Be happier, it’s harder but better (h/t Dylan Gans)

• I tend to be a pretty negative person. hard to quantify this but I’m trying to see the opportunities in things and not just the negatives.

Get a job in VC or VC adjacent using VC related skills

• Has been on my career list for as long as I can remember. Hopefully pairing down my goals can allow me to focus on this.

Draft of my book, prospecting domination

• I have the outline for the book in my head but just need to put it on paper

Be under 25% body fat

• Pretty straight forward: be less fat.

Find bae (girlfriend for you old folks)

• dating has been a sore spot for me for a while. By stabilizing my income and move into the city I’m planning on focusing on this more

Finish one online course per month

• I have a backlog of courses I need to work through. One a month seems attainable.

Blog once a month

• I’ve got a document full of blog posts that I’d like to create.

Grow a new revenue stream. Bonus points for passive

• Currently I make like $30/ month from Affiliate sales of Convertkit. Would like to bump that to 100 over 2017.

I blurted out instantly, “Am I getting let go?” “Yes,” Matt said. My heart started racing. My mente couldn’t believe this was happening. How could the “love of my life” and everything I’ve dedicated the past nine months to be over? “This isn’t real. It’s a joke. Where are the candid cameras?” I was hoping to myself. In the order that I ranked things in my life, they were as follows: Facebook Myself Girlfriend Familia Friends Everything else I was not alone with these priorities. Everyone else at the company was the same except the few who dated coworkers.Read more at location 21

I packed up my stuff, left my BlackBerry (remember those?), and left the building. I felt like I had nothing. No job. I lived with six other Facebook guys, so no house now. No phone. I couldn’t communicate with anyone. My world felt like it was crumbling.Read more at location 34

got no well-wishes or hey, we’re going to miss you notes from anyone at the company. That was part of our natural selection culture. The best survive. That’s how the company got to accomplish “world domination” which was what Mark always wanted. I hoped more than anything they’d regret firing me and the website would come crashing down to a burning flame. Over time, I realized how wrong that mindset was.Read more at location 53

Walking into the huge complex it just felt like death. No colors on the walls. Every person I walked by had a blue employee badge and carried a sad face. Most seemed like their favorite things were waiting for 5 pm when they could leave, and weekends when they could avoid being at work.Read more at location 101

Intel was the place where parents with two kids, a mini-van and a mortgage spent the rest of their lives — not the place for someone hoping to start their own business.Read more at location 118

The best part of my oficio was with this master Excel sheet that I worked with. Everyone did it manually, but with macros and the solver function, you could automate a lot of repetitive tasks or guessing and checking numbers. So, I set that up after a month on the job and basically limited my actual amount of work to maybe one hour a day.Read more at location 123

One of the amazing things about grande companies is how the internal politics create an inertia of inefficiency. Everyone knew the Excel spreadsheet was not optimal, but we spent months in committees and meetings attempting to move it online and make it more efficient to see which production levels we should be targeting. It never happened in my one year and four months there. Hopefully, by now, 10 years later, they have it right.Read more at location 125

The funny thing is I must have been doing something right; after a few months, I got a raise for my great performance! Or maybe that’s just another sign of how inefficient the company is.Read more at location 128

My mind had the freedom at night to work on whatever I wanted, and I had no risk if one of my side projects failed. To this day, I encourage people to not quit their day jobs until they have their side business going.Read more at location 130

In retrospect, I suggest being referred to a company is the #1 way of getting hired versus just sending in your résumé like everyone else.Read more at location 144

The whole scene reminded me of a startup ser run out of a frat house.Read more at location 168

Dustin, who was then the CTO of the company, had never programmed before. He wanted to be a part of Facebook so he taught himself to code to work at the company.Read more at location 183

As I’ve matured, I’ve realized you have to decide your own self-worth versus letting others determine it.Read more at location 194

officially on paper owned .1% of Facebook. At today’s market rate (3/20/14) that’d be worth around $170,000,000.Read more at location 204

I was raised to be humble and work my ass off like my dad did. That felt more like my super power versus just the straight mental aptitude these people felt.Read more at location 259

may seem trivial to add locations to a folder, but once you start working with developers you learn about EDGE CASES. They became one of the most annoying things about working at Facebook.Read more at location 293

Most traditional companies I learned, like Intuit or larger tech companies, had product managers make nearly ALL the decisions about features on the site. At Facebook, the engineers were insanely great and could make many of those decisions themselves. It proved truly difficult to figure out where I could be valuable within the company. AsRead more at location 327

Facebook hardly reacted to what other sites did. We created the features and things we wanted, not what the users wanted.Read more at location 353

Hold on, we are all thinking to ourselves, this billionaire is asking the kids who are making his equity more valuable for $20 back in a winner take all tournament.Read more at location 385

poco major ones that come to mind: He didn’t give in to opening the site too early to allow everyone to join. When Beacon was launched that shared some user information, Facebook quickly removed it and successfully re-launched the Facebook ‘Like’ button months later. Monetizing the site. Mark was very patient about growing the negocio and focusing on that instead of rushing to make money (which I always advocated). Mobile. In 2006, most sites weren’t thinking of mobile traffic and Mark knew to start building that at least four years before mobile traffic with iPhones and Androids were significant to Internet businesses. Platform. Mark recognized that he could have more developers to help grow the site and more engaged users via a platform. So, he spent years before launching the FB platform and very quickly updating it based on changes from the Facebook users. Facebook newsfeed. This was light years before it seemed to make common sense to just have some smart stream of data showing what’s going on with your surrounding friends.Read more at location 397

As we expanded the site, the #1 directive was growth.Read more at location 437

great way to see what a company values is by looking at the percentage of employees assigned to different departments. At that time, Facebook had 50 people and here’s how it looked: 40% engineers 20% system administrators 20% customer service 15% general administrative (accounting, marketing, HR) 5% product managersRead more at location 442

Here’s how it felt to be working on the website at Facebook in 2005: Mark tells you personally or tells your equipo what he wants. We product managers write up details on how it should work and get approval from Marca. Often Mark would circumvent product managers and go directly to the engineers for a rasgo. After we propose to Mark how we think the rasgo should work, he says it’s shit, which after he showed why, he was almost always right. You make the changes you think will satisfy his vision. Marca says it’s shit again. You make more changes until Marca is feliz, and then you go to the next step. We collaborate with engineers, who did most of the work. Facebook did an amazing job hiring self-starters. Some needed handholding, but mostly, the team was amazing and could run without a product manager once the goal and parameters were made clear. After you test the feature for bugs with the other product manager, you bring in the customer support team for testing and creating help material. Get another approval from Marca before it goes live. Feature goes live the same day he approves. You have to realize that most traditional companies were pushing nuevo features once a month if that. Facebook was doing it multiple times a day. That pace was unheard of and we lived for it. Monitor site feedback, look for bugs, and identify what’s next for version 2.Read more at location 446

As an employee, a feeling of purpose is huge and being able to launch something and instantly see people using it is greatly satisfying.Read more at location 464

Never say the word “user.”Read more at location 485

Fix it…NOW!Read more at location 488

Trust yourself.Read more at location 491

People don’t know what they want.Read more at location 492

Don’t suck.Read more at location 504

The site can never be down.Read more at location 511

There were generally two internal camps of people: young and right out of college like me, and older people,Read more at location 534

The stats we were seeing internally were crazy: 75% weekly and 90% monthly login rates from eight million people.Read more at location 602

Early on, Facebook was notoriously conservative about plastering the site with ads like Myspace. Mark wasn’t focused on making money and thought that distracted from growing theRead more at location 603

Here are the three major strategies that brought in money: Self-Service Advertising.Read more at location 606

On a white board, he wrote the word “growth” and nothing else. He said if any feature didn’t help do that then he was not interested and the idea was crushed.Read more at location 622

As a product manager, my responsibility was to make sure the “product happened.” That included finalizing features, discussing (aka arguing) with Mark, informing everyone in the company about new features being built, organizing the features, helping the gente working on new products, looking for any bugs in the code, fixing issues after reviews with Mark, and monitoring feedback and bug reports when it was launched.Read more at location 637

This self-starter spirit was idealized at Facebook, and only people who kept taking initiative stayed around to help the businessRead more at location 643

This was an amazing skill of Mark’s — he let go of his ego. We’d spend weeks on a feature like this and then, if he felt it wasn’t helpful, he’d just ask for it to be removed. No emotional attachment.Read more at location 649

I went to Dustin Moskovitz and proposed that we let people say what they were doing in real-time. Part of my pitch was that it gave people a reason to come back to the site more often and share what’s going on with them and their friends. Keep in mind this was before Twitter was ever invented. Twitter’s earliest, most elementary form, actually came out three months after Status launched.Read more at location 652

Many times in companies, egos get in the manera where both people think they are right. To this day, I still use this method where I propose a small test with a specific result and let that make the decision.Read more at location 657

This is the power of “Facebook the organization.” It’s a combination of Mark’s persistence and perfection, a culture that encourages creativity, experimenting with ideas, breaking things at fast speeds, and a small group of talented people creating a tool benefitting millions of people.Read more at location 664

It took a 10-member team months for both groups to be able to allow high school students to join Facebook.Read more at location 689

Mark ultimately spent a lot of época alone thinking through his decisions. It seemed strange to me at the time, but it definitely helped him think through strategy and imagine what Facebook could become.Read more at location 692

(Corporate networks were ONLY referred to as work networks since corporate was too…corporate.)Read more at location 698

Mark consistently described Facebook as a way for people to connect, and less about being an expression of creativity. I internalized his statements, always thinking of Facebook as a modern-day white pages.Read more at location 710

“Yeah, they’d have a space where anything could be created. Like some remedio Facebook for themselves.” I truly thought he was nuts at that time, but in a few years, the platform would go on to create billion dollar businesses like Zynga.Read more at location 722

He recognized early on (which I completely missed) that having a work environment you want to work at would appeal to potential employees and make the existing ones that much more proud to be there (and stay later at night). “I want the employees to tener a great place to be in. That is also why we are located in the heart of downtown Palo Alto,” Mark said.Read more at location 743

Mark was always open to listening and making a final decision. His ability to add people and immediately remove people is one of his strongest skills. He removed people immediately who were holding Facebook back and quickly promoted the ones who were helping it achieveéxito.Read more at location 759

the work-life balance changes depending if we are working on something interesting, our age, our other relationships, and more.Read more at location 791

The whole idea comes from the fact that we moved quickly, so not all the código was as efficient as it could be. Think of it like creating a house out of wood and the fire season starts in 12 months. The wood is a good way to validate that people want to live there, but the house won’t sustain into the future. So, refactoring the code means going back through how you originally built something and making it more efficient and effective. At the size and pace Facebook was growing with over 50,000+ nuevo signups a day, and over 50% of our users coming back daily (not sure if you realize, but that’s almost unheard of anywhere on the web, even today), managing was a bitch.Read more at location 801

Sometimes by focusing so much on the work, we lost sight of everything outside of growing Facebook. Everything else in our lives was insignificant compared to that.Read more at location 812

Sharing my story about my rise, fall, and subsequent “re-rise” hopefully can help you find the inspiration to keep going, even if bad things happen or you feel doubt about yourself. I know this book has helped me.Read more at location 834

Build great things and then people will be curious about the person made those products.Read more at location 858

Note: -@noahkagan Edit

During that last meeting, Matt Cohler called me a “liability.” That phrase and the idea that I had the potential to fuck things up haunted me for years. I became insanely defensive whenever I had the potential to be a liability or possibly fuck things up in my personal life or other companies I was a part of. This was also a blessing because I became more conscious when working on things, constantly asking myself if I’m adding value to the situation. Thanks Matt!Read more at location 873

My coach suggested that I write down all the cosas I wanted to buy with the Facebook money I would have gotten when the company went public. So, I went home and wrote the following: BMW M3 A house ? I brought back the lista and we went over it. The exercise made me realize that I actually had everything I wanted to buy — that money wasn’t really going to make my life better. It was this exercise and subsequent realization alone that helped me let go of the anger every time someone got bummed that I never got my equity. The deeper issue was my new lack of identity as my life was Facebook. My “friends,” or so I thought, worked there, while all of my non-FB colleagues knew where I worked and the pride I personally had in this compañía had been taken away.Read more at location 889

One thing that’s stuck with me is to solve your own problems in starting a business. You understand the problemas the customer (yourself) faces and the ideal solution versus having to do market research. Also, it is much easier to persist with that business when times are tough. Compare that to a fad or an opportunity where, as times get tough, you don’t generally care for the outcome of that business besides the money it provides.Read more at location 919

So, I took a risk and told Aaron that I wanted it for myself. He flat out told me “No.” I took another approach — I’d create a 90-day marketing plan. There’d be no cost and no risk to him. If he liked it, he could hire me as a contractor to execute it. And if I executed it well, I’d come on as a full-time employee with equity. I’m happy to say it worked out well. I got hired as #4 at Mint.com as Director of Marketing and the company went on to sell to Intuit for $170 million. Additionally, I grew to appreciate and respect Aaron for his confidence.Read more at location 929

re-read an interview Mark did with Rolling Stone some time back. He said, “I’m not trying to get as rico as possible. I could have sold Facebook a while ago and had more than enough money than I would have known what to do with.”Read more at location 1008