š Career Cold Start: A Founder Playbook for Compound Careers
šŖ Career Cold Start Algorithm
I worked at Facebook on a few products for a few years.
Leaving my previous company (BloomReach) was tough. I learned from some of the coolest & smartest people Iāve ever met.
I remember my last conversation with the CEO at a bar in London, knowing I was leaving, he told me 2 things:
Figure out if you eventually want to go deep on one thing for 10 years (startup founder) or go broad for 10 years (investing).
At Facebook, donāt bother trying to learn to āoperate within your boxā / learn vertical or specific skills (youāll pick these up) - rather, focus on learning all of the tacit things (what Naval calls āspecific knowledgeā) that are going on:
Company Culture: What are the unwritten rules, norms, and values that guide behaviour within facebook?
Social Dynamics: how do teams and individuals interact? how do they communicate informally?
Workflows and Processes: how do they effectively manage tasks?
Problem-Solving Approaches: what techniques and methods do employees use to tackle challenges that may not be formally taught?
Industry Insights: What are the nuances of the industry and market?
Effective Communication: How does leadership convey information, persuade others, and build relationships?
Customer Understanding: How does the company gather Insights into customer needs, preferences, and pain points?
Product Knowledge: How is product strategy designed and executed?
Management Styles: how do managers lead and make decisions?
A coupe months went by and I found myself doing my onboarding at Facebook. Over the years - and following his advice - I built a document compiling these lessons (which often time end up becoming Startup Ridersā editions) - but I digress.
During my first week at Facebook, I remember my manager suggesting that I read and implement a framework to help kick-off and accelerate my integration within my newly formed AR Studio team (now called Spark, part of Facebook Reality Labs).
This framework helped me build relationships quickly, identify the biggest problems faced by the team, and compile a list of āquick winsā / low-effort-to-reward to hit the ground running. One of the biggest pain points that came from this exercise was that the team needed help building a community of early product adopters to:
Help us gather product feedback to prioritise bugs and product features.
Kick-off user adoption, engage and retain users.
And so I started working on one of the coolest things I did at the time which was building the Spark AR Community - a place where AR creators could exchange ideas, learn from one another, and provide us with valuable user feedback which we used to help prioritise our product and quality roadmaps. Today, this community has >100K engaged members.
One day, our then VP Boz (now CTO at Meta), came to visit our team in the London office. I remember sitting in a meeting room with him and a few heads of Engineering, Design and Research around the table, and was surprised when he mentioned how awesome he thought the community we were building was.
I also remember the types of thoughtful questions he kept asking - and how his intent was to genuinely understand our problems at different levels.
Not surprisingly, he was the author of the Career Cold Start Algorithm note - the framework my manager had insisted I implement. Since then, Iāve used and recommended this note to everyone that starts on a new team. Here it is: