Lenny's PodcastMaking Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO)
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,133 words- 0:00 – 4:48
Boz’s background
- LRLenny Rachitsky
You were basically the 10th engineer at Facebook. I imagine there was a lot of pain and suffering that people don't often hear about.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
I didn't sleep for more than four hours at a time. I had to wake up every four hours and check the report and see if anyone was attacking the site. They don't tell you about that stuff in the movies.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
You worked 120 hours per week. You had no hobbies.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
I don't want to take away from the romanticism of it, it's just that it's most often we hear those romantic stories from the successes. It's a healthy thing for people to want to throw themselves into something and take that risk, but it is not glamorous (laughs) like at the time.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
The News Feed, that was one of your early projects at Facebook. People did not want it. They were wrong, clearly.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Now, News Feed was an easier case than people suspect. Everyone was outraged at the same time as they immediately doubled their usage of the product.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
In terms of the economic utility, the Venn diagram of Boz, of News Feed and Ads created a trillion dollars of value. Today my guest is Andrew Bosworth, or Boz as most people know him. Boz is the chief technology officer of Meta. He joined what was then called Facebook in early 2006 as one of the first engineers. And during his 18-year tenure at Meta, he created some of the most impactful and important products in internet history, including the Facebook News Feed, which was the first ever algorithmically ranked content feed of any social network and is basically what people think of as Facebook today. He also built the original Facebook mobile apps platform, which he then ran for another four years. He also helped build and scale the Facebook messaging system, the profile, the timeline, Facebook Groups, and even the internal engineering bootcamp. Most recently, he served as VP of Ads and Business Platform where he led engineering, product, research, analytics and design. And in 2017, he created the company's AR/VR organization now called Reality Labs. These days, Andrew leads Meta's efforts in AR, VR and mixed reality along with consumer hardware across Quest, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and more. In our wide-ranging conversation, we touch on so many important lessons and stories: What it was really like in the early days of Facebook; why you should be asking your manager for help more often; why communication is the job; lessons from Meta's turnaround over the past couple years; Boz's thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro; a bunch of leadership and career advice; what it was like to build the very first News Feed and lessons from that experience; and stories of failure and stories of success; and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Andrew Bosworth AKA Boz after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks. Plus you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny.
- 4:48 – 7:20
Fun facts about him
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Boz, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Thanks for having me. I've been a longtime, uh, fan of your program and all the- the things that you've been putting out, so I'm glad I finally get a chance to join.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Same. I'm really excited to have you here. I have at least a billion questions I want to ask you.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
(laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
But I want to start with a few fun facts that I've found about you. And what if I go through them and then just pick one that stands out and then tell the story behind it. How does that sound?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
All right. Sounds good.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay. You went to 14 proms.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
(laughs) Yeah. That's true.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay. I'm going to keep going. Okay.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Wow.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Uh, you're-
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
That's a strong opener. (laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs) I might do other one. Uh, you were a national TaeKwonDo champion in college. You were Mark Zuckerberg's TA in college in a class on AI, which isn't actually how you landed at Facebook from my understanding. Uh, Harvard was recruiting you to play football for them. You were very active in the 4-H club and you raised animals and showed them at county fairs when you were growing up.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Mm-hmm.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
You once shared a stage with David Copperfield.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
That's true.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
MC Hammer once told you that your outfit was stylish. And President George W. Bush complimented you on your shoes and the shine of your head.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah, these are all... These are all true. I want to say, wow. First of all, I gotta make sure that people understand. I was a national collegiate champion in... As a green belt, which is like a very-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
That's like being the JV champion, just so everyone's... Just so everyone's clear on what that is. It's, it's-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
W is a W.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Heavyweight, heavyweight sparring. Uh, uh, I want... I'll tell the... The prom story is a funny one. It's related to the 4-H story. I was a big time 4-Her, uh, national 4-H kind of Hall of Fame, did all this stuff there. As a
- NANarrator
Yeah.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
As a comp to that, I was, you know... It's co-... 4-H is a wonderful program, youth program. It's a co-ed program and I was all over the state, all over the country doing, you know, leadership events and doing these conferences and doing a lot of public speaking. And almost every 4-H event has a dance. People don't know that. They have like a... At the end of, like, the conference, at the end of the, of the... Literally, like, camp. You go, you go camping for a week. At the end, there's a dance. And so as a consequence, the most important thing, if you want to go to a lot of proms, I was a good dancer.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs)
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
And it turns out when like the, the high level bit, at least in the 1990s, for girls selecting who they might want to go to prom with was, will he and can he dance? And the answer with me was yes. And then combine that with the fact that I knew a bunch of, uh, girls who went to different schools, that's a recipe for success right there, if that's a... If that's the goal that somebody has. But no, uh, two my junior year and f- and 12 my senior year. I once went to three in one weekend, uh, a Friday, a Saturday, and a Sunday
- 7:20 – 11:11
Early days at Facebook
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
night.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Another fun fact about you is you were basically the 10th engineer at Facebook initially, way before it was a clear success story. I imagine there was a lot of pain and suffering and struggle that people don't often hear about those early days. They see a movie like The Social Network, it looks like, "Oh, that was so much fun. I gotta start a company. It's gonna be-
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
(laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... become a trillion dollar success story." I'm curious just what those early days were like. Are there memories that stand out to you?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah, there's a bit of a joke in the 10th thing, which is me and five other guys all joined at the same time, and there was nine people, nine engineers before us. We joined the same day, so we're all the 10th engineer.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
So somewhere between 10 and 16, depending on how you wanna... (laughs) How you wanna do the numeration on that. I've written this, about this on my blog and I tell this story a lot, which is, um, we... It was fun and there was tremendous camaraderie and, you know, memories that were formed, but they were formed in a kind of a forge of really intense times. You know, at that time, almost all of us lived within one mile of the office. We ate most of our meals together because we were working, not bec-... Or, not to say that we weren't also friends, but like because we were working, it's like, "Oh, cool." It's like just roll into a meal and roll back into work. And there's little things that you don't appreciate, which is like there was nobody to help you. There was no expert. And so it wasn't like, "Hey, I'm struggling with this one tricky problem. Who should I talk to?" It's like, "Nobody. You should talk to yourself and figure this out." Or it's like, "Oh, man, like, my servers are out of capacity." It's like, "Cool, you should go to Fry's Electronics. You should buy a bunch of components. You should build a new server and then you should run it. Uh, and like maybe drive into the Colo racket and then get back and run it." That... People really undervalue the fact that when you go to work, even a moderate mid-size corporation today, especially with the tremendous growth of startups supporting startups. Things like payroll and finance and IT and HR and, you know, these things are professionally handled in many cases. That was just not the case in the early 2000s. It was just like you and, like, your personal car and, like, whatever you wanted to do with your time. So I don't want to take away from the romanticism of it. It's just that it's most often we hear those romantic stories from the successes. We so rarely hear somebody who went through really sacrificing a lot of my 20s from any kind of social or, you know, like, outgoing, fun environment. It paid off for me, so no one feels bad for me, nor should they. But there are other people who did the exact same thing. Maybe they worked harder, maybe they were smarter, maybe they did better and it didn't play out for them, and it's a big sacrifice. And so I- I- I likes... I love that people... I love the enthusiasm for startups, I love startup culture. I think it's like, it's a healthy thing for people to want to throw themselves into something and take that risk. But it is not glamorous (laughs) like at the time. In retrospect, it's like, oh, it can be. We like... We have a little halo around it. But at the time, it doesn't feel glamorous.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah, in this post you mentioned, you said that you worked 120 hours per week. You had no hobbies-
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah. Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... and you gained a lot of weight and you-
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And yeah.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
We drank... We drank a lot to make up, to make up for it, so I gained a lot of... (laughs) And you weren't eating healthy. I mean, it was, it was weird. It was crazy. There was a time, I think I said... I've told this before, that there was a time where I... One of the first things I built was an anti-spam, kind of anti-scraping defense mechanism, but we didn't have any op support. There was no, like, 24/7 online support. So I built this tool. I had to wake up every four hours for about two years. I didn't sleep for more than four hours at a time. I had to wake up every four hours and check the report and to see if anyone was attacking the site. And if they were, I was up and I had to go battle back. And if they weren't, cool, I'd go back to sleep. But that's not... (laughs) They don't tell you about that stuff in the movies, you know? (laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That's like worse, almost as worse, worse than having a kid, a, a new, a newborn. (laughs)
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
And nobody asked me to do it. It was just like I... That was like I took it up. Nobody even asked me to do the anti-spam, anti-scraping stuff. I just, like, thought it was a problem and I went and got and did that, and that was the solution I came up with. If I was a better engineer, maybe I'd have solved a better problem, but...
- 11:11 – 13:22
Advice for founders
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
(laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
So maybe just to close out that thread. When you talk to founders, what advice do you give them along these lines?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
I want to be cautious about this because I... You know, when I tell found- The first thing I tell founders is that I've never been a founder and I want to recognize the difference. Like, you know, I joined in January 9th, 2006. That's almost two years after Mark started the company. I didn't have to do... I wasn't involved with fundraising. I didn't have to do any of that side of things and I didn't have to deal with, you know, the board or, or like the business side of things. I really was lucky in a way to have joined when I did. That's the first thing I tell founders is like, "You should take my advice with a grain of salt. I have not actually been in your shoes." If I can compliment you, really, one of the things I like about your program is there's a whole s- uh, system of professionals in our industry. And I was... When I grew up in technology in the Valley, right? Uh, you always heard about like the ACM, right? The Association of Computing Machinery. You heard of these legendary professional organizations that supported people in our fields. And-By the nature of the, the rapid pace of change and the technology and the nature of the engagement of those institutions. Even academics ... Even academia broadly kind of are out of touch. They ... The tools that you got from those places weren't useful in our field. So I do think the mentorship that we give each other has been a critical and sustaining resource. There is, today now, resources like your, uh, your, your podcast and your newsletter that are actually really designed to help people who are professionals in our industry in a way that has almost been kind of missing for 15, 20 years. And I love to see that because if you're an up-and-coming PM, literally you s- ... You used to have to know somebody and ask them a question. And so a lot of times what I'm helping founders with, I can help them with the strategy. I can help them think through the technology choices. I can help them think through business ... I can th- think through the management, the organization structure. But I also try to be very clear there's a bunch of stuff that I just was ... Never had the exposure to. So even as we just talk about how tough it was for the average engineer joining, you know, Facebook in 2006, man, it was even tougher for Mark Zuckerberg-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Hmm.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
... in 2004 probably. And that's not a ... That's, that's a story that's been told, I'm sure, but still. So I think these are bo- ... It's just like ... It's almost all scale and variant. No matter how far you dial back, the challenges kind of are interesting and are worth talking about.
- 13:22 – 19:27
Leveraging leaders
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
- LRLenny Rachitsky
One of your ma- ... Maybe your most popular posts is this quote that you share about the advice you often give. What you say is, "The advice I find I have to give more frequently than any other in my career as a manager, a board member, an advisor, and a friend is to ... It's for people to more directly leverage their leaders."
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Can you talk about that and what that means and what that looks like?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
It's such a normal and natural, healthy thing. And by the way, we do it in our personal relationships, like I said in the post. Like, we wanna do it ourselves. (laughs) We wanna do it ourselves to prove to everyone that we can do it ourselves. And we think in our heads, "If I ask for help, haven't I already given up that goal? Haven't I just admitted defeat on one of my top level goals, which is to demonstrate that I can do it myself?" But what so often we forget is, like, more often than not, your job is not to do it yourself. Your job is to get it done, is to have the thing done, done well, done right, done competently. And a lot of times, the, the tools that you need to do that live with your, your manager, with your partner, with your advisor, uh, with your mentor. Like, that's where they live. So it's like, you know, uh, how many times as a manager have I gone through and somebody's ... You know, I've told them, "Here's the job." They're like, "I got it." They go off. They come back. It's done. It's wrong. And I'm not blaming them for it being wrong. They didn't check in with me. They misunderstood. We miscommunicated. I'll take the L on that. That's no problem. But here we are six months later, it's not done right 'cause they, they misunderstood the brief. We miscommunicated on the brief. Or they come back and it took a year, and I'm like, "Why did this take a year instead of six months?" And they're like, "Oh, man. I had all these things I had to deal with." Where if they had emailed me, I could have bulldozed that stuff. I could have cleared the path. I could have said, "Oh. No, no, no. Don't worry about that. This is the thing." And then we'd have been done six months sooner, and they would've been less frustrated. And so light touches. Now I do think, as a manager, we also have a job to say, "Hey, you know, that's kind of the ... That's kind of the work. So you gotta kinda go figure that out." And one of my things I always tell my managers is, "One of the most powerful things we do is refuse to rule." Someone will bring me a thing. A lot of times, we feel obligated to, like, weigh in and help. I'll be like, "Nope. (laughs) Uh, like, I think you've got it. Like, I think the challenges you're facing are the right challenges. I think you're approaching it in the right way. Like, just do your best there, and, like, that's what it is." And so there is a responsibility as well for those of us who are leaders, mentors, advisors, board members to do that. But by the way, we ... That's in our personal relationships, right? Like, you're with your partner and you're trying to do something the right way, but you're not talking to them about it. You're just taking a huge risk there (laughs) and for very little reward. Like, they're not gonna be mad if you ask them, like, "Hey, do you wanna ... Is, is this how you wanted it done? Like, I don't know." And so I do think it's kind of funny, uh, how much we build these castles in our mind, these little silos that keep us from engaging the structures that are built around us that are designed to help us succeed. I saw this great quote actually just, uh, yesterday. I saw Patrick Stewart, uh, who was one of my favorite actors of all time and whose characters I love, and he talked about people going on casting calls. And this is a brutal thing for actors, right? You're going on 30, 40 things. You're getting rejected. It's tough. Everyone's kind of heard about this. And he said, "No one wants you to succeed more than the person you are auditioning for, 'cause they want you to be awesome. 'Cause as soon as you're awesome, they're done." Like, they want you to be amazing. That's like your manager. You ... Nobody wants you to be more awesome than your manager does. 'Cause when you're amazing, your manager, his life gets easier. Her life gets easier. So I just think that's like the mentality we get into is like, "No, no, no. Like, they're testing me." They're not. They are rooting for you. I promise you that.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I love that advice. I imagine the reason people don't do this, as you said, is they don't want their manager to think they don't know what they're doing or they can't solve it. Do you have any advice and guidance for when it makes sense to go reach out and ask?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
One of the things that I think for people who are timid about this especially is I think you can put a framing around it that's really easy for your manager to, like, engage with it. You can say like, "Hey. I'm making progress on this. This is what I'm blocked on. This is the current program." And I'll even say like, "Hey. If this all looks good to you, no response required. If there is something here that you want me to do better, different, that you think you could help with, you know, let me know." I love, uh, like a, a type, you know, like a five, 10 sentence email, no response required. Here's where things are. Even if I ... Even if everything is going really well, I feel like, "Cool. This is a, this is a, uh ... This person understands the urgency. They understand the assignment, and they're giving me a little heartbeat, a little ping back." And then also, if two weeks later, let's say, the blocking issue is bad, then you say, "Hey. I am sorry, but I do actually need your help now. I'm actually blocked on this thing. I have the context. You ... Like, I have a mental model of you, uh, you know, toiling away on the right thing, on the thing I asked you to do over there." Even then when you're blocked, you can make my life super easy. Be like, "Hey. What I'd love for you to do..."If you could send an email to this person, here's a draft with, like, this thoughts-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Hmm.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
... that would help. Or it's like, here's, here are specific questions framed up, like, "I think this is what you want. Is this right? Yes or no? If no, okay, we'll come back and we'll spend more time. If yes, we're all good." It makes it so as now it's like not only am I up to speed, I have a mental model, I'm engaged, also you've made it super cheap for me to help you. I just, like, take s- And people are always surprised, people at, at, people who work for me, uh, are always surprised when I tell them how big a part of my job is doing these little types of things. It's a little spinning plates at my scale. I, and I've got 10,000 or 15,000 employees depending on how you want to count different things, and so you're just like I, every now and then I got to get a whole new plate, a whole new rod and just really s- put the effort into it, but for the most part, I'm just, like, trying to touch everything and keep the momentum going. And so if something falls and somebody didn't tell me that, "Hey, we're losing rotational velocity here. We got to (laughs) we're losing momentum." Oh, I'm bummed. I'm like, "Ah, now that plate fell. I got to start a whole new thing over here now." So I, I think people just underestimate, they think of my job differently than my job actually is. My job is actually
- 19:27 – 22:10
Tips for communicating with managers
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
tons of little touches.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
So I think a key takeaway here is one, index more towards asking your manager and leaders for help. And I love this way of framing it of it doesn't always need to be like, "Here's what I need from you." It's, "Here's what's happening. Here's things that might be blocking me. Here's questions I have. Here's things that are going on." This is actually similar to something I found really powerful that I'll share real quickly, this idea of a st- a state of, I call it the State of Lenny email, and I sent this email to my manager every week, the State of Lenny, it's kind of like State of the Union, and it's, uh, "Here's my current priorities. Here's what's on my mind broadly. And then here's blockers that I need your help with."
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
We, we actually used to have a format for that we called, um, HPMs, Highlight the People, Me.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Um, and every manager at Facebook from, like, 2008 to, like, 2014 would send to their manager or even their leadership group. I mean, at one point when I was running what we called the com apps, I just sent it to, like, Zuck and the whole leadership group with, like, "What's the highlights?" Include, and it highlights a lowlights, like, what's the big ticket things you need to know? Where are people, like, is somebody in trouble? Is somebody at risk? Is somebody doing really amazing work that needs a, a shout-out? And then me, like, how are you personally doing? HPMs we call them. Actually, it's funny. I hadn't thought about that in a long time. But yeah, no, I th- I think this kind of thing can work. And look, every manager is different. So you, that's, even at the Meta level, by the way, is another success. Another thing people do is they want to treat every manager the same and that's not gonna work because every manager is different. So, but every manager you can ask, "How do you like to get updates?" (laughs) Like, you can ask them when you first start working with them, like, "Hey, like, what's your cadence? Like, how do you, like, how do you like to stay informed?" And so for me, like, I do regular one-on-ones. As I've gotten, the org's gotten bigger, those have gotten more distant, so people have replaced those with more written things. But, like, no manager will get pissed at you and say, "How do you like to get information about me?" (laughs) Like, that's a totally reasonable thing to ask.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I love this specific idea you shared of just, like, (laughs) drafting the email to, say, the other team leader of, like, "Here's what I need you to tell them that would really unblock this thing." That's such a cool idea.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
By the way, and, and I always put my own, I alwa- I don't take that, copy, paste it, like, uh, you know. I'm always looking at that and being like, "Okay, I understa-" A lot of it is actually not about what you want the other person to hear. It's about, like, the voice, the tone. It includes a lot of history. I don't know. Have you been going back and forth with them for 12 rounds and this is gonna feel to them like I'm really coming over the top? Or is this like, "Hey, first time you're hearing about this. My bad." Like, "Here's what we're doing. Need your help." So a lot of it isn't even about, oh, here, making my life easy 'cause I want to copy paste. A lot of it is actually there's a rich set of information in how you tone and how you draft that note that's gonna help me land it correctly and not feel like I'm just out of band, you know, heavy coming in.
- 22:10 – 27:01
Transparency at Meta
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
- LRLenny Rachitsky
This touches on something that I often hear is very core to the way Meta works, which is transparency. Anyone can ask Zuck questions at the Q&As. People are encouraged to post constantly, internally of what they're thinking, what they're working on. All the data is shared publicly, which often leads to leaks, which I, I hear you're very, uh, you hate and that is a pet peeve of yours. (laughs)
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Just feels like a violation of team trust. Just feels like, I'm li- I g- I grew up playing sports, right? It was football, soccer, track, and, like, you just can't imagine one of your guys, like, calling out the play to the other team. It's like, (laughs) can you ever, can you imagine what you would do in that case? Like I just, "You're off the team. I'm sorry, like, you can't be here." Anyways, sorry. Carry on.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah, and there's so many more people it's hard to find (laughs) who is this? So with this downside as an example, and it's also I imagine there's other downsides also takes a lot of work and it puts people on the spot a lot of times. What have you seen as benefits and why is that such a big part of Meta's way of working?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah. This kind of comes back to I think the principle that, uh, really good talented people, you want to leverage them fully. You really want to make sure that they are fully leveraged. And so any time 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, like, 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, like, what we're trying to accomplish top-down, but also having way more information, uh, at, at their disposal to be able to act on it. And so it's, you know, it's, uh, people will talk about top-down or bottom-up culture and it's a bit of a myth in my opinion.Uh, if you've ever met Mark Zuckerberg, he is not a b- it's not a bottoms-up thing. Like 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 he, of course, he is. And that's a form of bottom-up. People can bring ideas to him and he internalizes them and, and acts on them or not. But when he brings the things top-down, he doesn't, he's not micromanaging. He's in the details. I'd 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 n- 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, what the avai- what the infrastructure is like, what the availability is like, what the performance is gonna be like, well, you just are stuck. You're just gonna 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.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Right? Like, they're getting all the information they're intended to get.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
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. Uh, you have to have a system for triaging the incoming, 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.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
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's makes a lot of sense that most of the big ideas actually do come from the top.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
It's a bit... It's just like a... It's a... One of these mythology things, I don't think it's the wrong... As a, as a construct, it's more bottoms-up than many other companies because you do have these degrees of freedom within the construct. But, like, make no mistake, like, Mark or me or Chris Cox or Javi, like, they have very strong opinions about what we should be doing as a company. And you have to... Your bottoms-up-ness works within that framework. But we also are... It is true that you can ask Mark any question and he's gonna answer it. Same with me, same with Chris, same with Javi. And also that, like, we certainly take inspiration from the discussion that we have with employees. So it's not... I don't know. It's, uh, it's just not as black and white as people kind of tend to
- 27:01 – 29:11
The importance of clear guidelines
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
pa- paint it.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I think o- one of the biggest lessons here is making it at least feel like you have a lot of say. Like, even though a company is very, "Here's the big strategic pillars or into it," you're very good at making people feel like they can have an impact and a say.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
And can I tell you? The most important thing is just giving people clear guidelines so they know where they... Where is... Like, where can they... Where do they have space and where do they have no space? You know, one of the things that we go in these reviews with Mark or my team with me, I'm sure, and I'm like, "This is weird. Like, for this part of the UI, it is going..." (laughs) Like, "I will draw it for you. It's going to be like this." And this other part, I'm like, "Cool, that's important too. I don't have a clear vision of it. Why don't you do it?" So you're like... So there's just really clear guardrails of like, "Okay, like, where are we just on assignment and where do we have more flexibility?"
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Is there an example of that that comes to mind where you're just, like, very in the details and drawing (laughs) the screen?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Over the, over the course of time, there's been quite a few examples. I think early on when we were working on newsfeed, you know, Mark was absolutely whiteboarding every single, like, pixel that, you know, the team had to put on the front end. On the back end, he was like, "Make it rank. Like, have some ranking," you know? (laughs) So I felt like I was lucky there 'cause I was just like, "Cool, like, I'm off to the races on some ranking stuff," and like, you know, all these other, uh, Chris Cox and, and all these other guys were having to, like, really pixel-match these things. But it's not always that way, by the way. So now fast forward and we're talking about ranking. It's not like Mark is always hands off on that. When we got into modernizing our ranking systems, which we've done over the last five years, Mark was heavily involved and like, "Hey, what's the, what's the mix shift? And like, how are you weighing different things?" And so, you know, it can go both ways. For me personally, I've gotten really involved, uh, in kind of some, some relatively esoteric things. I was really adamant, for example, that hand tracking and mixed reality make it into the headset. Let's just say that there weren't any supporters in the team. Obviously, we had a hand-tracking team, which is phenomenal, mixed-reality team, but, like, there's a lot of people who are like, they did not feel those features were gonna be critical for this to become a mainstream device. I always believed that they were for ease of use and for kind of... So, like, I just, like, really forced the issue and didn't give anyone any room and held really high standards for the performance benchmarks we were gonna hit on, on the hand tracking, and teams told me it was impossible. And it wasn't. (laughs) It did great. (laughs)
- 29:11 – 33:15
Involvement in the details
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
- LRLenny Rachitsky
This touches on something that comes up a lot on this podcast, and there's this debate b- between how in the weeds founders and execs should be, whether they delegate, empower versus, "No. We're just gonna do it this way. I'm gonna be very involved in every mark." And that there's always this, like, up and down that happens where it's like, "Okay, cool. We're gonna let people run and do their thing," and then things start to not work as well often. "And then, cool. We're gonna take, take back control." Do you have just a perspective on when it makes sense to go deep, how founders, execs should think about that?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Such a useless answer for founders with, "It depends on the weeds," like, you know? (laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Like, there are some weeds that really matter and there's some weeds that really just don't. And I should say, like, that doesn't mean they don't matter at all. You have to do them. But, like, they aren't, like, the hinge upon which success, uh, or failure, uh, will happen. Yeah, like, there's people I really respect. Brian Chesky's been on and said like, "Look, the Airbnb is going to work only on the things that I can work on." Like, it's just that's the, the extent of what it's gonna do. And that's a super extreme form of it. I have a lot of respect for him and, like, how they're working things. Uh, I think that, like, if you have great, super talented people that you can trust who can own bigger pieces, that's one option. If there are ways to structure it so that you can, like, check in effectively and make sure that it's on track, that's another way to structure it.And there probably is still work happening at Airbnb that has to happen, finance and accounting and HR, that like Brian isn't personally managing. So there are clearly non-technical areas that we do... or, uh, legal. There are areas that we already... we do trust that this is happening at. And so I, I think a lot of founders regret delegating too much from what I've... you know, my conversations. And, uh, I totally get that. Or they delegated something critical that really turned out to be the most important thing. For me, the judgment is like how do you most important determine what is what matters the most?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
And so Mark... We, we, we joke inside of Meta to this day. We call it the Eye of Sauron. Uh, when Mark has determined that the thing that you're working on is the most important thing, there is no detail too small for him to notice. Like, uh, he will be in a review and in the same review will be like, "Strategically, I think we're off course. And also this one pixel is, is definitely wrong. You have to fix that." (laughs) Like, he... You know, that's a big range. And, uh, frankly if I... Uh, be s- uh, a little bit self-congratulatory, I probably myself would be able to do the same. And I think people who work with me often comment that the style of leadership that we have, and I think Chris Cox is the same, is that where it's like we will go high to low on the things that matter a ton. And there's a bunch of other things that certainly matter, like we're glad we're doing them, but either they have pretty clear roadmaps, pretty clear examples in the industry. Or it's like that's a feature that you have to have but isn't gonna determine success or failure, so getting it into rough shape and then iterating on it is fine. And so that's... I think it really does depend on the weeds how deep you want to get.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
It's so funny. I use exactly that same metaphor, the Eye of Sauron, when I talk about working on things at Airbnb that matter a lot to Brian. And my advice to people is you don't want to be in that Eye of Sauron for too long in your career 'cause you're just gonna burn out if you're working on the most important thing all the time. But you wanna be close. You wanna... You don't wanna be in the Shire, but you wanna be, like, around the...
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
That's right. Uh, they're both... Uh, so I worked for years in, in ads. Uh, from 2012 to 2017 I ran ads and business platform, this big ads group. And, uh, it was an area where certainly t- certainly was very important, but Mark had so many other things going on with the transition to mobile he did kind of delegate to me. And it was awesome. And it was so cool to have that kind of, you know, trust from him. And also you're constantly terrified 'cause like Mark does not know. Like, what if this is all... You know, it's like... Uh, and, and my, my leads would be worried 'cause, like, they just hadn't... We hadn't had a review with Mark in a while, and it's like, yeah, you, you suffer in the intensity of the gaze of Sauron. You also suffer in the shadow of its absence.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Uh, there's no perfect place to be.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That's hilarious. I'm trying to think of, like, the (laughs) part of Middle-earth that (laughs) is a metaphor for that.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah.
- 33:15 – 37:28
Building the News Feed
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay. So you talked about the newsfeed, which was one of your very earliest projects at Facebook. Here's a couple fun facts I know about the newsfeed. One is that it was the very first algorithmic newsfeed of its kind, of any social network and maybe of any sort of product like this.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And two is the very first AI code that was written in Facebook to rank the actual newsfeed. So there were a lot of firsts. And clearly this became a huge deal. The newsfeed is essentially what people think of when they think of Facebook now. But it was super controversial when it came out. People were very against this. They did not want to be sharing this much information with people, or so they thought. And then they realized eventually, "Oh, this is actually exactly what I want." What did you learn from going through that experience of building something that people initially reject and then later realized that they actually do want this and this is exactly what they were waiting for?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
This is a story that you tell a lot actually in, uh, through your interviews, which is just like you have to have conviction in what you're building. You're choosing your customers as much as your customers are choosing you is, is one way I think about it sometimes. And, uh, you know, one mistake that you do see sometimes startups make is they get an early cohort of users whose needs actually take them kind of orthogonal to a larger market. And so they become kind of held hostage by their earliest c- customers. Now, uh, so we've t- time and time again we've had a vision for what we thought this should look like and it wasn't the thing we were delivering right now, and so people who were using the thing we currently had were not sure (laughs) that that change was what they wanted. But we had a confidence that over time they would. And, and we don't... We're not always right, but in these cases we were right. Now, newsfeed was an easier case than people, uh, suspect because everyone was outraged at the same time as they immediately doubled their usage of the product. (laughs) So, so we had a few advantages there which was there was literally like everyone was like, "I hate this so much," and they would refresh, refresh, refresh. And so we were like, "Okay, wait. This is a... There's cognitive dissonance here, uh, between what the stated preferences and what the revealed preferences are in the economic sense." So newsfeed was a little easier than people suspect to, to stick with. But, uh, s- uh, people sometimes misunderstand that. They think, "Oh, the lesson is don't listen to your customers." Not at all. And we certainly care tremendous amount. And even with newsfeed, we did actually screw some things up. I kind of always make this joke that, uh, it's almost like, you know, you're at the party and music's loud, you're talking to somebody and the music cuts out right when you're saying something at a super high volume and so everyone in the party hears the last thing you said? Now, you were saying it in a public place so it wasn't like it was a private comment, but you also didn't mean to broadcast it at that volume. We kind of did that to the entire user base 'cause we took what had been wall posts, which sure, anybody could have gone to that profile and seen, and then put it kind of on blast, like, on main, you know? (laughs) As the kids say these days, "Put it on main." And someone's like, "Ah," you know? S- so we did that. We... I do think we, like... I don't want to say... Like, we've, we did screw things up. Like, it wasn't like, "Oh, this is a flawless execution." So then another thing to know is, like, when did you screw something small up and when did you screw something big up? Like, when is the thing itself wrong versus when were the details wrong? That is an art. That is a real art. And you don't always have user data to determine it, uh, like we did. And so a lot of that is do you have a clear vision and intuition?... for what you expected to happen and then what happened instead, and can you diagnose the delta there. So in the newsfeed case, we made a bunch of little mistakes. The thing itself was right and I'm, I- I really am quite proud of, of the work we did there. Uh, you know, me and Chris Cox, uh, at the most core, probably on the engineering side, which he's on beyond the... As the PM. Like, there was no ranked feeds before that. We did have some AI that I'd built before for the anti-spam, anti-, uh, things, but it was pretty rudimentary. So it was the... But it was probably the first consumer AI that, that was in a website of that kind or on content. And we built like the most efficient monetizing surface in history, uh, outside of search, I think. And for those who are curious, I don't use monetization because I think money's the most important thing. I do think it suggests the economic power you've created, which I do think correlates very strongly with human utility. Although, you know, obviously I respect that some people may disagree.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah. In terms of the economic utility, the Venn diagram of BoZ- of newsfeed and ads, uh, create a trillion dollars of value. Uh, so-
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
It's not-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... well done.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
It's not nothing.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
It's not nothing. We're proud of-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Not nothing.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
... we're proud of that work.
- 37:28 – 40:25
Passion and career growth
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
- LRLenny Rachitsky
You have, you have this quote in one of your posts about the newsfeed where you said, "It consumed me more fully than anything in life had ever consumed me. It opened up to me the truth that when you're passionate about something, you do better work, you do smarter work, and you're an order of magnitude more productive."
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
There's no substitute for it. And one thing I've learned about myself since that post actually is just the degree to which I am somebody who is inclined to be passionate about things. And that's a, uh, that's a, it's a gift, uh, that I'm very lucky to have. And I understand that's not every person. And so like, uh, actually the ads thing is a good example. When Mark told me to go work on ads, I was like, "No, I don't want to." I don't think I have a passion for that. I had this idea of myself, I had a very strong identity of myself as this like AI infrastructure product guy, and I was like working in this space. And, uh, nope, I was wrong. I just like am a guy who gets excited about things. Once I got into ads it's like, oh, this is fascinating. This is a, it's a three-sided marketplace and there's all these different... It was like a real, you know, it felt like I was playing chess at times in terms of, of the moves with other players in the industry. And I was like super pumped about that. And then when I... He wanted me to work on hardware, I was like, "No, I'm not a... I'm a software guy. I'm a software guy, Mark." And I've... No, I love this work. I just like, I... That's such a fascinating space that I'm in. I've learned so much. So I do think that's right. I do think when I find something I'm passionate about, that's good. What I have learned since then is to give myself the space to understand if I can get passionate about it. Now, there are parts of jobs that I've had before where I just never found the passion, and after six months I just have to move on. I literally, it's like I'll either quit, get fired, like I'm doing bad work, I don't care about the work, you know. Uh, and so I ha- I do have a self-awareness. It's not that I can get passionate about anything, but I do have a pretty broad palate it turns out.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I think that's a really interesting career lesson of don't assume you won't be excited about something that may come up. Is there anything there that you'd share with folks of just like explore it, give it six months, see if you can, can get excited about it?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Absolutely. So I have a very unusual career arc in some ways, which is like I really almost changed jobs like every six months for a long time. Like, you know, I was working on this, uh, integrity stuff with newsfeed in the background, then I was working on newsfeed for about a year. Uh, then I worked on integri- uh, uh, s- uh, site speed and infrastructure and like detecting, uh, SAVs and issues, and then I worked on Bootcamp, and then I worked on messaging and groups. It was like I just, you know... I had this really funny thing. I always kind of joke, it was like, uh, for those who are old enough to remember Karate Kid, I felt like I was, you know, painting a lot of fences, waxing a lot of cars, and at the end I knew karate. I was like at the end, at the end I had the payoff because I'd gone through and I'd, I'd met a lot of people and I'd worked in these different areas and I understood different dynamics. Um, while other people who joined in my cohort were getting promoted on the... But they were like in a single track, like they just stayed in one place and they got promoted. Whereas I kept moving around and probably at some point early in my career felt like I was moving more slowly relative to my peers. And then when I finally turned the corner, really with the ads appointment, which I did for five years, I went vertical. I just like, my career went vertical and I was the... I've kind of since then I've kind of been on that trajectory.
- 40:25 – 42:02
Exploring new opportunities
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
And so the advice I most often give people that this, for me at least, the lesson that I take from this is just like, I just was willing to learn aggressively. I would move because I wasn't learning enough. I was bored. And so I wasn't like learning enough new stuff. And what's cool about finally getting to the ads job and likewise in the job I'm in now is like those jobs I learned a ton for five years. I never stopped learning in those jobs. You will occasionally find those jobs where they're super deep and you can just keep learning. Meanwhile, a lot of my friends whose careers were on a better trajectory than me earlier, they literally got bored of what they were doing, but they didn't like have any place to jump to. Like they, there wasn't like some other... They were... They'd become domain specialists in a domain that they'd kind of exhausted for themselves, and maybe they even stuck around longer than they wanted to because it was comfortable or because the company wanted them to and it ended up kind of being a hindrance to them in the middle of their career. And so for me it's like, uh, don't be... Jump into new things. Give it six months. If it's not the thing, no problem. Like, you just built a ton of new skills. That's gonna come in handy, I promise you that. Keep going. And, and likewise, uh, when you do make that jump, as a early career, optimize for learning. Optimize for like... Think about it, compound interest, like it's- it's like the first like 10 years of compound interest don't look that impressive. It's like after 10 years it starts to look good.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I love that advice. It's, uh, it's similar advice I always give of variety of experience often ends up being the most valuable thing you build over time. Just trying a dump- bunch of stuff. Doing some internal tools, maybe working on customer support, I don't know, and trust and safety, user-facing products, infrastructure. I'm thinking from a PM's perspective, maybe in engineers and other functions.
- 42:02 – 45:01
The value of variety in experience
- LRLenny Rachitsky
One question along those lines. So we talked about The Eye of Sauron and working on like the most important thing at the company. Do you have any advice on how much of your career you should be working in that center?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah. Listen, all else being equal, I think there's two really good places to be. I think one is carrying a lot of water in areas that the company's not paying attention to but you know are important.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
And it needs to be a lot. Like you really gotta, like you gotta own that stuff and like really move mountains over there. Because like I promise you, as an executive, when there's a huge...... dam holding up, you know, the flood waters, you respect the heck out of the person who is holding that dam up. Like you're like, you know, "You keep doing that, Atlas. Like, that is good work over there." The second best place to be, or maybe this equally, ba- is, like, on the most important thing. And on the most important thing, that's where you get, like, to the advice that, uh, Eric Schmidt gave Sheryl Sandberg, which is like, "Hey, it's a rocket ship. Get on." Like, "Don't ask what seat I'm in. Like, just get on." If it's the most important thing, you're gonna get a smaller piece. Everyone wants to be there. Get the piece if you... But if it's the most important thing, get the piece that you can crush, kill, do a great job at, and grow from, 'cause you're gonna get a ton of visibility, you're gonna get a ton of experience. You're gonna see what it looks like in the fire, like in the fire. And that is invaluable. Uh, you will use that everywhere. And that, so I say that, that's at project selection time. But now I'll be cautious. Understand, projects that start in the fire hopefully are forged in some manner of metal that cools and is no, no longer in the fire, like God willing.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs)
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
And likewise, uh, things like dams that are holding up floodwaters have a tendency to crack, or break, or floods overcome the... It's like, so I think you, you do wanna be at selection time in one of those two places. But then you also gotta, you gotta stick with the ride. And, and again, to my point, like, if you're not engaged, if you aren't doing great work, if you don't love it, then move on. If you've exhausted it, y- you used to love it but you don't anymore, move on. If you still love it and you're engaged, great. That's cool. Like, it's, we, yeah, that's a great thing. You, you deserve to go from the forge to the dam and back over time. Like, that, you don't have to always just keep jumping onto the, the latest fire. I tried to do that once. After the ad business, actually, so I spent six months and we built the first mobile ad product in 2012, and kind of, uh, saved, uh, the, the IPO, which had gotten pretty grim-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah, I remember that.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
... by, at that point. And I told Mark, I was like, "This is so fun. Maybe you can just keep doing this. He's just putting me on the biggest fire every six months." And he turns to me, he said, "Boz, that's not a real job." (laughs) He's like, "I need you to stay here and usher this forward," which I did for the next four and a half years. And it was amazing. It was amazing. And again, I, I do give him such, I, I'm, it's funny, I'm gonna get a hard time with this. Uh, I'm one of the, I'm one of Mark's biggest critics, as well as being one of his biggest fans. I'm both those, I, I have both those jobs. But today we're talking about stuff that I think Mark really demonstrates really well. And, uh, he, he did a great job of, of pushing me in my career to different places where I didn't think I could succeed, and he saw the opportunity and made it happen.
- 45:01 – 47:38
Giving and receiving feedback
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
- LRLenny Rachitsky
What have you learned about, uh, giving Mark, like, negative criticism, anything that he accepts? So what, what have you learned about that?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Mark's voracious for all information and all points of view. One of the things that's pretty interesting, I talked earlier about how much as a founder I think especially, uh, you have to just have tremendous conviction. You just have to. You have to have a tremendous degree of, of confidence. And I think Mark is somebody who is, like, uh, maybe the strongest willpower of a person I've ever met, just in a pure willpower sense. And so one of the things that's interesting about Mark is you'll give him feedback, he listens. He's not, he's a, he's a very, he's a kind person to work for. So you'll give him feedback and he'll listen, truly. He'll most often tell you that you're wrong, why you're wrong. It's, it's just like most often. And what will happen is, this is, it's uncanny, is, like, over the course of the next, like, week or two, you'll just see shifts. And I don't think he's, like, doing it subco- as it's, you know, I just, I've always kind of joked that, like, the information gets to him, so much information every day gets to him, and then, like, at night he, like, recompiles the whole world with all that information and comes back. And by, and I'm, and by the way, this is not just true about product work. In my, I, in my head, I was thinking about product stuff where you're just like, "Hey, I think this product is doing this wrong." He's like, "No, no, that's why it's not that way." And the product will start to shift. Also, if you give him feedback just on his own presence in a meeting or delivery, he'll be like, "Oh, well, here's why I did it that way." And then, like, a couple weeks later, you'll be in a similar situation, and you will, he will moderate, like, how he shows up. So, I actually find him somebody who's really, it's really satisfying to give him feedback. It really works. It's very effective. But you do have to, like, take the long view on it. Uh, like, and, and he will have a, he will have... The things he did, he didn't do on accident. He will have a reason why he did them the way he did them.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
It's a great example of strong opinions loosely held.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah. That's right.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
It also makes me think, I think you used the compiler analogy. I'm thinking, like, the model training, like, the re- he's retraining his model-
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah. (laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... overnight.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah. It's funny, one of the things, one of the things that's so funny about Mark is he, uh, if you give him some feedback in the morning, the next, like, six meetings he has, whether it's about that product or not, he will ask people what they think of that feedback. He won't attribute it, he's just like, "Hey, what do you think about this and this product?" And so you'll be in a re- meeting with him, and you'll see him doing it. He'll come into the meeting with you about some other topic, and he'll be like, "Hey, Boz, what do you think about this product and, and this, this idea?" And so he will, like, over the course of the day, take that little note and kind of pressure test it 'cause he, and he loves to triangulate. What is, where are all the points of view on this that maybe he didn't see? Uh, so he really values a broad perspective on each thing that's being discussed, which is pretty fun.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
He's trying, he's trying to get more training data for his, for his model.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
That's-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I get it.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
I'm not, uh, you can't get me to call Mark an LLM. That's not fair.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs)
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
That's easy. (laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
We, we could all hope to be, uh, as, as smart as Mark.
- 47:38 – 51:30
Boz’s tattoos
- LRLenny Rachitsky
As you were talking, I noticed your tattoos, and it reminded me that you've got at least two tattoos that I'm aware of.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Oh, yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
One is of California, which I completely understand. California is a very special place. But you have this other tattoo that is just the words "Veritas." Can you talk about what that's about and why that's important to you?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
The funny thing about tattoos in general is I came out of high school as like, I don't know, I don't know what my, I don't know if there was a, an archetype for me. But I didn't drink 'til I was 21. I was a very rule-following person. I was like, "Why are you gonna get a tattoo?" You know, it's like, affect your body. Like, people dy- why are you gonna dye your hair? Like, just, like, let it be what it was. And some of this was, like, I think I had, was, uh, somebody who was privileged and had a great deal of self-confidence in who I was and what I wanted to be, and that was fine. But some of it was also, like, weirdly judge-y about other people in a way that's kind of off-brand for me certainly today, but even at the time. Getting a tattoo was a big deal for me, 'cause I was like, "Oh, like, this is just, like, the vehicle for my life. And, like, you can do whatever you want with it. And it doesn't ha- it's not like a..."... y- you know, it's- it's something that you possess and you can... If you, if you feel like... If you want to decorate it, you can decorate it. And so getting a tattoo was a big deal to me, actually, and I kind of completely shifted my mindset of, um, of how I thought about my body and how I thought about people's body and their presence and the, and the time. Maybe to some degree, even like an understanding of mortality. Like, hey, this is like, you can't take it with you. (laughs) Like it's all, it's all gonna go... You know, when you're 18 you think you're gonna live forever and when you're... By the time you're 22, a grizzled 22-year-old veteran, you're like, "Ah, tattoo that bad boy up. It's all going down." And so yeah, that's why I got the Veritas tattoo which is, uh, Latin for truth. Which is, uh, you know, I will say, uh, it's a little cheesy 'cause it's also Harvard's motto. Um, and, uh, but I got it in a monotype font. You know, there's the programmer's font here. Then the thing that's interesting to me about tattoos was, it's also part of a generational shift. Uh, you know, we grew up in a time when tattoos were really seen by adults as, um, you know, gangs or bikers or, or sailors or like, you know, certain types. Now, my understanding, I saw a stat recently that more people my generation have tattoos than don't have tattoos. Uh, and so I think, I think we also just culturally shifted positions in a way that I find, I find richness of self-expression wonderful. I really think it's great. And so I'm, I'm, I'm here for all of it.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
My assumption from what you're describing is this idea of truth is very important to the way you think and work.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
My reputation does precede me on this point, I'm afraid. It's just, you know. Uh, I think when I was young, I saw being honest, and I was wrong by the way, I saw being honest as like kind of a get out of jail free card. Like, you could say whatever you wanted as long as you're being honest. Um, that's just not the case at all. (laughs) Uh, if I'd- I've heard about this before, but by far my biggest professional regrets were me not being kind. And, uh, I used to think, like I- I wrote this note a while back called Be Kind, where being nice, that's like patronizing or, or telling somebody things that are half truths or just like getting by, and I'm against that. But being kind isn't that. Being kind is like, hey, how can I deliver this feedback in a way that is actually productive and helpful, in a way that is gonna help them and not cause them just to feel bad and helpless? And I think I was doing... I did that wrong a lot as a, as a young man. And so being honest is still a big part of my personality. No one would ever accuse me of being dishonest, um, who knows me. And I think people understand and respect that I'm pretty direct, and if I have concerns or issues, I'm gonna bring them up. I'm just much better at bringing them up now and expressing a true care and belief. I- I wouldn't bring it up if I didn't think we could do better, if I didn't think we could fix it, if I didn't believe in, in the situation. And uh, so uh, being honest is still a huge part of my identity and I think that's something I'm very proud of. But I will say the contextualization of like how I'm honest has changed immensely since I got this tattoo.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That seems reasonable.
- 51:30 – 1:00:47
Communication is the job
- LRLenny Rachitsky
This touches a little bit on something I definitely wanted to talk about, which is one of your most classic pieces, and this is the way I first learned about you, is a piece that is called Communication is the Job.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I know many people have read this. Many people haven't. I'd love for you to just talk about what this means and why this is important, why this is something that you wanted to share.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Yeah. It's, uh, it's one of the things that, especially if you aspire to be a leader, and, and leadership isn't management and leadership isn't, uh, uh, being res- the only person responsible. It's not even always the same as accountability. But if you want to have an impact on the world around you, it is exclusively done through the, the, the creation of artifacts or, or, uh, verbalizations that like affect other humans. Like that's the only... That is all there is. That's all there is if you want to have an impact, if you want to like create some kind of a, of a lasting change. And it could be in your lo- in your little relationship, it could be in your team, it could be in your company, it could be in the world. Uh, it is down to communication. And so often you hear people saying like, "Oh," like yeah, that was like, "I had that... I wrote that up a year ago." It's like, "Yeah, but you did a bad job of writing it a year ago or we would have not wasted a year not doing it." Like it's like, you know... It's like the, you know, people always think it's, "Oh, I had that idea," and that's like means anything. It means nothing. It means absolutely nothing. Or it's like, "Oh," like, "I wrote this post." Like well, you didn't break through with it. So that's like, that's on you. It's not on the audience. People want to blame the audience. Well, the audience is just there. And so I mentioned this even earlier and I hope people caught it when I, when I said, "Hey if um somebody's... I give somebody a piece of work and they come back six months later and they have done the wrong thing, I'll take the L." I will take the L on that. It's not great for them. They'll be pissed they wasted their time. But like I said, that- that's my responsibility. I did not communicate clearly what I wanted, what the expectations were. Could they have also helped themselves? Sure, they could have. And that's the thing that they... You know, it takes all sides. We should, we should work on this problem from both angles. I have another post called Listening is the Job which is the other side of this. But like Communication is the Job is, I- I really believe... It actually has a relationship to the- to this idea that came out of the US Marines and SEALs, uh, of extreme ownership. Which is like, so when everything goes wrong with like... I ask myself, "What could I have done differently, uh, in terms of how I communicated things for this to have gone better?" Could I have set priorities better? Could I set expectations better? Did I need to have a better metric that I pointed the team at? Did I put the wrong people in... By the way, the other thing I didn't talk about is org, org charts are communication devices. They don't exist. There's not a physical string between you and your manager. They're just communication tools that are supposed to give people a rough sense of how things are organized and where to go with who. And so I... All these things are communication. Silence is communication. Me not reaching out to you to check on you, to check on your project, right? We talked about this, the eye of Sauron earlier. What does that mean? That means trust. That means responsibility. Like the absence of check-ins has meaning. You cannot not communicate. You are always communicating something with your face, with your clothes, with your body.... what are you communicating? I'll give you a funny example, uh, which I hope we get to put in the podcast because if you're watching this on video, you will have noticed that my camera cannot stop adjusting light. It's just constantly too dark or too bright.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs)
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
I'm trying a new camera. I'm a nerdy guy. I try a lot of camera gear, I try a lot of, uh, microphone gear. I, I'm like, I, I love to have all the latest gadgets and gizmos, so I'm trying something new. It's not working. And in my head I'm like, "What is this communicating about me? People are going to think that I don't care or that I'm not competent." So it's the little, little ... That's what I'm talking about. And, and now I felt compelled to explain it in the podcast so that I can communicate clearly (laughs) that that's not the case. So I, I really just think, uh, so much of what I try to do in my professional life is understand the mental model of other people. Where are they right now? And I mean specific people, like my managers or my key technical leaders, uh, and I mean general people, like teams, and I mean broadly like just the average human. Where are they at in this conversation and how can I craft my language, my presence, my persona, everything to usher them from where they are to where I want to, to get them? And that requires me to have a very clear idea of where I want to get them, have to have a clear idea of where they are. And I want to tell you, it's not as much work as it sounds like. This isn't like, I think no one would accuse me of having this big fabricated persona. It's not that. But it is like having tremendous empathy for where people are starting. And I think ... And, and that, the, the, that was the leap for me. All the rest of it, all the rest of how I show up at meetings and s- and trying to smile more 'cause I'm like a big scary guy, like those things are little things that you work on. Those are, they ... And they become second nature and they're easy. The hard thing is just having empathy for your audience and being like, "Where are they? Where are they starting?" And when you miss, taking responsibility for that, extreme responsibility for that.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
There's so much good advice in that. I ... There's so many threads I want to follow, but let's just follow this last one of trying to understand how someone is best communicated to. Is there an example, to make that a little more real for people, of just what you've done to like, oh, here's how I'm going to communicate with this person?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
I'll give you a couple. So one is like multi-modality. Uh, there's an old saying, right? Uh, "Repetition never spoil the prayer." And I think most experienced communicators, uh, whether they be writers, whether they be public speakers, talk about the importance of reiterating a point several times and in several different ways to make sure that people have a chance to internalize it. You want to use it ... You want to say it directly, you want to use metaphor. And so for me it's like, I will give an all-hands and then write a post with the content of the all-hands 'cause different people are gonna respond differently to these modalities and are gonna absorb information at different rates on these different modalities. That's a trivial one. Another one that I think of all the time is, uh, making sure that you address people's fears and concerns. People will not listen to you if they think you don't know what's going on. Uh, and so of my favorite things to do when we're talking about some kind of issue is right up top and say, "Hey, let me be clear. This is the issue we're having. I know we're having it. I know it matters." And then I'll say the same thing that I would have said but they would have literally ignored me, because they're like, how can they trust my conclusions if they don't accept the premise? You know what I'm saying? So I think there's a, there's a whole piece there. And obviously, when you're in person, it's a lot easier 'cause you're reading facial expressions. Even on this, right? I'm reading you nodding on that. I'm like, "Okay, he's, he's got it. He's, he's with me."
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs)
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
And then I throw in a, "You know what I mean?" Whereas if you were to kind of like give me a cocked head, I then bring a second example to try to like drive the point home. But you build yourself up. Most people are gonna realistically start in their careers trying to influence one or two people. That's where you start. One or two people. That's who you gotta communicate with. Your manager, one teammate, that's who you got. And then you build up and build up and build up a skillset to do it at larger and larger scale.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I love so much of this advice. I think it's also helpful for relationships. (laughs) Here's what you're upset about.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Totally. 100%.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Here's what I think we can do.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Being a ... Agai- The work that I've had, uh, so graciously supported to do on myself at Meta, uh, with great mentors, Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, a bunch of others, and coaches, absolutely made me a better partner and husband to my wife. And then, by the way, vice versa, having kids and getting deep in the literature around raising children ... Congratulations to you, by the way.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Thank you.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Uh, getting deep in that literature made me a better manager. Uh, absolutely made me a better manager in terms of thinking about how people are managing their emotions and how to engage with them in those times.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Hmm. Amazing. We need a second edition of this Boaz's parenting advice.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
That's right. (laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And relationship advice.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
It's, uh, it's t- It's like, it's like it's all the good stuff. It's, you know, No Bad Kids, uh, uh, Lansbury, it's- it's, uh, Good Inside, uh, Dr. Becky. Like it's all, it's all-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Love Dr. Becky.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
It's ... I, I really, I really think that the modern parenting, uh, canon is really rich.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
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- 1:00:47 – 1:10:41
Comparing VR headsets: Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro
- LRLenny Rachitsky
You mentioned this gadget and these cameras you like to play with. Let's talk about the Vision Pro and VR headsets. Have you tried the Vision Pro? Thoughts?
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
Actually, Mark and I tried it together. And, uh, I want to say, first of all, when the, when the headset came out, we breathed a little sigh of relief because the stuff inside of it didn't represent a fundamental breakthrough. So there wasn't... Uh, everything inside of it was something that we probably could have gone and done, with the exception of Apple silicon, which is a, you know, a, is a, a marvel. But it's worth noting Apple silicon is like a 2X marvel, when doing things like scaling display resolution is unfortunately a quadratic proposition. And so a 2X linear scaling advantage doesn't buy you as much as you might expect when you're trying to scale resolution. And so, uh, that was step one. And then, but we still assumed at that price point, you know, with their legendary attention to detail and polish, they probably, you know, produced a great product. And, uh, the line that I said, actually on my own podcast with Matthew Ball a week ago was like, "Look, I was prepared to come to market and say, 'We have the best value headset.' Like, if you want a, uh, outstanding, best possible headset for the money, we've got it. It's the Quest 3." And I was so thrilled when I tried the AVP next to, to Mark. We were like, "No, no, no. We actually... We think we have the actual best headset." Now, we're not saying it's the best at all things. If you're sitting still and watching a movie in high-res, uh, res-, uh, movie, yep, Apple Vision Pro is, is really great. Uh, it's really great that- that- that it... The resolution shines. Uh, the way they've tuned the pass-through, uh, shines if you sit it stationary and looking straight ahead. And, and they've done some really nice things with the UI. Um, I'm a little bit... It's one of these things that we do get annoyed about. This is a, a mild aside. We get a little bit annoyed about it as product people. And know that it, this happens to all of us. Happens to Apple, happens to Google, happens to us. We have a bunch of internal things we've been playing with which will at some point ship-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
... and we will be accused of having stolen them when we actually... We did not steal them. Uh, if you, if you want, you can go see my Quora answer on the history of the Like button, where this happened previously, where we had built the Like button internally before it was launched elsewhere. Uh, anyways, it's a whole thing. So this, this happens in, in our industry a lot, and I really shouldn't care as much. It's a little bit of my ego peeking through, which I should control and tamp down if I'm being responsible. But yeah, so, so, so the beautiful UI polishes. They did a tremendous job with, uh, eye tracking. One of the things that's interesting about the eye tracking is to do it the way they've done it, that's why you have to have the prescription inserts. So it doesn't support your, your glasses. You have to get prescription inserts. They're kind of expensive, and they can shoot the cameras that track your eyes through the lens as well as the, the light around it. Ours go from the side on, uh, on the Quest Pro, and that allows you to wear corrective lenses. And so different choices like that have trade-offs, but it's still cool. It's great that they got that in there. At the same time, our hand tracking is better. Obviously, the app library we knew was gonna be better. That's not totally fair, uh, to them. They just, they've just launched and they have small volumes still, but, um, but, uh, I just find the comfort, the thing that really got me the most. The field of view is really small on the Apple Vision Pro, and some people are characterizing it incorrectly on the internet. They're doing a characterization up close to the lens. Once you factor in the eye relief, the distance between where the lenses are and where your eyeball is, their field of view gets pretty narrow for almost all faces relative to ours, which I find distracting. Their view is... Their, their displays are much dimmer than ours. And I find the motion blur really distracting when I'm in mixed reality use cases, and you... As I mentioned earlier in the pod-, I'm a huge mixed reality buff. Like, I'm a huge fan of that potential, for exactly the same reason that they are, by the way, which I think hands and mixed reality make it feel much more accessible to more people. I'm pretty glad we have the controller in our set though, because it really expands what you can do. And you know, we don't just, like, operate our computers with just, like, one thing. We have a keyboard and we have a mouse, so we do multiple modalities, uh, all the time. So I really feel like the comfort, the, the, the lack of persistence and motion blur in our pass-through, the brightness of our displays. I was like, "Oh man," like, if you had... If you gave me one to take, I would take Quest 3. Now, people have rightly said, "That's a pretty biased opinion." Of course it is. Go get your own opinion.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs)
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
But what kills me is most people haven't done that. They have not tried the Quest 3. That's what kills me the most. If you go and try Quest 3, ask yourself if you'd rather have seven of those, one for you and six of your best friends, or one Apple Vision Pro. I'm sure the answer isn't Quest 3 for every person. There are people for whom there are use cases that really fit their life, the Apple Vision Pro, I'm cool with it. But people don't even know that the Quest 3, you can do a remote desktop. You know, you can do it both th- through the, an app called Remote Desktop, which is very popular, or you can go into, into WorkRooms and you can have three monitors surrounding you, um, uh, you know, streamed from your machine. It's like, so we... Like, I think some of this is just, like, people have not even done the work. They haven't even es-, they haven't even tried it. So I welcome all of you who think I am biased to prove one way or the other what you think, but don't do it without putting the Quest 3 on and giving it through its paces, 'cause it's a pretty great device, and, uh, you can do a lot with 3,000 extra dollars.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs)
- ABAndrew 'Boz' Bosworth
How did they get away with that, by the way? Three... We, we launched a headset that was like 1,299 and people lost their minds about it. And they're like, "Ah, 3,500's fine. This is fine." No, uh, no one cares. I don't know. It says... Uh, you know. But I, I... Fairness is too much to ask and I don't care about that. Apple has earned the great brand they've built. They truly have. I think it's tremendous, and, and I, I s-, I certainly celebrate a large number of Apple products. I'm a huge fan of their work. I'm a huge fan of what they do. That's probably why I expected more from the AVP.
Episode duration: 1:42:20
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