right to the hardest part of any project,
and dash out possible solutions like an idea machine. It always
took longer for him to explain his solution to me than it took for
me to explain the project or task. One challenge with hiring
geniuses though, is that they want to do things cleverly, while
challenging themselves to learn all kinds of stuff around it while
they do. Whether the product is ever finished, or actually does
anything practical, is sometimes secondary to whether it was a fun
and challenging process to do it. On the other hand, he can get
impressive things done, as when as a senior intern he built a full
administrative web application for his high school, which I think is
used by all the teachers and students now.
In many ways his diametric opposite was Christopher, who is like
the prototypical effective consultant/contractor. He’ll finish a task
in the fastest, simplest, least complex way possible, ideally
mapping it to some code he’s written before or found. Chris
always focuses on the people he’s working with, the feature or
goal he’s working on has people on the receiving end.
Singlehandedly he’s built out a successful business, showing that
one person with a balance of people and technical skills can be
independent.
Karel Baloun 45
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
Steve Grimm was a second key trusted consultant. Even after the
company decided to continue with exclusively full time
employees, Steven (and Jordan) made the cut, too brilliant to let
go. Steve would be put on whatever distinct piece of the
application was most difficult, and would attack it meticulously.
Steve visited China where he noticed the entertaining fact that
pirated DVDs are often produced with completely random reviews
printed on the box - including some which note that the movie
was terrible.
Any startup has too much work for too few people. Amy is the
principle database engineer, which means that she does every
single bit of database related work for over 200 servers. I enjoyed
running my all night schema conversions scripts with her for 3
consecutive nights. All night work is pure fun and joy for the
young, who don’t have to get their kids to school at 8:30am.
Jeff Rothschild, various incarnations of VP of Engineering, was the
most critical hire in the history of Facebook. He has made so
many right calls on hiring and technology, and kept the ship
stable until TS came aboard. Jeff is so important that Zuck offered
to create a nickname for him, to bind him closer to the company,
but the JRo nickname didn’t stick, even though JRo is the hippest
VP of Engineering ever. Seriously, both Noah and I think he’s
cool. In his spare time, he fixed the most serious hardware
problems before vendors could figure out what’s going on, and he
intimidated vendor sales staff by telling them, “no, I actually have
built that kind of product myself, and that’s not how it works.”
46 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
Matt Cohler is the man with the most hats. He’s always VP of
whatever needs doing most today, perhaps the most important VP
at a startup. Matt is so thoughtful when not distracted: he
actually sent Mimoli (my daughter, and creator of this great girly
dinosaur) a lava lamp when she was ooohing and aaahing one, on
my self-designated bring-kids-to-work-day. He’s also always
typing on his Crackberry.
Matt at one time also led the charge for Pokey, who could have
been the essential symbol of a major product direction, before
real marketing was hired and shut him down. Pokey represents
poking, which you know as an original facebook activity. Pokey’s
last name is Schlegel, since that may be Matt’s favorite German
philosopher. People did at one time spend hours discussing
details of Pokey.
His counterweight is the COO Owen, who’s responsible for
actually translating the visions into a massive written plan, and
then just glaring at people with those powerful steely eyes until
they run away and make it happen. Owen’s claim to fame is his
look alikeness to Steve Carroll of 40 year old virgin. Of all people
at Facebook, Owen was probably most distraught about my
departure, because I think it leaves him as the only person at the
company with a little daughter, who on one of her visits really did
tell me what her Daddy’s does: he doesn’t do Aaaanything, he just
talks all the time.
TS was hired in the Fall of 2005 as VP of Product Engineering, i
think. As far as I can tell, every engineer reports directly to him.
Karel Baloun 47
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
So he’s very important and very busy. He started the yahoo
messenger group, and obviously made it very successful. He’s
called TS universally, because I’m one of few people who can
remember Ramakrishnan even though I constantly reverse my own
kids’ names, and because his first name is even longer than
Ramakrishnan. He says he likes his real first name though, as he
spewed it just once during his introduction, and will keep it, since
his parents went through sooo much trouble to create it for him.
At Facebook, I’ve reported to Zuck and TS, all the while doing
most of my work for Dustin, and for Trac, which (once I put in the
notification feature) most politely thanks me for doing such nice
work for it.
Kent Schoen was one of the new engineer types who actually
interviewed at the facebook before I did, but the first time he was
scared away by the graffiti38. I lobbied him daily since he was shy
and playing hard to get, and he joined during the summer, and
soon got himself responsible for all of the advertising technology.
Kent is unique in that he’s a good programmer and even better
technical architect, yet he’s someone you’d like to hang out with.
Yes, he’s a genuine people person, who’s even grown beyond his
habit of calling everyone outside his immediate company “those
clowns”.
48 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
38 Actually, no one was there to talk to him except Matt. The odd thing about that
is that Matt was there. A main reason susie was hired was so that we’d get
organized enough to stop standing up important interview candidates.
Kent’s unusual situation is he likes building advertising
technology to, you know, make money for a company. Zuck only
likes the money that comes from advertising, and he doesn’t even
like the money that much. I think he had to be physically tied up
at some executive meeting to allow that ad on the left side of the
page. Again, Zuck is right in not copying myspace by putting an
ad everywhere (they used to have more, even popups), since
facebook has much more traffic and inventory than they could sell
out. Facebook now serves many billions of pageviews a month. If
it just sold cheap crappy ad network CPM ads (at like $1-$3
CPM39) across all of its inventory, it could earn 10s of millions of
dollars every month. But that would annoy people and Zuck loves
his users. Ow! Zuck just mentally hit me. I meant his “student
community on the site”. Kent likes to be creative. So they are a
good match, whenever Zuck, TS or a product person stops for
even a second to think about ads.
Shoot, all of this reminds me that I never sent a “bye” email when I
left. “At least I know we’ll always know how to stay in touch.
Thanks for reminding me what it’s like to be young and in love.”
If you get holiday cards from me, know that they come in the
Spring.
How did we all work together? Not in meetings, which are rare
and often spontaneous, in line with a new industry trend against
Karel Baloun 49
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
39 Possibly, myspace can only get 10 cents; that’s not the only thing wrong with
them. I don’t know facebook’s real CPM, and if I did they’d have to shoot me.
meetings.40 I liked meetings more than everyone else, because I
wanted more architecture and planned collaboration. Everyone
else seemed to prefer autonomy and quick code iterations. Code
reviews were on and off required, and whenever they were done,
were worth their weight in gold41.
Facebook photos is the best model for how major applications are
built.
1. Find a genius engineer who will forego eating and sleeping for
2 months.
2. Give him the vision.
3. Give him a designer, so that a) he doesn’t need to think about
how the pages look and instead can focus on function, and b)
he immediately knows what the pages will be and how they
will work.
4. Get out of the way. Talking to you could make him sleepy or
hungry.
5. When it is done, bless it and say it is exactly what you wanted.
50 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
40 “Meetings are Toxic”, Getting Real, http://getreal.37signals.com
41 remember nobody ever prints anything. but they were still precious, since this
was the only opportunity besides bug fixing to look at anyone else’s code.
however, quick iterations on own code, ambitious time targets, and heavy scope
creep (since real specs were almost never made), meant little time for reviews or
design. In Japan, there was little urban planning, so the streets look like cracks
in pottery, while Paris or American cities has a solid grid framework. Facebook
code architecture is certainly on the organic growth side of that dichotomy.
Keys:
• Don’t change your vision.
• Make sure he’s a genius before starting, by testing on smaller
projects.
• Ensure the designer stays ahead of the functionality, since this
is the engineer’s umbilical cord to reality.
Photos also had very effective prodoug management, which
ensured that the features where clearly defined, and worked with
everything else that was happening around the company.
Noah, who is much too shy, humble and self-effacing42 to
mention any awards he has himself won, did in fact claim a prize
in this slide presentation. I simply won “most likely to sleep
under his desk overnight”, sharing the prize with Nick Heyman,
since both of us actually were photographed doing just that
during one of our work marathons. Noah, on the other hand,
picked up the prestigious “most likely to invite someone for
lunch” award, and the slide was graced with a smiling picture of
the man, with an added caption like “hey, i don’t know you, but
did you know that Facebook has a free lunch? you should come
check it out.” Just between you and me, Noah did in fact earn this
Karel Baloun 51
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
42 as you can see by looking at his site, okdork.com.
award, by bringing through a parade of the best looking43 girls
seen in the building.
Ezra was Product. This is why he can’t send himself off to law
school. From well before my beginning, Ezra was making
important product decisions and coordinating whatever was
happening on the site. Ezra had no product management
experience before coming to Facebook. He was contacted while
backpacking Europe because Sean Parker had been randomly
sleeping at his house during the school year. He started working
the day he got back to the States.
Karel Baloun 43
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
Then Noah and Ezra alone were Product. And there are a lot of
products, so I can’t really see how they manage. The main critical
factor in all of his decisions is that Zuck needs to agree with them,
and none of the engineers go truly ape-shit. Most of Noah’s and
Ezra’s time seems to go into talking through the page layout with
the designers, answering engineers emails about whether to do
something this way or that, and entering hundreds of pre-release
bugs. Designers36 mean Zuck has 8 hands. Aaron was Zuck’s
first designer, and Aaron taught the organization that designers
should be very technical, since he creates new fonts and writes
Mac desktop software on the side. I’m not sure if Aaron is full
time at Facebook or UC Berkeley or both, but he’s the one person
who I never know where he is. When he’s focused, he’s the most
productive front end guy I’ve seen, but even The Man is
sometimes stymied on generating that focus.
One of my best engineer friends37 was Nico, who is old like me,
but runs marathons and is an accomplished drummer. Nico kept
me sane, as nothing ever pulls him out of his rhythm. Chris Cox
is also a musician and a philosopher with deep spiritual interests.
In general, these geniuses like the other engineers at facebook,
are talented in many ways, and it’s fun to just watch them. My
only talent was throwing empty bottles into the recycling from
44 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
36 Bryan, Sol and others. Bryan worked something like 96 hours in his first week
doing Facelift. Sol stands as he works, which just looks as cool as his salutation
(“take it light”) sounds, though he says it just keeps him awake.
37 in the Real, as well as facebook context.
across the room, but fear of injuring the graffiti forced me into
semi-retirement.
Two other members of my team I got to know quite well. Jordan
is a sophomore at Stanford now, and he is the brightest kid I
know. He’d always look right to the hardest part of any project,
and dash out possible solutions like an idea machine. It always
took longer for him to explain his solution to me than it took for
me to explain the project or task. One challenge with hiring
geniuses though, is that they want to do things cleverly, while
challenging themselves to learn all kinds of stuff around it while
they do. Whether the product is ever finished, or actually does
anything practical, is sometimes secondary to whether it was a fun
and challenging process to do it. On the other hand, he can get
impressive things done, as when as a senior intern he built a full
administrative web application for his high school, which I think is
used by all the teachers and students now.
In many ways his diametric opposite was Christopher, who is like
the prototypical effective consultant/contractor. He’ll finish a task
in the fastest, simplest, least complex way possible, ideally
mapping it to some code he’s written before or found. Chris
always focuses on the people he’s working with, the feature or
goal he’s working on has people on the receiving end.
Singlehandedly he’s built out a successful business, showing that
one person with a balance of people and technical skills can be
independent.
Karel Baloun 45
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
Steve Grimm was a second key trusted consultant. Even after the
company decided to continue with exclusively full time
employees, Steven (and Jordan) made the cut, too brilliant to let
go. Steve would be put on whatever distinct piece of the
application was most difficult, and would attack it meticulously.
Steve visited China where he noticed the entertaining fact that
pirated DVDs are often produced with completely random reviews
printed on the box - including some which note that the movie
was terrible.
Any startup has too much work for too few people. Amy is the
principle database engineer, which means that she does every
single bit of database related work for over 200 servers. I enjoyed
running my all night schema conversions scripts with her for 3
consecutive nights. All night work is pure fun and joy for the
young, who don’t have to get their kids to school at 8:30am.
Jeff Rothschild, various incarnations of VP of Engineering, was the
most critical hire in the history of Facebook. He has made so
many right calls on hiring and technology, and kept the ship
stable until TS came aboard. Jeff is so important that Zuck offered
to create a nickname for him, to bind him closer to the company,
but the JRo nickname didn’t stick, even though JRo is the hippest
VP of Engineering ever. Seriously, both Noah and I think he’s
cool. In his spare time, he fixed the most serious hardware
problems before vendors could figure out what’s going on, and he
intimidated vendor sales staff by telling them, “no, I actually have
built that kind of product myself, and that’s not how it works.”
46 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
Matt Cohler is the man with the most hats. He’s always VP of
whatever needs doing most today, perhaps the most important VP
at a startup. Matt is so thoughtful when not distracted: he
actually sent Mimoli (my daughter, and creator of this great girly
dinosaur) a lava lamp when she was ooohing and aaahing one, on
my self-designated bring-kids-to-work-day. He’s also always
typing on his Crackberry.
Matt at one time also led the charge for Pokey, who could have
been the essential symbol of a major product direction, before
real marketing was hired and shut him down. Pokey represents
poking, which you know as an original facebook activity. Pokey’s
last name is Schlegel, since that may be Matt’s favorite German
philosopher. People did at one time spend hours discussing
details of Pokey.
His counterweight is the COO Owen, who’s responsible for
actually translating the visions into a massive written plan, and
then just glaring at people with those powerful steely eyes until
they run away and make it happen. Owen’s claim to fame is his
look alikeness to Steve Carroll of 40 year old virgin. Of all people
at Facebook, Owen was probably most distraught about my
departure, because I think it leaves him as the only person at the
company with a little daughter, who on one of her visits really did
tell me what her Daddy’s does: he doesn’t do Aaaanything, he just
talks all the time.
TS was hired in the Fall of 2005 as VP of Product Engineering, i
think. As far as I can tell, every engineer reports directly to him.
Karel Baloun 47
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
So he’s very important and very busy. He started the yahoo
messenger group, and obviously made it very successful. He’s
called TS universally, because I’m one of few people who can
remember Ramakrishnan even though I constantly reverse my own
kids’ names, and because his first name is even longer than
Ramakrishnan. He says he likes his real first name though, as he
spewed it just once during his introduction, and will keep it, since
his parents went through sooo much trouble to create it for him.
At Facebook, I’ve reported to Zuck and TS, all the while doing
most of my work for Dustin, and for Trac, which (once I put in the
notification feature) most politely thanks me for doing such nice
work for it.
Kent Schoen was one of the new engineer types who actually
interviewed at the facebook before I did, but the first time he was
scared away by the graffiti38. I lobbied him daily since he was shy
and playing hard to get, and he joined during the summer, and
soon got himself responsible for all of the advertising technology.
Kent is unique in that he’s a good programmer and even better
technical architect, yet he’s someone you’d like to hang out with.
Yes, he’s a genuine people person, who’s even grown beyond his
habit of calling everyone outside his immediate company “those
clowns”.
48 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
38 Actually, no one was there to talk to him except Matt. The odd thing about that
is that Matt was there. A main reason susie was hired was so that we’d get
organized enough to stop standing up important interview candidates.
Kent’s unusual situation is he likes building advertising
technology to, you know, make money for a company. Zuck only
likes the money that comes from advertising, and he doesn’t even
like the money that much. I think he had to be physically tied up
at some executive meeting to allow that ad on the left side of the
page. Again, Zuck is right in not copying myspace by putting an
ad everywhere (they used to have more, even popups), since
facebook has much more traffic and inventory than they could sell
out. Facebook now serves many billions of pageviews a month. If
it just sold cheap crappy ad network CPM ads (at like $1-$3
CPM39) across all of its inventory, it could earn 10s of millions of
dollars every month. But that would annoy people and Zuck loves
his users. Ow! Zuck just mentally hit me. I meant his “student
community on the site”. Kent likes to be creative. So they are a
good match, whenever Zuck, TS or a product person stops for
even a second to think about ads.
Shoot, all of this reminds me that I never sent a “bye” email when I
left. “At least I know we’ll always know how to stay in touch.
Thanks for reminding me what it’s like to be young and in love.”
If you get holiday cards from me, know that they come in the
Spring.
How did we all work together? Not in meetings, which are rare
and often spontaneous, in line with a new industry trend against
Karel Baloun 49
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
39 Possibly, myspace can only get 10 cents; that’s not the only thing wrong with
them. I don’t know facebook’s real CPM, and if I did they’d have to shoot me.
meetings.40 I liked meetings more than everyone else, because I
wanted more architecture and planned collaboration. Everyone
else seemed to prefer autonomy and quick code iterations. Code
reviews were on and off required, and whenever they were done,
were worth their weight in gold41.
Facebook photos is the best model for how major applications are
built.
1. Find a genius engineer who will forego eating and sleeping for
2 months.
2. Give him the vision.
3. Give him a designer, so that a) he doesn’t need to think about
how the pages look and instead can focus on function, and b)
he immediately knows what the pages will be and how they
will work.
4. Get out of the way. Talking to you could make him sleepy or
hungry.
5. When it is done, bless it and say it is exactly what you wanted.
50 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
40 “Meetings are Toxic”, Getting Real, http://getreal.37signals.com
41 remember nobody ever prints anything. but they were still precious, since this
was the only opportunity besides bug fixing to look at anyone else’s code.
however, quick iterations on own code, ambitious time targets, and heavy scope
creep (since real specs were almost never made), meant little time for reviews or
design. In Japan, there was little urban planning, so the streets look like cracks
in pottery, while Paris or American cities has a solid grid framework. Facebook
code architecture is certainly on the organic growth side of that dichotomy.
Keys:
• Don’t change your vision.
• Make sure he’s a genius before starting, by testing on smaller
projects.
• Ensure the designer stays ahead of the functionality, since this
is the engineer’s umbilical cord to reality.
Photos also had very effective prodoug management, which
ensured that the features where clearly defined, and worked with
everything else that was happening around the company.
Noah, who is much too shy, humble and self-effacing42 to
mention any awards he has himself won, did in fact claim a prize
in this slide presentation. I simply won “most likely to sleep
under his desk overnight”, sharing the prize with Nick Heyman,
since both of us actually were photographed doing just that
during one of our work marathons. Noah, on the other hand,
picked up the prestigious “most likely to invite someone for
lunch” award, and the slide was graced with a smiling picture of
the man, with an added caption like “hey, i don’t know you, but
did you know that Facebook has a free lunch? you should come
check it out.” Just between you and me, Noah did in fact earn this
Karel Baloun 51
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
42 as you can see by looking at his site, okdork.com.
award, by bringing through a parade of the best looking43 girls
seen in the building.
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