Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth: evaluation

Transcript context

…I love that advice. It's similar advice I always give of variety of experience often ends up being the most valuable thing you build over time. Just trying a bunch of stuff, doing some internal tools, maybe working on customer support, I don't know, and trust and safety, user-facing products, infrastructure. I'm thinking from a PM's perspective, maybe an engineer's and other functions. One question along those lines. So we talked about the eye of Sauron and working on like the most important thing at the company. Do you have any advice on how much of your career you should be working in that center area? Yeah. Listen, all that's being equal, I think there's two really good places to be. I think one is carrying a lot of water in areas that the company is not paying attention to, but you know are important. And it needs to be a lot. You got to own that stuff and really move mountains over there. Because I promise you, as an executive, when there's a huge dam holding up the floodwaters, You respect the heck out of the person who is holding that dam up. You keep doing that, Atlas. That is good work over there. The second place to be, or maybe it's equally big, is on the most important thing. And on the most important thing, that's where you get to the advice that Eric Schmidt gave Sheryl Sandberg, which is like, hey, it's a rocket ship. Get on. Don't ask what seat I'm in. Just get on. If it's the most important thing, you're going to get a smaller piece. Everyone wants to be there. Get the piece. If it's the most important thing, get the piece that you can crush, kill, do a great job at and grow from because you're going to get a ton of visibility. You're going to get a ton of experience. You're going to see what it looks like in the fire, like in the fire. And that is invaluable. You will use that everywhere. And so I say that that's at project selection time. But now I'll be cautious. Understand projects that start in the fire, hopefully, are forged in some manner of metal that cools and is no longer in the fire, like God willing. And likewise, things like dams that are holding up floodwaters have a tendency to crack or break or floods overcome. So I think you do want to be at selection time in one of those two places. But then you also, you're going to stick with the ride. And again, to my point, if you're not engaged, if you aren't doing great work, if you don't love it, then move on. If you've exhausted it, you used to love it, but you don't anymore, move on. If you still love it and you're engaged, great. That's cool. That's a great thing. You deserve to go from the forge to the dam and back over time. You don't have to always just keep jumping onto the latest fire. I tried to do that once after the ad business. Actually, so I spent six months and we built the first mobile ad product in 2012 and kind of saved the IPO, which had gotten pretty grim at that point. And I told Mark, I was like, this is so fun. Maybe you can just keep doing this. He's just putting me on the biggest fire every six months. And he turns to me and said, boss, that's not a real job. He's like, I need you to stay here and usher this forward, which I did for the next four and a half years. And it was amazing. It was amazing. And again, I do give him such, it's funny. I'm going to get a hard time with this. I'm one of Mark's biggest critics as well as being one of his biggest fans. I have both those jobs. But today we're talking about stuff that I think Mark really demonstrates really well. And he did a great job of pushing me in my career to different places where I ggest fans. I have both those jobs. But today we're talking about stuff that I think Mark really demonstrates really well. And he did a great job of pushing me in my career to different places where I didn't think I could succeed. And he saw the opportunity and made it happen.…

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