Julie Zhuo: preference

Transcript context

…For listeners who maybe aren't familiar with you and your career, could you just kind of briefly walk us through your journey in design and then a little bit about what you're up to these days? Okay. So, let's see. I am a first generation immigrant to the United States, and so, with Asian parents, there were really only three options that I had for a career. From the time I was six years old, I was told I could either be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. Nothing else was really in the realm of possibilities. Unfortunately, I was really scared of blood, so I couldn't be a doctor, and I only liked reading fiction growing up, so I was like, "Never really be a lawyer." So, I was always like, "Okay, right, this engineering thing," but actually, it was during middle school and high school that I discovered what I love to do is drawing and in particular digital art, and the reason for that is because I actually have a very shaky hands, and so, whenever I draw a line, it never looks good, I have to erase it, start over, and so, by the time the art was done, it was a mess. It was like here's like 20,000 eraser remarks. But when I discovered MS Paint, and I kid you not, that was my very first design application, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I can draw a line, and even if it looks crummy," which it always does because you have to use a mouse in those early days, "I can just Ctrl+Z, it goes away, and just keep trying over and over again. No one ever has to know how often I tried to get to this to be what I wanted." And so, MS Paint became PaintShop Pro, and then one summer I finagled my way into a pirated copy of Photoshop because I couldn't actually afford real Photoshop, and I was off to the races in my digital art career. It was actually through digital art that I realized, "Okay, I've actually amassed all this collection of art. What should I do?" And I was like, "Well, let me go and actually build a website. All these artists that I admire on the internet did that. So, I'm going to learn how to write HTML and put together a website," and that's essentially what I did on the side in my middle and high school years. So, that's kind of how I got into design, but I didn't know it was design because I really still thought of myself as an artist, and I thought that the only thing I could be was an engineer, but I went in and studied computer science in college. Right? I always had this vision, "Okay, if I like building websites, maybe computer engineering is the closest thing to that," and I had this idea that maybe I could go work for one of these big tech companies, and after I took a class my senior year, that taught me what is Silicon Valley, what is entrepreneurship. By the way, here's all these stories of two people in a garage, and then they went and built something big, and I totally just was so into that. I was like, "All right, I do not want to work for a big company. I want to figure out if I can do this startup thing and make something small 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. 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.…

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