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

I had gotten offers from all big tech companies, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. That gave me a lot of confidence that, okay. I can do it. Today's conversation is with Rahul Pandey. He's a software engineer with tons of experience at both startups. Let's figure out how we can get funding or at least build something once we quit. And in big tech. Interview prep is a very different scale.

Compared to actually doing the engineering job, I was very worried that I wouldn't actually get the offer. In our conversation, he explains the pros and cons of each. Most things in your career are two-way doors. You try it out, you learn something, you experiment, and then you can always back out, leave the startup.

go to big tech if needed he also speaks about his career growth from junior at pinterest all the way to staff at meta so then i like messaged back my old recruiters at other big tech companies i got offers from hey like are you still hiring or can i join i thought the points he had to make

on the staff side of things were particularly interesting. As you go up the career ladder, most of your impact is going to be derived through the influence you have on other people rather than actually just coding all day, every day. I asked him at the end of the conversation, what is some advice? that he'd give to himself if he could start all over again. And I really liked his answer. I think you're gonna like it too. I hope you enjoy the podcast. The beginning of your career is...

Unusual. You went to Stanford, but you joined a startup immediately. And it looks like a very small startup. What's the story behind you joining a startup right out of college? The story is in my fifth year at Stanford, I was at the... school for five years doing an undergrad and master's degree. So in that fifth year, one of the reasons I actually decided to stick around for that fifth year is because I felt like I hadn't really...

made any faculty connections. And Stanford, just like any other top institution, is famous in part because of amazing instructors and faculty who are doing groundbreaking research. And I felt like, what a shame if I leave this institution and not really understand or take part in that. And so the fifth year, I was an RA, like a research assistant in a lab with a professor named Yuri Leskovich, who was like a rising star. And I thought it was a cool opportunity.

And that led to a lot of the work we were doing in the lab. He decided to spin it out into a company. And Stanford Ashley is pretty well known for it. being fairly generous or willing to allow their faculty to go out and do companies and like have this revolving door with academia. And so when that happened, I felt like it was almost too good of a story to pass up.

I could be one of 10 or 20,000 engineers in big tech if I go join Google or Microsoft or Meta. And I had received offers of all of them. But then I felt like, okay, this is a story where I had this connection relationship with a professor.

He trusts me. I trust him. And it just feels like a Silicon Valley unique story that will, it could go really, really well, in which case amazing. Or worst case, it's a good story to tell. Yeah, yeah. And so I felt like there was not enough reviews and that's kind of why I ended up.

choosing that route makes sense and you're early in your career so if it fell flat you didn't have a whole lot of responsibility how many people were were in that early venture like was this just you and the professor or Was there more structure? Yeah. So as a professor, he had one industry veteran who had been around the block. And so it was like two founders. And then there was one other person in the lab with me. So two new grads, me and him.

And it was one more person. So I think I had joined technically, aside from the two founders, as like employee number two. So very, very early on. into the company's formation right how did you think about risk at that point because i think a lot of people they're evaluating big tech and and versus startups and big tech is kind of uh you know the high expected value path and then startups are kind of you know

boom or bust type of path. So did you think about that at all? Or was it a no brainer to go to the startup? Yeah, I did think about that. I think the couple things I thought about is one way door versus two way door. Like, let me try it out.

startups most things in your career are two-way doors in the sense that you try it out you learn something you experiment and then you can always back out you can always decide to leave the startup and then go to big tech if needed so that was one consideration and the other consideration too if i'm being honest is that

I felt like I had attained that level of success or that level of approval from big tech. And if I hadn't had that, I honestly am not sure if I would have done the startup. But what I mean by that is I had done an internship the prior summer.

at facebook right now known as meta in 2013 and then after that internship i had gotten offers from all big tech companies i'd gotten five offers including what i mentioned like google facebook and microsoft twitter and square so five companies in total and so that gave me a lot of confidence that okay i i can do it right i can hopefully with some preparation i'm hopeful or confident in my ability to go back and get that opportunity

So it didn't feel like that much of a risk. Whereas if I had never gotten that big tech offer, I think I might have really thought twice, well, let me go get a stable job, which is going to be much more kind of a known commodity to other companies.

If and when I decide to move on from my first gig, I can get a really good job on my second gig. But because I already had that insurance policy of Stanford on my resume, along with these other offers, I felt like I could be a lot more risk on that early in my career. Right, right.

That makes sense. So when you went into the actual startup itself, would you say that it was a good outcome from the acquisition or was that kind of like, you know, acqui-hire maybe not the best outcome you're hoping for? Yeah, more the latter for sure. I think the thing with acquisition... but I learned that acquisition is probably one of the most overloaded terms in Silicon Valley. What do you mean? You could talk about acquisition as in like...

the most famous might be, or one of the most famous might be like WhatsApp getting acquired by Facebook for 19 billion. Right, right. Right, in 2014. That's like an acquisition and like everyone became filthy, right? Right. But you also have acquisitions where frankly, the total opposite, which is...

The company effectively failed. Yeah. And they're calling an acquisition to save the dignity of the founder. I think what happened with Pose, the company I joined, it was somewhere in the middle. It was a little bit, if I'm being honest, closer to... the failure end i mean i probably shouldn't call it a failure it was basically like an opportunistic bet that okay the startup that i joined like i mentioned it was spun out of academic work right

And so I think the bet that we were making is that, hey, we have interesting IP, intellectual property. We have some interesting ideas that are more academic, but there's not really a clear pathway to generating revenue or building a product. And so...

When the startup acquisition offer came along, like Pinterest, this hot company, which already had 100 million users, when they came along and said, hey, sharing your technology and your technology know-how with our core product and pmf product market fit that we already have that could really create something where one plus one equals three that i think was

a really attractive proposition and so i think that it we never gave the company a chance to really fail like it just ended within like eight months of formation and so i think to answer your question directly I think financially it wasn't like an FU rich outcome. Like I'm never up to work again. It certainly wasn't that. I basically, you can kind of think of it as me entering in Pinterest with a slightly higher package than.

what a normal new grad at pinterest would have received so certainly i mean you can't complain like i feel like i learned a lot about silicon valley i learned a lot about acquisitions and i came in with like a financially better outcome but it wasn't like a life-changing amount of money. Got it, got it. Yeah, I think people who hear the word acquisition, they assume that it's an insane outcome. But it sounds like in this case, it was...

kind of some sort of way to acquire the talent and the know-how and not be crazy good. But at least it's better than if you just went straight to Pinterest, it sounds like. Yeah, and I think one more thing I'll say, which I think is really often overlooked, is that storytelling...

And the story that you tell yourself and the story you tell other people, the narrative that you can create about what you did, why you did it, and why it's interesting, that is incredibly powerful. And I think honestly, more than anything else, I feel like... Me being able to tell this story of how I was an enterprising young engineer, 22 years old, and I took a bet on a startup and I did this crazy story. Honestly, I get a lot of mileage out of that story.

genuinely I get like I learned a lot but also just like being able to tell that story and explain to people what happened what I learned from it that actually has a ton of value and so one of the things I tell people on tarot or just in general when I mentor people is that

If you have a choice between A and B and you feel like A is the one which will give you exposure to more unique opportunity, unique people, unique stories, that's a really good argument to pick option A because it just will broaden your... perspective and give you that storytelling ability which is so powerful for sure yeah and i think also going that path can allow you to piggyback off the social proof of kind of

the crazy silicon valley startup trajectories and i'm sure the story could be told in a way where it was a very good outcome and you learned a lot and you're a rising you know startup kind of software engineer so that could let you be you know, valuable in that social circle as well as big tech. So, okay. So it sounds like looking back on that, even though the startup, I guess, you know, it didn't like succeed. It kind of like failed a little bit. It was actually a good outcome.

You got a story out of it. So looking back on that, let's say I was a new grad and I think there's a lot in the audience. Would you recommend that they pick this same opportunity if they had the same decision to make? Yeah.

I think it depends. So a couple of things that made this story unique and why I felt like it was a requisition for me at the time was number one, I had a lot of social proof on my resume already. Like I went to Stanford, I had done internship at... facebook which is already a huge company at that point and i felt like the founder of the startup was one of the best people in the field

in the world right like undoubtedly this person knew more about recommendation systems and big data and you know we didn't call it machine learning back then but effectively machine learning back then so it was like clearly a really good person to just be around and and see how they operate

And so I think if those things are true, then yeah, I mean, I would encourage anyone who's that early on in their career, go do the crazy risky thing, which might fail. But I will say that's honestly more of the exception than the norm. So if you're a normal... If you are the typical pap, which is what I would describe as like you went to a pretty good school and you got a degree and you are like...

struggling to find your first job, actually, I would recommend go and find the biggest brand name you can like the biggest company, like reputable company and go work there. But I do think there's so much value in just accruing credibility, right? Go work at Amazon. I think your first job was Amazon. That's a great first gig. Go work at Amazon. Go work at Google if you can get in. I think that will set you up well at a baseline.

for whatever else you want to do later on in your career. And if you had this exceptional opportunity and you're able to justify it by like an amazing founder and you already have some of that kind of backup plan because of your background.

I think then it makes sense. But for the most part, I would just recommend the standard path is probably the best because it's a standard. Like it's a standard for a reason, right? So like probably the standard path is what I'd recommend for most people. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I think... You know, big tech versus startups comes up a lot and it just feels like...

Like you said, one of the big things about going directly into a big brand is instant step change in your credibility. You just immediately you have some prestige on your resume. Yeah, there's a lot of value. And just even if you just went to big tech for like a year or two.

and then you left. And even if your end goal was to go to startups, I kind of feel like developing the engineering fundamentals while collecting that stamp is one of the highest EV things that you could do. Knowing now your situation. makes it you had an extraordinary opportunity and you already had the stamps essentially Stanford Facebook you're kind of already in there so that makes sense you got acquired by Pinterest and so you're

kind of uh it was a pretty big company at the time right pinterest is maybe a growth stage startup at the time yeah around 400 people well 400 people okay so it was bigger than a true startup startup but it was still much smaller than big tech you know when you got acquired um you know what was what was the story there was it uh something that you felt like You were happy to get acquired to Pinterest or was it kind of chaotic? What was that like? Yeah, I think.

In the end, I was happy with it, but I will tell you, like, it was very chaotic and very stressful in the process to get there. Because, like, basically, the way it worked, right, the behind the scenes is that... It was like my professor and this other industry veteran. And they were like much, much more senior than me and the other new grad who joined Cose together. And like, you know, they had 20 years of work experience. Clearly, they were much more well-connected, much more in the know.

And so the way it worked is that I came into work at Kose, the startup, one day. And they told me and said, hey, we are going to get acquired by Pinterest. They want to interview everyone on the team. You're going to do a full round of interviews next Monday, which was like a couple days away.

And so that was like a big change in the company strategy, right? Obviously, I was like, we're really shutting down. We're going to get acquired. And then the last 48 hours, the next like 72 hours or whatever, it was extremely stressful because I had...

You know, I was like out of interview prep for almost a year at that point. And as you know, you talk about this later, but like interview prep is a very different scale compared to actually doing the engineering job. And so I was very worried that I wouldn't. actually get the offer at Pinterest because I didn't do well in the interview. And in fact, that almost came true. Like I remember I did the full round. Like they took everyone basically immediately to the final round interview.

So I had like five or six interviews in one day and I was borderline. They called me back in to the SF office again to say, hey, like, you know, we still had some doubts or like we had some questions follow up for you. And I did two more interviews.

And luckily, I nailed those. I did really well on those. And then I got the offer. But I was very worried because there was a TechCrunch article and it was a big news announcement about how Pinterest is acquiring this hot technology company. And it would have sucked if it was like...

Oh, I joined the startup. I didn't actually take part in the acquisition. And all my friends would have texted me or messaged me and like, oh, congratulations. I'm like, oh, well, I got nothing out of it because I didn't get an offer. So it kind of worked out in the end.

It really was a pretty stressful process and it was rushed. Right. Had you vested any... uh options in your in kosei at the time or okay so you would have gotten nothing because kosei had only been around for about eight months at that point right okay so if you didn't pass that you would have gotten fired essentially and

I had gotten no upside from any equity after that. That's right. Yeah. And so like literally like after that on this whole like onsite interview, I was feeling pretty nervous. So then I like messaged back my old recruiters at. other big tech companies I get offers from I like start hey like are you still hiring or can I join that was worth that would be a backup let me go back to Google let me go back to Facebook right luckily it worked out

And then I wanted to be part of that story. And I knew the people at Kosei, so I wanted to kind of join with them. So that was like a nice transition. But yeah, that was like, it would have been effectively. start from scratch and become like a new grad all over right was that leak code to to just the standard alco interview loop yeah that was a pretty standard like i think it was you know uh leak code they asked me like what i did on the startup what projects I worked on.

i didn't know it's like one behavioral interview i think and then a bunch of weak code man okay you'd have a very different story if you failed that not nearly as good um so okay so you get into pinterest what was the What was that like? Did they have a ladder system at that time? Did you get plugged into a certain level in terms of career side of things? Yeah, they had just developed an engineering leveling system. And I came in at L3, which is like their...

entry-level engineer so effectively they borrowed it from google and facebook so l3 is entry-level l4 is mid-level l5 is senior so i came into l3 and then i transitioned away from recommendation systems or like data engineering which is effectively what i was doing

at the startup and I transitioned into mobile development. And so I kind of did a career reset in some ways by joining Pinterest. And then that led to... kind of a longer ramp up time and i actually ended up getting rejected for promotion which we can talk about if that if that's interesting yeah but yeah i basically came in at the l3 i see so

You mentioned that you were working in a different space. How did you choose what you're working on at Pinterest? And also, maybe you can tell us a little more about what you were working on, too. Yeah, I mean, the way they...

put you into teams is they actually modeled it off of facebook so facebook has a thing called boot camp at least they did back in the day where it was like a six-week program where you like learn about engineering fundamentals and you pick a team they had something called base camp there's a dare like a play on that

And the idea of Basecamp is that it's like a bridged version, like two or three weeks where you've learned about different teams at Pinterest and you decide what to go work on. By going through the Basecamp process and talking to a bunch of teams, I kind of made the call that I didn't want to do things that were more backend.

I wanted to be closer to the product. I wanted to actually be able to build something which I could deploy either at Pinterest or on my own. Actually, one of the criteria for me is I wanted to be able to build things on my own end-to-end like side projects. I felt like I wasn't able to properly do that with my background in recommendation systems, which I had kind of built up an expertise in.

at stanford and at coset you wanted to do that because uh you had aspirations to start a company someday yeah i mean i think vaguely i did have some aspirations like i think at stanford like everyone has a vague aspiration to start a company so there was some element of like i wanted this

at some point, do the entrepreneurial thing. I think there's also just like a more fundamental itch of like, I want to build something. And I felt like you can obviously build things on the back end too. But I did want to be an owner of the actual... user experience as well that was important to me and just like i wanted to dabble i wanted to build things the idea of being able to have my name on an app in the play store like the android app store that was really compelling and like

My whole family was on Android, so I could go home and show them, here's this app I built, and thousands of people could use it. That was really compelling to me. And so I felt like if I could just learn Android professionally at...

Pinterest with really good people that could help accelerate my side project endeavors because that was not an option at Cosa. There was no such thing as a mobile team. Like we were only three, four people total. So I just wanted to leverage the benefit of a bigger company. to be able to like double dip and do well professionally hopefully and also

be able to do things on the side that I thought were interesting. That made sense. So I think the rationale made sense when you actually went through with it and you ended up on this client side team.

Did you learn what you wanted to learn or were you surprised that it wasn't what you were expecting? Yeah, I think I did end up learning what I wanted to learn. It was a really good... staff level Android engineer who got hired a couple months after me I learned a lot from him like that was a huge kind of pivot I would say in my career like I was able to just get a ton of mentorship but I will say for the first few months it was kind of rough I didn't know how to properly learn

I had not learned how to properly learn at that point in my career. And so Android, especially at a somewhat mature company where we had, you know, I think hundreds of thousands of lines in the Android app at that point already, it was not a small code base.

I think I really did struggle. Like as someone who had never done Android professionally before, the first few months of transitioning were really difficult for me. And I think I, like that was kind of the reason why I think I didn't do well. When I initially went up for promotion at Pinterest is that. I was very slow to ramp up and I felt like I read a lot of documentation. I read a lot of code, but I didn't actually modify. I didn't write much Android code.

in the first few months. That was rough, but I think eventually I got to the point where I felt comfortable. So what was the key change that took you from not landing code and not being effective in your onboarding to learning how to learn and being effective? Yeah, I think a lot of it honestly was just being surrounded by really good people. In particular, this like L6 staff level engineer who had come from Facebook, who joined Pinterest. Like I think that person really like we started.

to pair program. And that was, I think, a really big change in how I approached the work. And I think just in general, like having a team where you're accountable to something. I think I did work pretty hard. So like, it's not like I was fooling around and I didn't know you learned anything. I was...

spending a lot of time i think when you have a team of people who are like kind of holding you accountable or they're gonna judge you which is really what was happening i think that was a really good fire under my butt to actually learn it properly and eventually it kind of clicked

But the combination of mentorship and just enough time in the role. Got it. So for people who are looking to join a team, they're making a similar decision of like what team to join. Maybe they already passed the interviews. What do you think is the most important thing in picking a good team? Yeah, I'll say maybe two things. One is the people part of it. Again, it's like the amount that you learn is going to be dominated by who you interact with and like what kind of discussion or...

internationally how about them and the second thing i would say is how important is that team to the company so one of the reasons actually additional reason why i picked android at pinterest is that one of the big initiatives for pinterest in 2015 when i was working there Let's international grow. And if you're going to try to grow a consumer app internationally, the number one way you do that, the key is going to be Android. Android is dominant outside of the US.

And so I knew that the company would allocate a lot of smart people, a lot of resources, a lot of money, frankly, into that domain. And I felt like if you're adjacent to or operating in an area of high growth.

you will inevitably see some of that growth too right so i think the combination of those two people and where the company is growing i think matters a lot in team selection yeah that makes sense i think um you know common advice i see is like uh you know rising tide lifts all boats i've seen some people's careers where they they went from you know new grad to director in like five years because they were working on

the one of the most important things for the company and they were really delivering so the impact was insane and typically career growth is proportional to your your impact so that that makes a lot of sense so going into the career growth side of things. You came in as an L3. You mentioned that you had a failed promotion. Can you talk me through how you eventually got the promo and maybe the story behind what you were talking about there? Yeah, I mean, it's...

Pretty difficult journey, honestly. So I got the failed promotion. I got the feedback. I think, honestly, that was probably legitimate. Like, I think it was a year after I was at Pinterest and I wanted to go up a promo and I got rejected.

And it was like valid feedback. Okay, you've only been doing Android professionally for like, you know, nine months at that point. And you haven't really added, you haven't really added that much. That was fair. I ran up again six months later. And I got rejected for the promotion again. So that was Julie Timorland. I came into Pinterest with this attitude of like, okay, I came in through an acqui-hire, an acquisition, and I should be on top of the world. I should be one of the best engineers.

And then getting rejected for the same promotion twice was a real setback. So luckily what happened in the second time is they had like an appeal process. at pinterest so then i was able to work with a manager to appeal the promotion and i got i actually ended up getting it so oh that was valuable one of the takeaways i learned in that second time is a big feedback for me for the rejection

was that, oh, on one of the projects that you listed in your promotion packet, you said that you've been working on it for like 16 months. And the promotion committee, this anonymous promotion committee, interpreted that to mean that... I wasn't working with urgency or with deliberation enough. And that was not true. I think the framing of it had that framing because they kind of interpreted this long duration of the project.

But then when I clarified that with a manager and they were able to like kind of advocate for me or put up a appeal, it ended up working out. But I think it kind of showed me the value of like you really need to. be clear about what you think you're saying it may not always be interpreted that way right right and so especially for things like career growth or like a one-on-one document or a promotion document you have to really be clear about get it reviewed by people who

have been around the block and like understand, like be open to feedback on how things might be interpreted differently. Cause you want to avoid the situation that I ended up in back then. Was the promo packet something that. you you put all the initial materials together and then your manager you know fit it into whatever promo template like how did the 16 the framing of the 16 months get into the promo packet

Yeah, I'm trying to remember actually how exactly it worked. I mean, I definitely go with ProVault Pocket. So there was like a normal self-review. And at Pinterest, it was a pretty heavy-handed process, I think. you know a self-review your promotion pocket and then your manager would add commentary on top of that and they would submit that to an anonymous promo committee who would then accept or reject your promotion and so yeah i mean i think i was like the primary author behind this i see like

promotion document which said that i'd worked on a project for 16 months got it yeah it's it's interesting you talked about the duration of the project and how it being longer hurt you because i've heard the opposite as well if you have a project that is long it's perceived as larger scope potentially and therefore you know maybe a bigger undertaking and so I've heard some people say actually sometimes it can be advantageous for a project to be longer duration. So I think, you know...

Of course, there's no one size fits all thing here. It's all about the context and how the story is actually told. The color behind it matters a lot. Yeah. And this is why I think like you have to be really clear with your manager.

What narrative, what story are you trying to tell? You have to make sure that you're aligned with them. And also ideally get feedback from other tech leads or other people who are in positions of influence. Because the same project, if you've been working on it for 16 months, it could be really impressive.

Or if it's like this minor experiment that people assume should have taken you three months, but you've been working out for 16 months, that could be held against you, right? So I think the devil is in detail and you have to be... I guess the learning I had is that you can't make assumptions about how you are going to be...

evaluated or judged based off of your own interpretation. Software is a social endeavor. You have to be able to work with other people and figure out how are they judging you. What do they think are your areas for improvement? And make sure you figure that out ahead of time so you're not surprised during a performance review. Right, right.

That makes sense. One of the last things I want to go over for this leg of your career is usually from L3 to L4, it's all about engineering fundamentals and technical growth. And you mentioned a little bit that... Having a really strong mentor was one of the key things that helped you level up here in terms of your skills. Was there anything else that you did that helped you have a lot more impact or really develop the skills quickly going from three to four?

learned from this mentor, which was also incredibly valuable for me when I was doing my own side projects or like publishing apps, was this willingness to just operate outside of the code base. Like for example, I mentioned how the Pages Codebase, even though it was still relatively early, it was already quite mature. Compilation, building the Android app and deploying to the phone, it took, I think, sometimes between two and five minutes. It took a long time to actually...

do all this compilation so it's like a very slow and painful debug cycle one of the things that the mentor showed me is that hey you can actually create your own like mini android app and make changes and like copy over themes as needed but then you can

had a sandbox environment where the debug cycle is way faster. And I think that was really eye-opening for me because it felt like making a new app, that's like so much work. That's like this big, ambiguous thing. I don't know how to do that. But... When you actually get into it, it turns out it's not that hard and it will actually meaningfully increase your velocity. And that fear I had, I think, of like being able to dabble and like break things and...

you know, copy paste code and modify it over here and see what happens. I think that went away after a while. And which is also, of course, very valuable for a side project because you don't have training meals. You don't have any code to already modify for a side project. Right. So it was very valuable for that. And I think that change of attitude of like just being able to go in and make things and break things, honestly, was probably the biggest mindset shift that led to.

the L3 to L4 promotion. That makes sense. Yeah, I think a lot of that promotion too is about, you know, contributing more code and having one of the most important things for that is like a very fast. iteration loop, like very tight iteration loop. I've heard also, you know, at Meta and other big tech, like building the mobile app, because it's such a massive thing, can take really long time, maybe.

you know up to an hour in some cases and so yeah having that sandbox app or like any other things too where you have like a a script that saves you you know a few minutes you run it in the background and it's pre-compiling things or anything like that can make a big difference when your iteration speed is what controls your learning speed and how quickly you're landing the code. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. So, okay.

You got the promo of Pinterest and I believe at this point you left to Meta. Is that correct? Yeah, I left in mid 2017. Got it. What made you want to leave Pinterest for Meta? A couple of things. One is I think Meta. was a much much bigger company and i felt like frankly the engineering brand of meta was still quite a bit stronger just in terms of like name brand and being a huge company and it was value in that

They were paying more. And I felt like in terms of immediate growth at Pinterest, I didn't see a clear pathway to, okay, like, here's how my career is going to rocket ship from where I am now. And so the combination of those three... led me to okay let me look around and see if i can get a meaningful bump in my career promotion or compensation i do think in general early on in career job hopping

is more effective at that later on in career job hopping is actually counterproductive what makes you say that job hopping is counterproductive later in career and as you go up the career ladder most of your impact is going to be derived through the influence you have on other people, rather than actually just coding all day, every day. It was rare for like, for example, a staff or principal engineer to just...

crank out so much code that it justifies their impact at the company. Usually what's going to be happening is you're creating frameworks or tools or systems that allow other developers to do productive work. And so for that kind of work...

You need to be in a company long enough that you have those relationships and that trust built out. If you are a staff or principal engineer, it's very hard to job hop your way beyond that. You have to just kind of... build out that trust and relationship and then you get promoted whereas early on career as long as you show the competency of hey i can write high quality android code i can write high quality production code that's that might be enough actually

for a company to bring you in at a higher level or at least a higher compensation that makes a lot of sense i think that aligns with my experience as well i think my my promotion from senior to staff i think was unusually quick because i had a lot of relationships already a lot of my peers had kind of switched companies like very very fast but i stayed in one place one team for a long time so actually that leg

came a lot of it was from influence and people trusting me and knowing I could get a job done at a staff level and giving me those opportunities, which I was lucky to receive. But yeah, staying at some place for a long time gave me more opportunities for influence. that kind of luck. So one thing I want to ask you about, because you mentioned one thing about meta was like more social proof, more prestige.

Your resume was already pretty loaded at the time in terms of Pinterest is not a bad brand. You had Stanford. You had already been at Meta. Do you feel like there was additional value in another stamp or was it more for the other aspects of it? Yeah, that's a good point. I do think part of it was like, I still felt meta as a much bigger... Like everyone in the world had heard of Meta or at that point with Facebook.

Everyone had heard of Facebook. Not everyone had heard of Pinterest. Part of it was maybe like this ego of like, it's a more well-known brand, both for the common public and also in terms of engineering. But I think you're right that that was not the highest order bit.

of what i was optimizing for because like i had already technically had the facebook name on my resume i had already had these other somewhat well-known names on my resume I think it was more, I think, focused on this feels like a place where I can grow my career.

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

A lot of the Pinterest culture was influenced by a lot of ex-Facebook and ex-Google people. So it was similar in that sense, but Facebook culture was from my internship and from people who had joined interest from Facebook. And you could tell that Facebook was like the authentic taste that I had gotten, but on steroids. For example, at Pinterest, I remember their culture was every code review, every change would be reviewed by at least two people.

And they'd actually have these things called herald rules, where if you modified a particular part of the code base, it would automatically add reviewers, and they were blocking reviewers, so you couldn't land the code until they took a look. At Facebook, as you probably know, it's actually very rare for that to happen. Usually, all you need is one... except one lgtm one green check mark and you can land it and so i was actually kind of shocked at

wait, people are just landing code that quickly without all the other like checks and balances. So then that was one big difference. I think people were more direct at Facebook, at Pinterest, more of the common criticisms of the company.

was that it was kind of too nice which is kind of a weird criticism but like i think what they meant to say was that people weren't saying the difficult thing around feedback or prioritization and then therefore projects or people who had no business actually staying at the company they stuck around a lot longer whereas at facebook i think they were actually quite again i don't want to say like they were more mean but they were definitely a lot more direct around hey

this doesn't make sense. Why are you doing this? Let's cut it or kill it. And I think there was a lot more aggressive like pip culture, for example, Facebook compared to Pinterest. Right, right. That makes sense. How about the technical stacks? Like when you... switch from pinterest to meta did you have any issues learning meta's very custom stack i mean it's kind of interesting because like on paper it was quite similar like

both as an android dev both were using java there was no kotlin really at the time so java there and it was still using like android tooling but i think one of the things that was interesting is that facebook was operating at such a scale that they had like workarounds for a lot of things like they had their own custom build system called buck right that was relative that was very easy for me and then a lot of the ways of doing compilation for android at facebook was different from what i had

learned which was exacerbated or like made even more pronounced by the fact that i was working on a hardware team so i joined a relatively unique part of facebook called portal and it wasn't called port all the time it was called building eight it basically was a forked version of android along with like 30 different custom android apps sitting on top of this custom operating system and so the building the build

the tooling for that was actually very, very different, not just for Pinterest, but also just for core of Facebook. So that took some time. like probably it took me like four or five months to understand how that even how that worked got it yeah and for for people who don't know portal is the standalone device that's a video

calling device that has a screen on it and it sits stationary. It's almost like a Google Home. That's the thing that you're talking about, right? That's right. Yeah. I see. So when you were actually building these Android apps and running it on hardware, it was one of those. Those things. That's right. I mean, initially you would have like, we have like literally like an Android tablet.

because we didn't have hardware when we first joined but then yeah like eventually we had custom hardware which had our own os we it was like you call it flashing you'd flash the device with your own os and on top of that you would then put oh

over optimized build of a 30 app but then you're not going to build all 30 apps that would take like literally three or four hours then you would take the app that you're working on like i was working on the calling app so just build that app i can put that on the device there's a very kind of unique process even for facebook which took a long time to understand and actually that was an opportunity like you talk about this later if you're interested but i built out this like debug tool

which was just for people on Portal because of how unique the setup was. And that actually led to a ton of impact because I was able to understand deeply how the workflow was different compared to other internet engineers. And I was able to...

build something to help with them how many engineers did that speed up by the time i built that tool like portal had grown dramatically so i think by that point like hundreds of engineers in the portal org or adjacent orgs were using that tool either every day or every week and It was probably saving like hundreds of hours of engineering time every month. Yeah, so I mean, to me, that sounds like...

IC6 impact or staff impact. So maybe we can talk a little bit about career growth at Meta. Were you hired as a IC5? So senior or? Yeah. Okay. So that was probably a big part of moving as well. Sounds like you got a promotion from switching from Pinterest to Meta. Yep, that's right. Did you have to do anything special to get that?

that job hop promo or you just did the interview and that was what they proposed yeah that's what they proposed i mean i think i i knew i had done the interviews really well like i came out thinking okay i felt really lucky i felt really good about okay i pretty much nailed every problem and i came in in a position of strength in the sense that i already had i think a couple pending offers at that point

I had interned at Facebook. I had worked at a respectable company before, which was Pinterest. And the market was hot for Android developers. So the combination of all of that led to just like... They wanted to give me a compelling offer. Right. Did the offer come in IC5 right off the bat or did you have to? It did. Okay. So you didn't need to negotiate. You didn't need to say, hey, I'm only interviewing here if it's IC5.

you just took the interview without saying anything and happened to get ic5 you went from senior or ic5 to to staff yeah maybe you can talk a little bit about what you're working on i mentioned i'm working i work on a thing called portal which is a standalone hardware video calling device and so prior to portal existing facebook already has a long history of doing video calling primarily in the form of doing it through messenger so messenger

The Facebook Messenger app already had a fairly mature ecosystem or infrastructure around supporting cross-platform video calls between desktop and mobile Android iOS at different codecs. qualities, different audio, video codecs, things like that. And so I think a lot of the challenge was, hey, the step zero is just effectively fork off of Messenger and do our own thing.

because we were just kind of an experimental project. But then once Portal had launched and we had hundreds of thousands of people who were using Portal every day, then there was a need to now kind of come back into... the normal infrastructure. Because like, you know, obviously the RTC team, like the video calling infrastructure team at Messenger, they were constantly making improvements and it would always be a challenge of how do we now stay up to date? And so the main project I...

I worked on was moving the core call infrastructure back into what Messenger had already developed. So migrating the old infra to the new infra while maintaining compatibility with all the custom features that Portal had. adopting a lot of the new features that the RTC Infra had enabled for us. So kind of navigating that at a product layer and also the tech layer, that was the main project. I think...

One thing I tell people is at the staff level, you can have one big project that I think some people have that. But for me, I think having a portfolio approach worked out really well. But that was like the main thing that was really cross-functional. And frankly, a lot of like bureaucracy where it was. managing people from the messenger team, managing people from portal, leadership.

Like getting everyone in mind, PMs. And so I think the other project that I mentioned earlier, which was a debug tool, that was purely engineering driven. I knew exactly who I was building for, which was me and other engineers on the team. I think the combination of those two led to...

a pretty clear promo case when i was able to go up for it right right i mean that makes sense that sounds clearly like ic6 scope you're you had to influence across teams sounds like a pretty big shared infrastructure initiative I've heard a lot of other people getting IC6 promos off of shared infra because that central team probably made it so much better in the interim when you were branched away. So when you merge together, it's almost like you unlocked all of theirs.

engineers' work in this new product service. So were you intentional about your growth to IC6? Like, was that something you kept talking to your manager about? You said, hey, I want to get there, or it just happened naturally? Yeah, I mean, the way you phrased the promotion conversation...

matters a lot so like i think for the first year at facebook my goal was really is let me make sure i do well right because i think a big turnoff and i learned this when i was on the other side as a manager later on

But like, if you have someone who just joined the company and they're immediately asking me, okay, like, I want to get promoted. Can you help me? It's a big turnoff because even, especially for someone like me who had felt some level of... imposter syndrome but hey i came in at a fairly high level there's a lot of expectation my first priority for the first year was really let me just nail it let me make sure that i'm

exceeding expectation or at least meeting expectation for E5 or IC5 senior level before I think about promotion. So after that year and I felt like I now had developed some trust and I landed some good work. Then I started to have a really clear conversation with the manager about what does it look like to grow on the IC ladder? What does management look like? Because even back then, I think there was some element of I enjoyed talking to people.

enjoyed mentoring people. So there was even discussion back then on what would it look like to be a manager. I think the conclusion we came to, and I think it was the right one, was let me first go up the ladder as an IC, like an individual contributor. and then maybe later on try out the management path which is what happened but it was a pretty like thought through deliberate conversation with them makes sense

You mentioned that there were two kind of big efforts that helped you get promoted. One of them was the tooling that you made, which sounds like that was a bottoms up initiative. You knew it was bad. You saw how many people that could help and you just went and...

built it. For the shared infrastructure initiative, did you create that scope? Or was that something that maybe your manager came to you and said, hey, we got to do this. Could you lead it? How did you get that opportunity? Yeah, that one was more of like...

It was kind of obvious that that had to be done by someone. And I think I had been around the team long enough and I had enough of a seniority and relationship with the RTC team, like the messenger team, to make it happen. So it kind of felt like a natural fit. Okay, I can just step up and do it rather than it being something like I'm going to create scope. It definitely was like an obvious thing that both the RTC team and the Portal team wanted. It was a question of who could step up and...

try and be the point person for this initiative. Got it. And you were naturally that person because you had been delivering, you had all the relationships and you'd been there for long enough. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was kind of very clear to everyone that if I wanted it, I would probably be.

one of the better people to take this on or maybe the best person to take it on just because I had been around long enough and I knew the context of what each team was trying to do. and how to make it kind of compatible, how to make it work together. Okay. And so you talked a little bit about management and I know you got the IC6 promo and then later you switched to TLM and I was kind of curious. I think a lot of people want to make that same...

decision for their careers. So what was your reasoning for wanting to switch? I do think genuinely the whole point of like my company now is to try and help people. So I think good managers, I think genuinely have a desire to help people. Like they want to see people grow. And then I think as a byproduct of helping people grow, you also can actually have a lot of impact.

The job line managers are generally quite senior and respected at most companies, right? So that was the initial motivation. And again, going back to the idea of like, I had a lot of contacts. I knew a lot of people.

So again, felt like a kind of a natural transition in some sense. Like you have a growing team and you want someone to give them feedback and make sure they're working high impact stuff. Okay, do you want to become a manager? And so it was a very, again, it didn't feel forced at all. It kind of felt like, oh, very natural. like is something you've expressed interested in the past and also

It seems to be a natural fit here where the organization needs it. Do you want to try out management? Right. So let's say someone's decided for themselves they definitely want to try management. What are those concrete steps that...

maybe you took, for instance, that got you to actually become a manager? Yeah, I think a couple of things. One is just ask yourself the question of, do you enjoy helping people? Do you enjoy working with people? Like if you hate one-on-one, you dread the one-on-one with your manager.

or one-on-ones with other people, you're going to have a really difficult time thriving as a manager because a lot of your time is going to be one-on-ones or even just like reacting to pings. And I do think one of the hard parts of management is that... you become more of a firefighter or you become more reactive rather than proactive. Like you can't guard your time as much.

So step one is like, are you willing to, do you like people enough? And do you want to help people enough that you're willing to give up some of the autonomy or flexibility that you might've had as an engineer? If you've clarified that with yourself. And by the way, you should test that too. Like don't just like intellectualize it.

I think it's worth actually having one-on-ones with people and start doing some of that motion now, even as I see, if you think you might want to become a manager. Another big part of management, honestly, is having opinions. You should have opinions not only about the feedback of like what quality of work people are doing on the team and like how they could do better. That's one part of having opinions. Another part about having opinions is how should the team and organization change?

based on different priorities of the company or of the org and if you feel like you haven't done that reflection or if you don't want to do that reflection i actually don't think management is again like it's not a good fit in the sense that you wouldn't do well i think the best managers are the ones who

come in with a very strong point of view and they're able to effectively bend the organization to help them achieve what they want. And so I think the combination about those two, like do you, number one, enjoy helping people and like testing it out, testing it out with... one-on-ones and like meeting leading meetings and things like that and then number two do you care and do you want to be part of like those

broader organizational decisions around what the team or what the org should do. I see. And when you say have an opinion, I'm thinking from the IC perspective. So for someone to kind of get a sense of if they like that kind of work.

It sounds more of like the directional work and the kind of like tech leadership work is the best simulation of that. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think even a senior, a very senior IC effectively helps part of the expectation is that you should have very clear.

opinions that you can articulate and convince people about what the team should be doing for the next six months or next one year and if you feel like you would really rather not have those kind of negotiations with other teams or other people about what the team should do and you just want to be more of like a

I want to just execute and write code and like feel productive. Then I think management, again, is like not a good fit. That was actually one of the big challenges for me, which is like... When I became a TLM, TLM in particular is difficult because you're kind of straddling the line between doing IC work and management work. But I remember feeling a lot of the time where at the end of my day, I was like, what did I actually achieve today?

And really the way I spent my time was in meetings, doing one-on-ones, trying to figure out the roadmap for something. And if you are approaching your job with the mindset of, let me just crank out code and let me... ship an experiment, then you might not be satisfied with how your day or week is going if you don't do any of that stuff as a manager. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, managers...

nine to five meetings, I think it can feel like you're not actually landing anything concrete that resonates. Was there anything that surprised you when you switched to management? I mean, so I think in my case in particular, because I was a tech lead manager, I was like a hybrid role.

I think that job was tough because it's okay to be a TLM as a transitory role where like you're deciding whether you want to be a full-time manager, like a full-time M1 or M2, or you want to be a full-time IC. But it's not a good place to be.

in terms of long-term sustainability. It's like you kind of are not really clear about are you being judged or evaluated on your IC work and your ability to... strip a lot of interesting code or are you being evaluated primarily on your people leadership right so that was difficult for me i think i was surprised how taxing that would be yeah um yeah

And I ended up switching to EVEX after that. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I switched to TLM too, kind of in the transitory state to EM. And I asked a lot of people before I switched, you know, what they thought. I talked to other... TLMs. And every single TLM I talked to told me, hey, it's not a good idea to stay long term. I have not heard one person tell me that.

hey, you should become a TLM and it's a great idea in the future. Because you kind of just become this, you know... jack of all trades master of none you're not specialized and growing long term in one of the two paths and also it's like unsustainable to try to do two jobs at the same time that

Definitely matches my experience and what I heard as well. I'm curious, why did those people who you talked to, why did they stick around as a TLM if they didn't like it? Or if they didn't recommend it to you? Yeah, to me... I think the reason that they were TLM and they remained TLM was they loved the technical side so much that they...

just wanted to still be involved in the technical strategy and they were kind of specialists themselves. So I think that's one of the reasons. I think also in the last few years, growing as an EM is, you know, correlated to the number of recursive reports you have. And so for them, it was a way to

be able to be, you know, TLM2, which would be a senior manager equivalent without the constraints of, you know, needing all that headcount. So it was a way to unlock some short to midterm career growth and also kind of stay. in that kind of technical role, but it was not something... When they were giving me advice, they were saying, you should go in one of the two pads. And one of the TLMs, I remember he said, he wishes...

He would have just went pure EM faster because he stayed at TLM because of that personal satisfaction of wanting to be technical still. And it... slowed his career growth and he said he would probably have been a director or higher at that point had he just went purely into people management and he realized that at meta and in he was an infrastructure org Being EM is actually still a very technical role. And that was something that he wished he had put more faith into.

and that he could still be satisfied technically and challenged yet be a people manager so interesting yeah i mean that's a good point that i feel like managers can still remain quite technical especially at a company like meta which is so inch driven yeah i mean i don't think managers write code that frequently but they can still have a lot of technical opinions yeah

They should have technical opinions. They should have technical opinions and they should be on top of what their team's doing and why the team's doing it. They're not maybe writing design docs, but they should. be able to explain everything pretty clearly so at this point okay you got the staff tlm

You switched teams, and after you switched teams, you ended up leaving Meta. You left Meta to start your own company. I'm kind of curious about the story behind that. What made you want to leave Meta, and how did that happen? Yeah, I mean, I think, like I mentioned before, I mean, as a team...

where there's like in the water somewhere there's like this oh kind of like everyone thinks i'm starting a company or talks about starting a company and so i had definitely fallen into that and it just in my mind starting from like i would say 20 2016, like fairly early on, I always had this idea like, wait, I want to do a company. It's a question of when. And I finally felt like I was ready for it.

at meta for a couple of reasons number one probably the biggest reason is i felt like i found a co-founder who i wanted to try and explore an idea with i trusted them i enjoyed working with them and that was a huge unlock because i finally find someone found someone who We have validated our relationship and we like working with each other and we have similar timelines. I think the second thing was I felt like I had reached a level in my career where I felt satisfied.

or maybe the maybe negative framing of it could be like i felt like i had plateaued so that's okay i made it and now like it's harder to see a pathway to like a director or like something very senior so now is a good time just to leave. And I mean, I also felt like, I mean, you are well paid as an engineer in general. And I think I got lucky through a combination of promotion and just stock growth at Meta that I felt like I didn't have to work for a few years. So that was...

obviously important in terms of optionality like i didn't have to worry about finances i could cover my life for a couple of years and i mean the third and final thing was like i call it i had some signal of like i had been doing tutorials about android actually at that point I've been publishing them on YouTube for a few years, starting in 2019. So I got like that.

was another input. By the way, there seems to be something here. I enjoy teaching. I enjoy working with developers. Can we build something around that? Can we see what happens? So the combination of all three of those led me to feel confident about leaving and doing my own company. Right, that makes sense. You mentioned...

at stanford everyone's starting companies were you unusual at the time for being in big tech as senior as you were um had a lot of your peers already started companies yeah well i guess maybe

Just to clarify, I don't think it's like everyone did a startup. I think they were talked about a disproportionately large amount of time. I do think like the median Stanford team will end up probably just... kind of doing a vanilla career path if you will not i'm not saying it's a bad thing i will say like the median student will probably just go

end up being a big tech engineer in Fang or maybe like a smaller, slightly smaller company and just grow up. I mean, that's a great light and they're doing good work. But I think that the people who, what people talk about in the hallways, right? And that is like what matters. Like I think in New York, they talk about money. In Silicon Valley, they talk about like, you know, innovation and tech. And in Southern California, they talk about like celebrity.

or fame, right? That's the common trope. So I think at Stanford, the common trope was like, okay, the people who got the most kind of respect or the most, they were the most aspirational or the people who had like a product market fit startup. And so I don't think I was unusual to answer your question. I'm like joining a big tech company, but certainly like I felt like, oh, I want to see what that world is about. I had I had a bit of a taste of it with 2014, the startup I joined.

But that was very different because I was clearly like a founding engineer and not a founder. And I wanted to try it out on my own. with someone who now felt more confident in their abilities. Right. Makes sense. Yeah. You had already built up that base of skills, money, a much stronger foundation to start a company off of. You know, a co-founder is a big part of the equation. Where did you find your co-founder?

Alex and I worked together on Portal in 2017. When I first joined the company, he was literally on the same exact team with me. He ended up switching, I see, relatively quickly. But we worked together pretty closely for like a few months. And then we stayed in touch when he moved over to Instagram. So we probably met. every week in person at facebook pre-covid

And then once COVID happened, we started talking like almost every other day, just like talking about different ideas and different things we want to try out together. Right, right. OK, that makes sense. When you ended up quitting, did you already have something built? Like, did you and Alex work for a little?

bit kind of moonlighting and then once you had something you you quit or did you both just quit with a commitment to each other and then start the startup journey yeah we had nothing built i mean i think what we had done before we quit was we had commitment to each other that we would work on it for at least

you know, six months or a year. The second commitment we had to each other was that we knew kind of the broad domain area that we wanted to operate in because a big part of that was what we've been doing for maybe like six months prior to us quitting is we were just doing community building and like research. Like during COVID, we...

ran these free webinars talking about different elements of career growth and those actually did quite well like i mean part of it was just like people were really itching for interaction social interaction at home

And so we had these webinars, like literally 800 people who joined. It was a huge number of people who just joined to hear us talk about different elements of career growth. And so we felt like, okay, we are committed to this broad domain. We're committed to working on it for a certain amount of time. And we had this ambition of like, let's figure out how we can get funding or at least build something once we quit.

That was the idea. I see. And so you guys ended up applying to YC and getting fundraising through that avenue. Is that something you'd recommend to, like, let's say I'm a big tech employee thinking about starting a company. Is YC the...

the best way to get fundraising or is there more behind that decision? It depends. When you say start a company, it's kind of like what we talked about earlier with acquisition. Acquisition is such an overloaded term. Start a company is also a very overloaded term, right? You could start a company with just like...

I'm going to build utility apps on Android, which has got a million downloads, and then they make no money, right? Or you could build small apps on your phone, which makes like 5K a month. That's a pretty cool thing. Or you could just... cover your living expenses or you could try and make like a billion dollar company right and so if you are in that latter category where you have some ambition to make a huge company then i think yeah yc makes sense as like a funding vehicle i do think that

It depends on like your network. If you're a first-time founder and you don't have that much of a network, then YC is a no-brainer. Like it's such an obvious decision that you'll get credibility, you have that money, you get the accountability of YC. But if you're a repeat founder or if you already have a network of other VCs, like you already know someone.

top tier VC firm, then maybe you can make the argument that, you know, YC is not worth it. It's because it is kind of the way it is for what they give you. Right, right. Yeah, I have heard some people say that they take a little more equity than what, in terms of fundraising terms, like they take more than they're worth potentially.

Again, like what you get out of the program, the value that you derive from YC is going to depend on your situation. And so for 95% of people, I do think it's more than worth it. But yeah, you might be one of those exceptional founders who has a huge network, a ton of money already and a ton of... then in that case, you could probably make the argument that YC is not worth it in terms of dilution. Right. So comparing, and so now you've been working on your startup for some time now, maybe.

It's been years at this point, right? Yeah, it's been about two and a half years. Two and a half years. When you compare that to your time in the industry, I'm curious, what do you see are the biggest differences between the startup that you're running for yourself and big tech?

Oh, there's so many differences. I mean, good and bad. I mean, I think one of the big changes, which is both good and bad, is like, I think the structure of accountability is like, you are in charge of it, right? There's no boss. There's no...

Me, Alex, and we're a team of three. So we're still actually quite small. We're three full-time people. And so we try to manufacture urgency. We try and manufacture deadlines. But unlike a company like... facebook or pinterest or any other company really where almost always you have like a cadence of a quarterly release or some like big launch coming up and you have that going for you you are in charge of creating a structure for yourself

when you are doing a startup, right? There's no manager, there's no boss, there's no one looking out for you. So that is both empowering and also very scary. Like you have to work with urgency. Otherwise you could spend five years, you know. just like twiddling your thumbs and that's not a good outcome. So that's one big change. I also think that...

there's kind of related, there's a lot more ambiguity in what to build. Like even now, I think like it took us a while to get to where Taro is now. And initially the idea was just focused on let's build something for developers. And we thought I'd do. dev tool could work like something in i don't know reviewing code writing code things like that but then

We felt like the community angle was more powerful. So we started going more into community and that ended up going into courses. And now we have like this pretty robust course platform along with some community elements. That product management thinking is something that a lot of big tech engineers in particular.

have no idea how to do like talking to users iterating on the feedback looking at data you have to be willing to just dive into a new area and like learn something a lot more obviously when you're a two-person two-person company compared to when you have a world-class data scientist or uxr person or you know whoever else sitting next to you at meta right right that makes sense let's say you were

I guess, giving advice to people who are in big tech and they're kind of thinking about it. At what point do you think you would... advise someone it could make sense to start a company like what what do they need to see where they're like okay that yeah now it's probably a good good idea i mean i think this depends a lot on

what you define as success, right? So here's the thing, like you can have a very, very amazing life if you stick around and you climb the ladder and you get to like a director or... higher at meta like that's an amazing amazing life and you're in the top 0.1 percent of the people in the world but i think

If you want to have a lot more control and autonomy over what you do and what you build, and you also want an outlier outcome. Outlier meaning like you want to have a small, small chance of a huge outcome. It's actually very hard. to have that happen in a big tech company because like a big tech company i mean i could be proven wrong but i don't think meta is going to like 5x in value in the next five years right it might double

which would be amazing, but it's probably not going to 5X or 10X. And so if you want to have something with this 10X thing in value, then I think that could be like a time. So like, I would say like, when you have the stability, this foundation laid, that's how I think about it.

But like you've worked in big tech, you have the credibility, you have the finances now. Now you can go for a bigger swing. Then that could be one input into doing a startup. And the other thing is what we mentioned before, which is like...

you have to really get along with your co-founder. It's like a marriage. And so if you find someone who you really feel like you get along with, and critically, the timing works out. Because the other thing I noticed is that sometimes people have... their dream co-founder in mind and they're kind of just waiting and they're never on the same

timeline where it's like oh one person is waiting for a bonus or a vesting period so they're gonna wait for six more months and the other person when they wait six more months they have a kid and now or now my kid is like i'm gonna wait until they're in daycare they wait two more years or whatever

And then the other person in two more years, they're now like, oh, I have to get married. It's like having the alignment on the timeline and like your commitment to how long you want to do the startup. That is what you dare to find as well. Those are some of the considerations I would tell people in big tech if they're evaluating.

a startup right makes sense yeah i had a i had a friend who was at meta and then he left to go do his own company and i asked him his motive and he said he felt like he would regret If he looked back on his life and he headed that big tech trajectory the whole time, he would just regret that he didn't have a story worth telling. It's kind of boring sort of thing. So, yeah, there's so many different ways to look.

at it. I think the last things I want to ask a little bit about, I guess, reflecting over everything, some high-level thoughts about your career. You know, looking back on all the different legs, you had a little bit of startup. big tech, a few legs of big tech, and now you're back in startup as a founder rather than an engineer. What period of your career did you feel like you had the most skill growth or career growth?

I would say when I found that really amazing mentor at Pinterest, that was one period of dramatic growth where I was like pair programming and finding this person. And like, there are a lot of things you learn by osmosis that you don't get taught. But it's like seeing how he operated and made this separate mini app that we talked about. That was like eye opening for me. You are empowered to change your environment and do things. That was powerful. I think I met when I started or Facebook.

When I was there, when I was actually meeting a team and doing this migration, that was powerful. And along with that, the debug tool, this tooling change I made, that was the first time I felt like I built... something especially in the big tech environment where like i was creating value like it felt like i was creating value for the first time which is kind of odd to say but i felt like a lot of the other things i had done i felt like a worker you know like i felt like okay

This is like something which is being sent up, sent down from above. I want to be like a good Android developer or I'm going to be a good, you know, recommendation system engineer and just like do it. And for the first time. I felt like I, an idea that I had come up with, like it was my baby. I was able to put out in the world and people were willing to adopt it. That was, I think.

a crazy eye-opener again for me, which probably led to why I felt confident also doing a startup. And maybe the third thing I would say, which is not really maybe relevant to a big tech audience, but I felt like the two months or three months of YC. when we were doing like the actual YC period where you had a group check-in every week and you talk to people every week about what you've done. That was also very intense, but I learned a lot in that process just because like...

If you don't perform like you're kind of being shamed and like you have this intense pressure to like get things done. That makes sense. And what about looking back? I think this is something people are always interested in is if you if you look at everything.

Is there anything that you regret or that other people could learn from where you think, man, I wish I changed that. Your life would have been better if you had just changed that thing at that part in your career. And if so, what would it be? That's a good question. I feel like the startup I joined in 2014, I think that I don't necessarily regret it because I think I learned a lot. I have a good story to tell from it. But if I'm looking back at the reason I did it...

Honestly, I'm not sure if it was the best decision because a lot of it was maybe somewhat ego-driven of like, I don't want to be one of many people in big tech. I want to do the special thing. I want to go do this thing which is unique to me. It was unique to me. So that was true. I think I felt special doing it. But at the same time, I feel like I don't know if I had enough maturity as an engineer to really handle this scenario. I did, I think, flounder or struggle a bit.

both at the startup and also when I joined Pinterest. So I think maybe going into a more structured environment would have maybe been a better bet for me in terms of my maturation as an engineer. So that's the one that comes to mind. But I think in general, I would say I don't really have that many regrets. I just feel again and again in my career, I've been so lucky. Like, it's weird to say or think about, but like, there have been so many jobs that I've been rejected for.

Whereas honestly, if I had gotten the offer, I would have taken it and the company completely exploded like a year later. And also, even in the VC world, there were a couple of VC firms that strung us along so badly with Taro. And they were like, oh, we'll invest in you at this valuation. We'll give you this amount of money.

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

You know, when people see a career like yours, they're going to say something like, it was luck. I guess my question to you is what portion of your career growth do you think was luck? Oh, I think a lot of it was luck. I think we're lucky with the opportunities and the people I came across. I will say you can manufacture luck in the sense of being curious about the people and the opportunities around you.

I think a lot of the ways I would have been able to find my co-founder, find that startup in 2014, get the opportunities at Facebook. I think one thing I do a relatively good job of is keeping in touch with people. I try and just be friendly without.

You know, you take that class together. What have you been up to? What do you like about your new job? Or, you know, let me know if I can help out with this particular project that you're working on. I feel like that's something I've always enjoyed doing.

And it turned out that that has career value as well because you're able to get exposure to projects, people, ideas that you wouldn't have otherwise. Even like the thing that we talked about in this conversation a couple of times, that debug tool I built at Meta. came from me talking to a bunch of people and it's like understanding their workflow. Me doing a lot of the job hops in my career have come from just, again, being kind of in the know on what...

are the people doing that I respect? And so I think that can be a repeatable algorithm or a repeatable process that's not dependent on luck. I guess change your approach to networking, I guess, or like talking to people. And that's a really good way to manufacture a lot. And I think actually, you know, one thing that's just like maybe present day, I think both me and you are pretty active on social media, right? Like we post a lot, maybe too much.

And so I feel like part of it is, of course, like this genuine wanting to put out some value in the world, hopefully. But also part of it is like, that's the way to create luck, right? Like you are putting out content and people can see it and resonate with it, help them, and then they'll think of you.

When it comes to career growth, they'll think of you for a certain opportunity. And so that's a good example of, yeah, it's kind of luck because you don't know who's going to see your post. But at the same time, that was a very deliberate thing. And we probably spent many hours per week.

or per month thinking about what that will look like and how we can help you. Yeah, definitely agree. And I've heard some people call this, you know, maximizing your luck surface area. And I think, yeah, social media is one thing too, but even just... you know wherever you are maybe like internally at your company i feel like you know writing or putting things out or reaching out to people that visibility just gets you more opportunities probably part of the reason why you got uh

project that got you to staff the one where you were helping with the big shared infrastructure initiative you were you had relationships and credibility already because of you know you talking to people you putting out writing that says hey i'm the person leading this initiative and hey it was successful that's essentially giving people reason to trust you and give you future opportunities which increases your luck so yeah totally

Totally agree with that. I think one thing you said was about how you're good at, I guess, like reaching out to people. And it sounded like what you were doing was really natural. And I think, you know, when people talk about networking, it feels a little bit more manufactured.

Do you have any tip on how to kind of, you know, quote unquote, network with people? Yeah, I see. That's a really good call. I actually hesitated to use the word networking because I never really thought of it as networking for what I've been doing.

for most of my career i think the things that i think about when i do it is one genuine curiosity like i genuinely am interested in what you're doing how are you doing like how are you enjoying it or not enjoying whatever you're up to that's part of it and the second thing is being

thoughtful about what are you sharing i do think that one of the best ways to develop a relationship with someone is not just by asking a ton of questions or like asking for mentorship a really good way to develop a relationship is say hey here's something i've worked on which might be interesting to you the best way to

get inbound is like to show off not maybe not show off is not the right word but like to showcase um what you've been up and like here's why you have a unique insight or a unique project that turns out to be a really interesting way or a really compelling way for people to, like, you create gravity. Like, people gravitate toward you because they want to get your opinion on things, too. So it's like a two-way street. And if it feels like you're the one always asking...

and it's not reciprocated, then it could just be that person's not interested in you, and that's fine. But it could also be, hey, could you make yourself more interesting? And that actually... being a really good way to network. Yeah. Yeah. I remember when I was a new grad, people would say, you know, networking is so important.

I thought, OK, so I'm supposed to, I guess, reach out to people and connect to them in this. And it felt really artificial. And so I never really did it. And then more recently, I have all these these side.

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

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

at the end of college, you're right about to enter the industry and you're going to give yourself some advice knowing everything that you know today. What is something that you tell yourself at the beginning of your career that you think would make the biggest difference? I think... The thing I wish I realized way, way earlier in my career is that there are no gatekeepers. Like, you don't need permission from anyone.

when it comes to learning a technology or trying out something new. I think in school, I did well in high school. I did fairly well in college. I think I was able to do that because I... was very methodical and studious with whatever i was given but i don't think i was as creative or like as exploratory as i could have been like for example like your project of building out a keyboard that's so cool like you didn't need permission you didn't no one told to do that you did it

And those are the things that I think are the most interesting. Even, okay, build out a mobile app for fun. Or like I had this recent project now where I'm building out some extensions for an app launcher on my Mac. like it's like random things like i think if i had learned earlier that you are empowered and you should feel like this desire to do something unique

based off of what you care about, rather than just doing what everyone else around you is doing or what the instructor or the manager is telling you to do. That is how you get an outlier outcome. And I wish... I had tried harder to cultivate more creative interests, I would say, earlier on, or at least allocated time to those creative interests in a much more deliberate way than what I did.

for most of my career so and it sounds like in the second half of your career you started to take more of that initiative and kind of just wheel your way into creating the tools or this new company that you've been working on and so it sounds

like that's made a big difference is that right and you wish you had done that sooner yeah yeah i mean i feel like i got there eventually but like okay i made tutorials on youtube and i remember feeling so much joy when people start commenting on my youtube tutorials like oh it's such a magical

helpful tutorial thank you for making it i love that feeling i published android apps i um started doing these like webinars with 800 people like it felt like someone lifted off the blindfolds and like you can do Like you're not going to be ready to go start a company. You're not going to be ready to go like publish an app. You're not going to be ready to go teach people. Just do it now. And I think I wasn't just like, wait and let me get better. Let me get smarter. Let me.

I don't know. So that's something about like just me being way more passive early on in my career until at some point I'm like, hey, I'm old enough. I've done enough. I like got a job already. Like, what am I waiting for?

let me just go do it i would say had adopted that mindset way early even in like middle school or high school i think it's not too early but you can just start having that same mindset of creative expression or this like pursuing things that you care about way earlier way earlier on in life so it's kind of like the um the main character energy versus like the npc energy is that right yeah i like that yeah i mean

you don't have to be a main character in every domain of your life those kind of people might be kind of annoying to to be with like in certain domains like i think it's good to try and be the main character in like certain parts of your life at least you know like for things that you care about or things where you have a neat take. I like that. That's maybe a, yeah, don't be the NPC. Just be the main character. Awesome. Well, that's, yeah, that's everything. Thanks so much for sharing.

I think there's so much gold in here for the audience. I really appreciate it. And at this point, if you want to plug anything, yeah, now's the time to do it. So anything you want to mention for the audience? I mean, we touched on it for a bit, but I mean, I am working for the past two and a half years on this.

company called taro it is born out of my own experience in the tech industry like how do i grow my career how do i figure out how to feel more confident productive get paid more money and so if people are interested in that kind of stuff. They want to get feedback or advice from really smart people who I respect. I've been working on that every day for the past two and a half years.

I'm really proud of kind of the knowledge that we've been able to accumulate. So people can check that out at jointaro.com or, you know, just follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to do whatever I can to help people. Cool. Yeah. And I'll put all the... Or YouTube, I guess. YouTube is otherwise. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll put all the links to Rahul's YouTube, to Taro, to his LinkedIn as well. So you can see that in the show notes. So yeah, thanks. Thanks for coming, Rahul.

Yeah, thanks for having me. This was super fun. Hey everyone, Ryan here. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Rahul. I really appreciated how transparent he was throughout the entire conversation. So I hope that it was really helpful. You can take a look in the show notes. I left a bunch of links to him.

if you want to get more from Rahul. And if you have any feedback about the show, anything that you liked or that you disliked, I'd love to hear it. You can leave comments on YouTube. That's where I've been checking for feedback. I'll read every comment that I get. Also, if you have any requests for future guests. or maybe questions that you wish I would have asked, would also love to hear that as well. Thanks again for listening, and I hope to see you in a future episode.