Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Making Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO)

March 3, 2024

AI Summary

5 min read

Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO and an early Facebook engineer, shares lessons from 18 years at the company, emphasizing unglamorous early struggles, management practices, cultural mechanisms for execution, and product conviction amid tradeoffs.

Early Days and Startup Realities

Bosworth describes joining Facebook around the 10th engineer in 2006 as intense and unsupported: 120-hour weeks, no hobbies, building servers from components, and waking every four hours to combat site attacks without ops teams. Successes like News Feed created massive value—enabling $1 trillion in ads through algorithmic ranking—but required personal sacrifices rarely highlighted in romanticized startup narratives. He cautions founders to recognize these unglamorous risks, notes his non-founder perspective, and values peer mentorship over outdated professional bodies.

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What you'll learn

1 *(00:07) Early Days at Facebook**
2 *(13:22) Leverage Your Manager**
3 *(22:11) Meta's Radical Transparency**
4 *(27:51) Leadership: Depth in Key Weeds**
5 *(33:15) Building News Feed Lessons**
6 *(39:01) Career Mobility & Passion**
7 *(51:41) Communication Is the Job**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Andrew Bosworth—or Boz, as most people know him—is the chief technology officer at Meta and head of Reality Labs, the company’s augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) organization, which he created in 2017. Boz joined Facebook in 2006 as their approximately 10th engineer, and in his 18-year tenure he built the original News Feed, Messenger, and Groups, as well as many early anti-abuse and infrastructure systems. At various times he has been the engineering director overseeing Events, Places, Photos, Videos, Timeline, Privacy, and more. Before Reality Labs, he ran the Ads and Business Platform product group, where he led engineering, product, research, analytics, and design, taking annual revenue from $4 billion to $40 billion in five years. Andrew currently leads Meta’s efforts in AR, VR, AI, and consumer hardware across Quest, Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and more. In our conversation, we discuss:

• Stories from the early days of Facebook

• Lessons from Meta’s downturn and recent turnaround

• Meta’s culture of transparency

• Boz’s thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro

• Why communication is the job

• Why you should regularly seek help from your manager

• Lessons in setting incentives and avoiding their misuse

• Why you should optimize for a variety in experience in your career

• The importance of trusting your own expertise and not being swayed by external opinions

• Stories of failures and personal growth

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