Julie Zhuo: evaluation

Transcript context

…I love that advice. It's so simple and so effective. Reminds me of advice a coach once told me that when you're in a new role, you are an imposter. You're doing something you've never done before and that's normal and don't feel like that's unusual. So, speaking of being uncomfortable and being vulnerable and doing hard things, you now have a startup that you've started and I'm curious. What's kind of different from the experience of being a leader at a Meta versus being a founder, especially things that maybe are surprising, good or bad? I will say it is definitely a very humbling experience, but it's also exactly the journey that I wanted, and a lot of it is just going back to kind of this like base layer. When you're at a large company, a lot is taken care of for you. Right? If I have a question about, I don't know, finance or how to deal with a people situation, they're experts. There's experts in every single field, and I just go and reach out to them and talk to them and kind of handle that and help me. But when you get back to it, it's like, okay. In the beginning, it was myself and my founder, Chandra. It's just the two of us, and it was like all sorts of stuff that it was like talk about being an imposter. It's setting up, figuring out taxes, or just figuring out how to incorporate, or just thousand little decisions, right, a thousand little things that were new and different. So, there's a huge amount of learning. There's a huge amount of just having to do it all yourself and realizing in a lot of ways just how many things you're bad at, or don't really like to do and that because you don't like to do them, it's hard to get them done. Right? So, it's humbling that way of just helping you realize these things about who you are. I think the other thing is for me, it's going back to the idea of being much more focused on doing, working with people who are at different stages in their career. When I was leading design for let's say the last five or seven years, right, I was often directly managing senior people, either senior designers or managers or directors and so forth, and going back to working with folks at various stages, including new grads, early career folks, it was actually both me realizing I had to kind of really change a lot of how I manage, so it was, again, also very humbling in that respect. I had to change a lot of what good management looks like in that context which was different from a lot of the habits that I had built up, but it was also so rewarding. I realized I actually really love working with people who are in that early phase of their careers. It's totally different, and what they need and how to best support them is really different than what you would do with a director or very senior person, but it's also just a whole lot of fun. So, that was something that is really new, and then of course, so much of it is again putting that IC hat back on, right, and it's been years since I've actually sat down and designed. Often as a manager, the thing I develop is I develop my eye, but not my hand. So, I learned to be a good critiquer of design, but actually because I stop practicing design, I'm definitely, the limits of what I can actually make and what I can produce myself become really evident. Right? And so, again, back in this new company setting, well, I have to put on a bit of that IC hat. nitely, the limits of what I can actually make and what I can produce myself become really evident. Right? And so, again, back in this new company setting, well, I have to put on a bit of that IC hat. I have to learn how to be kind of an ICPM learn how to be an IC designer, realize that there's so much that I'm actually really bad at as well and in that way, but develop and grow some of my muscles and those skills again.…

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