Peter Deng: evaluation

Transcript context

…I feel like you've built more products from zero to one to scale than maybe most anyone else across all the companies that you've worked at. I'm going to do a quick rundown of some of the things you've done and I'm going to miss a bunch but let's see. You built and led the Facebook Newsfeed, the current version of it. You built the new groups experience chat and messages. You shipped the Messenger app as its own app. That was one of your projects. You led UberPool low-cost rides. You launched ChatGPT Enterprise. You shipped voice and vision, memory, custom GPTs, just refreshing the whole design of ChatGPT. Many more things. A lot of work at Airtable obviously. Also, Oculus. These are just some examples in the intro. I'm going to try to go through all these things. All that to say, I feel like you've seen a lot of what works and doesn't work, building from idea from zero essentially to one to scale. So let me just ask you this question, what's an important lesson you've learned about what it takes to succeed building something from idea to one to billions? Yeah. Thank you. That was a good trip down memory lane too when you read that off. I think the first thing I would say, going from zero to one is different going from one to 100. When you are in the one to 100 phase, which is a lot of the time that I spent is the one to 100 phase, we quadruple Instagram usage in two years, that was very much a fun ride and there's a bunch of other examples at other companies. But when you go to one to 100, I think one of the things that you really got to take into account is that you have to plan your chess moves out in advance. You have to really think before you act and build systems that are going to let you go sustainably faster, because the zero to one is you're trying to find that product market fit and then when you get to one to 100, you're trying to make sure you can get to hyperscale as fast as you can. I've been very fortunate to be along the ride of many of these products as they were going through that hyperscale. And the analogy I always like to use is that when you do that, you feel the G-forces. Some people are like, "Oh, yeah, I'm a pilot, I can fly at 35,000 feet." But feeling the G-forces of takeoff of a rocket is very different. One thing that I've learned there doing that a few times is you got to build the systems that help you move sustainably faster, and sometimes, you have to go slow to go fast. Here's an example. In building the Newsfeed, the current version that we have today, it really hasn't changed much from the time that we built it, I don't even know, it was like 12 years ago or something, I don't know the reason why it hasn't changed much. But I like to think that it's because we put a lot of time and craft into thinking about the whole sharing loop and what are the key pieces of it and how is it architected, what's the information architecture, and what does that whole flow look like, how does it go from posting something at the top of the page to showing up in the newsfeed to someone clicking like and then that notifications thing lighting up red and then that repeating over and over again. I like to think that Newsfeed has stood the test of time, the current version of it, because we thought very carefully about how people wanted to interact and how people wanted to consume information and also, that whole loop. When that happens, then I think things are built to last. I think this is a case at a lot of different companies. When I was at Uber, we had a bit of a spaghetti string code situation on the writer app, but taking a step back and re-architecting things of what are the core components and how do you actually make it so that the product selector can scale around the world. Here's a little known fact. Talk about grit and elbow grease. Uber's not just as simple as finding a ride. If you've ever been to another country, like in India, sometimes, there are no street signs, so you have to pick up in front of this mini mart or whatever it might be. ust as simple as finding a ride. If you've ever been to another country, like in India, sometimes, there are no street signs, so you have to pick up in front of this mini mart or whatever it might be. There's a whole team that worked on pickup and drop-offs. This was a large effort. It sounds so boring but it was so critical to Uber being able to scale because pickup and drop-offs team thought about, "Well, how do you do it for venues?" That venues and finding that right abstraction means that you can have a scalable way to do pickups at airports and configure different venues. Those systems when you take the time to build them in the one to 100 phase help you speed up massively and that's how you get 4x users in two years. Or on Messenger, we put a lot of thought into the infrastructure around push notifications, etc. We grew that product from zero to 4.7 billion messages sent per day in about two and a half years. I think it really requires that forethought in building the right systems.…

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