Luc Levesque: belief

Transcript context

…It's good to see you too. I want to start with a story that you shared once when we were hanging out in the past and something that I'll never forget, and it's about the time that you just joined Facebook and apparently you had some kind of big presentation you had to give to the entire company or the executive staff. And then I just love the way it kind of unfolded and it kind of gives you a glimpse into what it's like to work with Zuck and at Facebook. Can you share that story if that rings a bell? If remember the story, well, basically I had just started at Facebook about... I'll use those two interchangeably. I remember it as Facebook and I always will. I was three months in and was working on a new area for me. So I came in, started putting together our thoughts on a strategy and was asked to do a presentation in front of the company with Mark on the strategy. So I whipped up a draft strategy, put together some plots and plans, presented in front of the company and went well. And then every six months there's something called the [inaudible 00:04:32] Team Review of Facebook and basically product area leads will go in and present their strategy, how it's going. Again, I just joined three months before, so I walk in no idea what to expect. I am sitting at a table. You can kind of envision it's a big room, a really big room with a bunch of tables set up in a big square with a little microphone. So I sit in there, there's Mark and all the executives sitting on the other side. And I sit down and it's quiet for what felt like five minutes. I'm sure it was not, but it was quiet for a while, just sitting there waiting for what's going to happen now. And at some point Mark kind looks over, says, "Hey, we saw your presentation, saw your strategy. Now when are we going to start seeing results?" And that was my introduction to Facebook. It was kind of my introduction to working with Mark and was a pretty kind of intense thing to go through. Again, I just joined. The strategy was very much a draft at that point, but I think what it highlights is something that Facebook does really, really well, which you get very quickly when you join Facebook and it's why they're such an execution machine and can build a lot of great product. It's because they focus exclusively on that magic word, which is impact. And that was kind of my first introduction to working with Mark and just that laser focus on, "All right, got it. Now when are we going to start seeing impact and kind of moving from there?" So it's something that is very much in the culture there and something that is so important. It's something of course that we focus on a lot at Shopify, but it's that difference between, "I don't care how hard you've worked. I don't care what you're working on, what the activities are. What are the outcomes? What is the impact you're having?" I actually really love that word impact and focusing on it because it's vague enough that it covers off any work that is impactful towards the mission and it's precise enough to know what does that mean when you say, "Are you having impact? Or what is the impact we're having?" So it's a great way to approach things. That was my first experience there within a few months. And yeah, we jumped in and started focusing on having a lot of impact from there. I love that story. There's a couple things there. One is, if I were in your shoes, I'd poop my pants sitting there for five minutes waiting for what do you guys-…

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