Hello Facebook.
A little life update.
For the past five years I’ve lived and breathed startups. These startups have ranged from small ventures with myself and a few others renting hot desks in a South London coworking space, to Series B hyper-growth companies growing from tens of employees to a several hundred. One small caveat, when I say the past five years, I’m really speaking about the majority of my professional career. I’ve been shaped by my experiences at these companies and when I think back, it’s been a journey defined by one word ‘acceleration.’ Learning, launching and shipping at an incredibly fast rate with few resources but also few constraints.
The thread that explains my willingness to embark on these experiences is a desire to build something useful for the world and being able to create something from almost nothing. Most startups give you an immense amount of autonomy and mix a healthy amount of risk with creativity which can lead to magical, serendipitous moments where what you build, clicks. I love that feeling and I’ll always want to retain it, but more than that I want to build.
I recently reached a crossroad, where I had to decide what to do next — a crossroad which every other time I’ve visited in the past five years, I’ve taken a hard left towards Shiny New Startup. This time though, I paused a little longer. Instead of just turning left, I started exploring the option of applying all I have learned in startups to something larger. Maybe I could look for organisations tackling problems who already have a foothold and already have momentum; momentum which would allow my work to reach a much larger audience, faster. When starting this journey, I consulted heavily. I reached out to my friends, peers, investors and former colleagues. I was not so much seeking a direction, but advice.
The most formative piece of advice I received, wasn’t advice at all — it was a question. A YC partner asked me to think back to a time where I was most fulfilled at work, where that flow state occurred frequently. He then asked me if I knew what it was about that time, or that place which had made it so. We talked through this, and it became clear that there were three themes linking the times I was able to do my best work.
- I cared deeply about what I was working on and truly believed it was beneficial for the world, whether that be individuals or businesses.
- I was surrounded by kind, smart and incredibly talented colleagues where learning from one another was an everyday occurrence.
- I was challenged, solving difficult problems and challenging the status quo; low repetition, minimal copying of others and high calibre execution.
In order to find the above, I had to first break it down. Point number one is somewhat more manageable to come by, partly due to the sheer scale of opportunities available and also, unfortunately, due to the insurmountable number of problems that need to be solved. Interestingly a lot of problems that are seemingly small for one group of people can be significant for another. I was less concerned about finding a new opportunity with a compelling problem; larger companies are typically solving the most prevalent issues we face today. Be it internet connectivity, communication, fair and equitable access to education, simple healthcare insurance etc. The list goes on.
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The second point I believe is harder to satisfy. Product people, particularly designers can be hypersensitive to the overarching driver of an organisation. Some designers are acutely aware of how companies operate internally and how their discipline is viewed throughout the organisation. Poor representation or care for the design discipline may result in low upward mobility, low job satisfaction and the lack of a critical voice in key product decisions. It’s therefore important for designers to choose wisely. We look at cues in order to determine how an organisation fairs on this front, with the best signal being a fair and unbiased review from someone who already works there. Outward communications are also helpful; organisational structures are interesting and unique and clues are everywhere from headcount to the ratio of heads in design to engineering. Not every company is product led— I wouldn’t necessarily expect it. If you can’t find an AirBnB type, at least find a decent, creative environment within which to thrive.
The final point is in some ways a question to one’s self. It’s asking, “Do I find this challenging?” Or, “If I were tasked with solving this problem as the only designer available, could I do it?” Or, “In three-months, could my contributions make a meaningful difference to this problem?” These are interesting questions to ask, if you find yourself being unchallenged by the problem at hand or the mission the company is attempting to achieve, then you’re probably not headed to the right place.
Looking at the above, my options were most certainly narrowed down. Here’s the tl;dr. I was looking for a product or engineering-driven culture, solving a large, complex problem with an incredible team of talented people from all over the world. When it came to reaching out to individuals within these companies, I was fortunate enough to have several referrers, which alongside providing me with the introduction to these teams, gave me their fair reviews.
I won’t get into the interview processes in detail, suffice to say they were long, tough and extremely varied. I can write a seperate post about PD interview best practice if anyone is interested! I ended up with several options, each pretty unique with some representing not only a new chapter in my career, but a new country to call home. After thought and consideration, I chose to accept an offer to join Facebook.
Disclaimer — as I am not a representative or spokesperson of Facebook, the following will be brief!
First and foremost, of the offers I was lucky enough to receive, my choice satisfied the criteria I set out above. To me, Facebook represents a mission, an environment and a challenge which combine to form an opportunity which thoroughly encompasses what I want from the next chapter of my working life.
Marketing guru + NYU professor Scott Galloway talks about the big four tech companies of our generation as the following: Google is god; Apple is sex; Amazon is the consumptive gut and Facebook is the heart. If you haven’t read his book on this, I’d highly recommend it! Galloway’s analysis here is poignant and in our current situation, timely; ‘The heart,’ is the people you love, it’s your friends and colleagues and it’s making new connections in the world around you. I not only resonate deeply with this mission as a person, but as a designer, I am also impressed and humbled by the incredible products that Facebook builds for the billions of people who use them around the world every day.
I’m incredibly excited to start this next chapter — in fact I ‘formally’ started a few weeks ago, slow on the uptake! Thank you to the friends, family, connections and advisors who have helped me to navigate my next chapter. In particular, the YC community and alumni have been an invaluable resource over the past year. I’m also grateful for all those I was able to meet in the startup community (between London, Denver and SF), it’s been the most exciting and adventurous start to a working life that I could have asked for.
Thanks for reading! You can find me on Twitter Fifi Kara
