Nikita Bier: commitment

Transcript context

…Okay, so you launch TBH, it goes viral, start getting offers from companies. Nine weeks later after launch, you end up selling it to Facebook. What was it like selling your company and then what was it like working at Facebook? Which you worked at for four years. I was not expecting that when I was looking at your LinkedIn. So yeah, what was it like selling? What was it like working at Facebook? Selling your company is one of the most draining processes you could ever go through as a founder. When we met with Facebook, they told me they have 80 people assigned to this deal. And I'm like, I have one person, it's just me. They were like the SWAT team of M&A. The funniest part was they wanted to meet the team as well. And so they came out to our office in Oakland, which is a dingy old office that I got for $1,800 a month. That was our rent for the office. They arrive and they walk in. There's two engineers and one designer and me, and they're just like, "This is the whole company? This is the number one app in the United States?" I'm like, "Yeah, this is it." And when we went there, when we arrived, we joined the youth team, which was about, I don't know, 150 people just for this one division of Facebook. It was my first job effectively that I've ever had. When they told me my title, they said I would be a product manager, I was like, "Okay, I don't know exactly what that is, but yeah, I guess that's what I do." I arrive and then I get access to a workplace system where people post all the things they're working on, and I realized it's kind of like this almost academic environment for social networks, like social network development. It's like the Harvard of social networks. I was reading all these studies that people were doing on like, "Oh, if we change that, this is the impact to retention and DAU." I was so impressed, like, "There's a whole science here." A lot of the stuff that we did was learned from first principles, but then we saw it actually turn into systems and processes here. But the thing I didn't realize as a product manager in a large tech company is there is very little product management that you do. You're actually not as involved in the product as I had assumed. I thought, "Oh, you're the person who gets in the pixels and designs the flows." Absolutely not. You're completely detached from the design process. There's a design vertical org that does all that and they don't really want you working on that. So that was very difficult for me because when people ask me like, "What do you think you're good at?" At the core, I'm a designer. I don't consider myself a product manager. I'm great at growing things, looking at mixed panel and then designing the things that make it grow. But there's a rift between those two things inside of a large tech company. And so I loved the academic approach to growing, but it was really hard for me personally as I became disconnected from the design process. I think that a lot of my skills atrophied over those four years. But I did stick around. I went through multiple orgs. Favorite one at the end was new product experimentation where I worked with other founders, a bunch of legends in Silicon Valley, building zero to one products, standalone apps. I mean, I was building standalone apps my entire time at Facebook. I think I built probably eight apps while I was at Facebook. Wow.…

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