Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, this kind of comes back to, I think, the principle that really good, talented people, you want to leverage them fully. You really want to make sure that they are fully leveraged. And so anytime they have the wrong information or they don't have the information, you've now blocked one of the economically most valuable things that your company possesses, which is this person's time, attention, talent. Not only that, you've also made them more frustrated and now they like are more likely to leave. Like if, if the, if the lifeblood of any company are the people inside of it who collectively commit to some kind of a goal and mission and work together, then like you want to maximize that potential. And, uh, Creating this really open information ecosystem is one of the ways that we do that. So often, great, phenomenal work that has happened at our company has not come from this one top-down mandate, but it's come from people understanding not just what we're trying to accomplish top-down, but also having way more information at their disposal. to be able to act on it. And so people will talk about top-down or bottoms-up culture. It's a bit of a myth, in my opinion. If you've ever met Mark Zuckerberg, he is not a bottoms-up thing. The ideas that we're pursuing are Mark Zuckerberg's ideas, first and foremost. That's not to say that he's not open to new ones, and of course he is. And that's a form of bottom-up. People can bring ideas to him and he... He internalizes them and acts them or not. But when he brings the things top down, he's not micromanaging. He's in the details. I'll be careful on that. But he does create the space for you to bring back three or four versions of the thing that he's talking about. And then he shapes it from there. And you can't do that if there's... If you don't have degrees of freedom, sure. But also if you don't have the information. Otherwise, if you don't have the information available, what we're trying to accomplish, why we're trying to do it, what the infrastructure is like, what the availability is like, what the performance is going to be like, well, you just are stuck. You're just going to have to follow the script. That's very boring for high talent, high creativity, high engaged people. Now, it does come at a tremendous price. You have to get really good at managing information on the incoming. Most people at most companies... consume all the information that's given to them, but the information itself is carefully managed, right? Like they're getting all the information they're intended to get. We've turned that on its head and it sounds great, but it's not free. Even somebody senior coming from outside the company to the company, one of the things I have to coach them on is like, how do you find signal amongst all the noise? You have to have a system for managing your information. You have to have a system for triaging the incoming information I have to coach them on is like, how do you find signal amongst all the noise? You have to have a system for managing your information. You have to have a system for triaging the incoming information Getting rid of a bunch of stuff that is on the wrong channel or doesn't matter to you. Figuring out what's the... Groups that you want to be a part of, but you consume only when you choose to. And where are the things where you're getting push notice? Like that's the real time thing. And that takes some time. This point you made about bottom up versus top down is really interesting because when I think of meta, I think it's a very bottom up culture. I hear everyone comes up with their ideas, runs experiments. It's very encouraged to just try stuff. And it's really interesting to hear that. And it makes a lot of sense that most of the big ideas actually do come from the top.…

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