What is your company culture (and why does it matter)? with Mike Schroepfer

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And like that don't be afraid is sort of really important, but it kind of got cut when we like put on a, it's like harder to put that on a poster. The font gets too small. The reason that's important is without it, it sounds like an imperative. It sounds like your goal is to break things. The goal was never to break things. Again, back to trade-offs. The goal was iteration speed. When you're building products at the hundred million to billion user scale, you've gone beyond being able to guess what your users want or assume what you want is what people using your products want. You have to be able to rapidly take feedback from the marketplace and taking that feedback and incorporating it into the product actually is one of the most important features to success. And so you've sort of embedded that in the culture of like the faster we can do that. I got feedback. People don't like this, need to change it. If it's a six month planning process, you know, you're in deep trouble. And so, you know, and that goes down to, you know, when I joined Facebook in 2008, the way we would make updates to at the time, Facebook.com, you code push. There'd be a major push once a week and minor pushes throughout the week. And so you're like major feature changes would happen on the cadence of, you know, every seven days. And the team set out a goal to like go to what's called continuous deployment, which is now super obvious. At the time, this was like revolutionary or quite controversial. I'd say a bunch of people thought this was a very bad idea because it was literally like the goal was engineer makes change, commits change, test runs, change goes to production to a hundred million users, a hundred plus million users, you know, without a giant like QA process. And that was the goal. Now you don't just do that. You have to do a bunch of work to make that happen. There's a whole bunch of engineering and cultural work that went into making continuous. It wasn't just like, go push it, go, go, go. There was like, it was a focus of we decided to dedicate engineering energy to get to continuous deployment because we thought that that was a way to iterate more quickly. You know, what the engineering culture was when you joined is not what it is today, meaning you've, you did a lot of work to grow and develop it. And you just told, you know, a story about a really tangible, two really tangible changes that you pushed to make in terms of how engineers could take an idea and turn it into something that users could use as fast as possible, which I think was something you and Mark decided was really important relative to this sort of move fast and break things. But I'm curious, like, why did moving from shipping once a week or shipping, you know, once a day to being able to sort of ship continuously, you know, why was that something that mattered so much to you and to him? Yeah. I don't want to overly take credit. I think the org was sort of going in this direction and, and, and others. So I'm not, I'm not going to claim I was the one who, you know, who had the insight. I had to, I had to help implement it and like protect around it. But you know, a lot of it came to this, like deep belief that the speed at which you could learn was, was the determinant of success. And so we would often joke that if I sort of like, if I spent three weeks trying to figure out which direction to run in and then, you know, ran in it versus like just started running and then zigzagged all the way through, like you could get there in this, in that particular domain more quickly. And it's really important. This is the other challenge about cultures is people cut and paste cultures from other organizations. And that's always a bad idea because you have to really understand the culture has to be tuned to the environment and the products you're building. This was a consumer product, lots of users moving very quickly, tastes change, consumers change. We move from, you know, web to mobile. You move from text to photos to video. You like, the name of the game was like, keep up with the consumer basically. In an enterprise context, things are very, very different. You know, if you're, you're launching things into space or a lot of what I do now is like energy, like there are places where you, you want to like measure a couple of times and then cut before you sort of test and iterate. And so you really have to tune the process for the problem at hand. At that time for that product, speed was, was sort of the speed of iteration was, was sort of the name of the game. When you talk about fear and, you know, I think that the, you know, there's ways to combat fear from a cultural standpoint of to like make it safe. The number one thing is, is when people fail, but they fail in a way that was like, you wanted them to fail, which is they tried something. It didn't work. They learned as opposed to they did something bad. Like in the first case where they're like doing exactly what you want, you need to celebrate them because it's what you asked for. And then second is equally important is you need to sort of, you know, people work well within constraints. I need to keep all the guardrails up and I need to build technical systems and processes so that that failure isn't catastrophic for the organization. Right. And that we can recover from it. And we can prevent it. And ideally, you know, uh, that is where a lot of the engineering went into is just an entire process improvement, the building technical systems to make it easier to make changes, but not have catastrophic failures, you know, as a result. This episode is brought to you by Framer. 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So, like, I remember early on that there was a little bit of pride. I think this is in the first year that you were there. There was a little bit of pride in taking the site down. Like, there was like, oh, I shipped code. And we always were like, oh, engineers ship code in their first week, ship code to production in their first week, meaning you could send something out to a user in your first week on the job. And that if you took the site down, that at that time, it was okay because we would fix it. But I am curious, like, that obviously had to change for a bunch of different reasons. And I think you were a big part of shifting the sort of, like, what does good look like? I'm curious, like, some of your early stories about, like, where it was when you started, where you were like, we need to, like, change this or grow up a little bit or, like, push things so that we understand kind of, like, the guardrails that you were talking about of, like, how do we make failure? How do we celebrate failure, but also not make it, like, destroy the business in the process? Yeah. I mean, I would make one twist to what you said, which is we weren't celebrating. Taking the site down was terrible. Like, it cost us a lot of money. It looks really bad. It's very stressful. We're like, it's a product that people depended on. And so we actually took it very seriously. But the way I would always ask the question is, like, it's a little bit more like, how in the world did we allow this one change to take the site? Like, that's the problem. And so the way I would frame it is a learning culture rather than a blame culture. So when something went wrong, engineering made a code change and there was a site issue, user-visible or not, we had this Friday meeting, the SEV review meeting. And that was where all major issues in the site, user-visible or not, were reviewed. And Jay, who ran infrastructure, Jay Parikh, who was amazing, Jeff Rothschild, who predated me there, who I think gets a lot of credit for this more than me, you know, myself would often attend that meeting. And my goal, our goal in that meeting wasn't to be the smartest technical person in the room. It was actually to enforce the culture that when engineer rolls in and says, okay, well, I made this change and then this happened and then this happened. It is a human instinct for someone else in that room to go like, why didn't you do X, Y, and Z? And I can't believe blah, blah, blah, blah. And this is why you're a junior engineer. And I was like, and our goal was like, nope, nope, nope. This is not the purpose of this meeting. We should be asking a different question. Why in the world do we not have systems that would have prevented this? Like, why was this possible? And how do we make this impossible in the future? And what are all the things we're going to do to armor up against this particular scenario so that we never have this conversation again? Like, and that was the goal was like never repeat, never have the same error twice. And we set a culture where people were comfortable talking about their failures because they knew they weren't going to get pounced upon. And the celebration you're probably remembering is, you know, we had a, you know, I didn't clear it with him, so I'm not going to name him, but we had a very famous summer intern who was kind of poking around and this was way early days and like kind of like took a system offline. And we didn't, it was one of these things where, you know, it's kind of like, you know, you didn't know that that popsicle stick was structural, you know, kind of like took it and like, boop, whole site went down. And that was not his intent, but he's just like, oh wait. And so, um, we literally, we have a summary on this, like, and it's kind of like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Why was this little service here keeping the whole site running? Like, and why wasn't there a second one and failover and a whole bunch of other things? And we like named a system of testing after this, this intern X test, I don't want to name him. Um, but, and, and, and then we started instituting that as a process, which is, and then it turned into a much bigger thing, which we called storm testing, where we would literally go in and randomly start taking stuff offline and see what broke. And the idea was we're just like learning in a controlled environment where our weaknesses are so that when something really bad happens, and that started with like, we take a service down or a server down and it sort of escalated into like, we're going to take this entire data center offline to like, we're like, we're simulating the Eastern seaboard, like fiber ring went down and like, does Facebook stay up? And we would just like, we would do a controlled cut of all the capability. And this was just a never ending stream of lessons. It's like, huh, there's just like one random server in the corner here that we were like massively dependent on, but nobody knew until you turned everything else off or we turned that thing off and the whole site went down. And that was just this like never ending learning loop of like armoring ourselves up against like a failure. And so it's just that culture of like testing optimization. And you just have that attitude throughout the whole environment. And it breeds a sort of sense of people sharing information rather than trying to hide it. Cause you're like, if I'm going to get yelled at, I'm going to try to figure out how this wasn't my fault. If I know I'm not going to get yelled at and be like, man, we really should have had this system over here. Or I made the following three mistakes. Like, great. How do we make sure the next intern doesn't make those mistakes? Yeah. So, so I love this as early stories because you're saying what happened and how could it never happen again? So I'm like, that is such conscious development of a culture. Like you and Jay and, you know, Mark and everyone and Jeff, like all being aligned around, this is really important. So like, cause this, this isn't how every engineering team works. Do you know what I mean? Like, first of all, the value of moving fast. Like I worked at Google before Facebook, and this was, I mean, Google has a very different set of values that is around. Well, I would argue it's around beauty and elegance and like shipping the most beautiful products and the most beautiful code and sort of like engineering polish versus like, I would say Facebook always had a value that was much more hackery. It was much more like, let's get it out the door and learn versus like, let's make it perfect. I don't know again, if you agree with all of that, but like, where did, where did this come from? Like, is this Shrep saying this? Is this Mark? Like where, like, how did you even know that this was what you wanted to build? I mean, I think in some cases it's like an accidental confluence of like, so look, you've got to start, most cultures are a direct reflection of the founder. And it's really hard to build a company culture with an involved founder. That's like orthogonal or counter to how the founder feels. And so, you know, Mark embodied a couple of things that I really, like, I think I learned from and I continue to, to, to carry forward. So I think number one, he embodied the sort of like always be learning at an individual level. And so it was sort of like easy to incorporate into the, into the company because it was like consistent. He also, I think embodied the, the sort of, you know, he was not a find the person to blame. He, he was like very unsentimental. You know, we always sucked at celebrating things because we're like, what's the next thing? It's like, oh great, we did this thing. Okay, what's next? And that, but that also meant that he was not like caught up with like figuring out like who was, who was responsible. Like, I don't ever remember Mark saying who is responsible. It was more like, well, what happened? And how do we, like, what do we do now? It was much more the conversation. So if you're, if you've got a boss who like wants to figure out who's the person to embarrass and fire, it's, it's going to be hard to build a learning oriented culture. 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You said, I mean, you went from managing a team of 150 to a team of 30,000. Is that what you said? Was that how many engineers there were when you left? It was, well, I mean, it was more than engineers who were doing product management and other things. And I only know the number because like as I was leaving, I had to like move people around in the org tool and I like popped it open and it was one of these like, oh my God, I didn't, like maybe this was bad on me. It's like, I didn't even know it was that big. And so that number is sort of a little bit bonkers. But it's just like, you have to change at every 10 people, 50 people, 150 people, 500 people, 1500 people. You have to change the way you lead. Not change you, but change the way you interact with the organization to respond to the scale. And if you don't, this is where a lot of people who are like good at one stage, like miss it at another because they're like heavy hand to hand. Like I'm meeting everyone and meeting with them. It's like, you just can't. There's 500 people in my organization. I cannot do one-on-ones with all of them every week. So like this just is not physically possible. I have to figure out how to scale my communications to them. Yeah. What was the biggest team you'd managed before you came to Facebook? It was a few hundred. So I was at Mozilla and I can't remember the exact number, but I think, you know, and this is back to like, look, I, you know, I almost made a big mistake. I had a big ego. I was like, you know, I had this, Firefox had more users than Facebook at the time. And like, I was like, my team was bigger. So it was like a step down to go to Facebook. And like, I almost didn't take the job as a result. And luckily I came to my senses and I was like, slope, not intercept is like, where's this thing going? It's like, I think there's a chance that it's going somewhere interesting. And so the question isn't where is it today? It's like, where is it going to be in five years? And I think of this for people too. I've been lucky to work with people who just like are on this like crazy. And again, back to Mars. Like he's just like learning all the time. And so there's just a set of people who like combine like grit and intelligence and curiosity and humility altogether. And those people are sort of magic because they, they're like, you, you can't predict where they end up. And I think there's products that are like that. Technologies, companies, and people. And like, those are the things that change the world. And that's what I'm just obsessed with and where I try to spend all of my time trying to find the highest slope ideas, companies, and people. So I do want you to tell this one story because you've told me like the moment when you realized that you had built the culture that you wanted at Facebook at scale. Yeah. I mean, I, so, so we had a site outage and, you know, if, if anyone hasn't been in like a very high stress, high stakes situation, you know, when, when, when Facebook and all the products related to it, you know, WhatsApp, Instagram are all down. It's a, it's a really big deal. Like I forget the exact, you know, millions to tens of millions of dollars a minute, you know, in lost revenue. It's really affecting people's lives. Like this is a like high stress environment. And for a thing that runs 24 seven, you know, at a hundred million or billion user scale, like the fact that it's down by definition means that something unexpected has happened, right? It isn't simple because this is, by this point, we've done all the things I'm talking. We've got triple redundancy everywhere. Like, you know, back hose can cut fiber lines. You can crash a truck into our building. Facebook ain't going down. Like, so something really weird has to have happened. And so you're, you're like, it's, it's chaos. Somehow this is always on holidays because our sites are used very heavily on holidays. So, you know, I had more, more than one of my holidays with me hunkered in the back room, you know, on a, on a laptop. And in this particular case, we were running a major theory as to what was going on. And so we're kind of running down the theories. Like, okay, we think it's this. Like someone pops in. I think it might be this. And they like link to a diff and it was their diff. So in other words, like, I think I took this site down. Right. And we like took a look at it and it was like, like a minute. It's like, oh, oh, oh, that's it. That's it. That's it. And so we had the site back up shortly thereafter. And so two things are really important here. Number one is just like actual impact on the business is we probably would have found it eventually, but at least several hours of outages were saved by this. So the actual practical impact of the business. Exceptional. The other thing is just from a human perspective, think about what it takes for someone to say in the middle of a disaster, it's costing lots of money and people are very upset about like, yeah, I did it. Like the only way that that happens is, you know, what's going to happen next, which is like zero blaming and yelling. And actually the reverse. Thank you. You got the site up more quickly. Now let's figure out how this never happens again. So to me, that was a like, okay, we like, we got something right here that people have the cycle. And this is another word I love, like intellectual honesty, psychological safety, have the psychological safety to say might've been me. And that piece of information was critical to our business. And so I think that when you can build a culture that has intellectual honesty and psychological safety, you're going to win because like, it means that in no moment are you doing the wrong thing when you could be doing the right thing, if just someone freaking spoke up. Yeah. It's such a beautiful story. And also you really answered one of, I think the most squishy questions in the world, which I think is why does this matter? You know what I mean? It's so easy to just be like, uh, like culture is an afterthought or culture is for whatever. But you know, the Facebook one is really critical because you, even just at a monetary level, you're talking about millions or maybe even billions of dollars saved because someone was willing to say that was me. So, so tell me a little bit about what you would say to a founder. That's like, where do I start in terms of thinking about the culture I want to build? Yeah. I mean, I would start is like, it has to be authentic to you, right? You can't be performative. So like, I think most founders are bringing something to the culture and it has to be sort of aligned with their interest and values. Um, and then I think it has to be aligned to the problem at hand, right? Am I launching a rocket into space? Am I providing a consumer product? Am I providing a financial services thing in a regulated market? So I think fit for purpose in terms of understanding the culture for the problem at hand and, and aligned with founders. Because if misalignment is where things like the gears grind and you see it when companies are like, oh, we really value teamwork. And then it's like, Hey, how do performance reviews work? It's like, oh, everyone gets individual bonuses. You're like, okay, so you told me teamwork's really important, but it turns out my performance is all that matters