Making Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO)

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.

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.

You worked 120 hours per week. You had no hobbies.

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.

The News Feed, that was one of your early projects at Facebook. People did not want it. They were wrong, clearly.

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.

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. Boz, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.