Julie Zhuo: belief

Transcript context

…mall into something big." I just happened to be very lucky at the time. There was a startup down the street from my university. It's a product I had been using for two or three years. It was Facebook. It was still a high school and college social networking product at the time, 8 million users. They were doing a lot of recruitment at Stanford, and so, that's how I decided to go and join for an internship, and on my first day I remember my mentor, Ruchi, she said, "What kind of engineering do you like to do?" And I was like, "The stuff that people see, of course. I want to be able to..." The stuff that I'd always done. Right? And she goes, "Oh, I see. You should go sit next to the designers," and that was the first time I heard that design was a profession, that it was actually a job. It was a thing that people did. Back in those days, all of the design team was technical. So, we were both the front-end engineers as well as the designers, but I felt like I'd found my tribe. I had found people who kind of had always been passionate about this thing that I didn't really realize was a job. And so, I realized though as well that I had a lot to learn about design. I was never really formally trained in it. Right? I'd only ever designed for myself for me to express my creative, artistic side, so there was a lot in those first three years. I would think of my time at Facebook as chapter one, learn how to be a designer, learn about usability, learn about the actual language, nomenclature of design, learn how to think about the user as somebody separate than just me and my own work. Then, because Facebook was always scaling, I got the opportunity to eventually manage a team of designers. Totally unprepared for that, no idea what I was doing, kind of jumped in, and just started to manage, but there was a huge amount of learning around recruiting, process, what even is good design, what is the way that we want to design at this company in our team, and so, tons of learnings there. The third chapter is just sort thinking about scale. Right? Learning how to scale in management, learning how to build a wide diversity of products, learning more about strategy, and how design fits into working with all of these other disciplines to build something great. So, that's kind of how I think about my time at Facebook and the various chapters. The latest chapter is eventually I left Facebook about two years ago and now I am a startup founder. So, it's something that I've always wanted to do. So, go back to that, the early phases of figuring out how to build something from zero to one, and I'm working on a product and product analytics. er. So, it's something that I've always wanted to do. So, go back to that, the early phases of figuring out how to build something from zero to one, and I'm working on a product and product analytics. I'm really passionate about the idea of making data accessible about... I've seen the power firsthand from working at Facebook of what data can do to help us make better products, especially for people at scale, to help us reduce the bias in our intuitions, and how we think about what is the way that we should prioritize, and I'm really passionate about the idea of making that such that every single company, every single business in the world can properly use data, know how to interpret it correctly, know how to use it to influence roadmap strategy and prioritization decisions, and make better decisions as a result. I feel like that, this idea that you're working on has such intense founder market fit, and I can't wait to hear more about it when you're ready to kind of go deeper and for people to use it. But going back to your time at Facebook, you kind of made it sound like you just kind of like, "I joined as a designer, figured out design, became a manager," and then somehow you became VP of design, and it sounded too easy. That's an insane trajectory for someone to follow. Do you have any thoughts or advice on what contributed to your success rising through the ranks that quickly for folks that are kind of just early in their career maybe?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.