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

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2:52Well, I mean, there's a famous one, which is, you know, one of the places you and I both worked, which is both slightly misunderstood, which is, you know, move fast and break things. And the first thing that people miss on this is, like, it's actually a shortening of the full phrase, which was, like, move fast and don't be afraid to break things. 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. I like to say that everyone has a company that raised them. I was raised at Facebook now called Meta.

3:28Facebook is a controversial company, but whatever you think of Facebook products, it was an extraordinary company. Watching it get built was like going to business school a hundred times over. It's important to realize that Facebook was smaller than MySpace when I joined. No one thought it would be successful or matter in the way that it has. I feel like I had a front row seat to watching a company that touched billions of people get built. There are so many examples of companies that had that opportunity or an opportunity like that, but weren't able to deliver on it. So what makes the difference between a company that stalls out and one that gets to$100 billion in revenue or touches billions of lives?

4:09My takeaway from Facebook was that how you do things really matters. In other words, the culture. Facebook had an amazing one. I learned so much there about how you build and lead high-performing teams, how to focus and prioritize, how to make hard trade-offs and decisions. Culture can be kind of a fluffy word, but I want to make it tangible because it was so important to Facebook's success. What is culture? Why does it matter? and how do you craft a culture that produces exceptional results? I'm Molly Graham, and this is Work Life, where we untangle the messy, human side of work. Mike Schrepper, or as I like to call him, Schrepp, is the founder of GigaScale Capital, a climate-focused investment firm.

4:55But I know him from our time working together at Facebook. We joined around the same time in 2008, and he spent over a decade leading the Facebook engineering team. He joined when it was 80 million users and left when it was billions of users, hundreds of employees to tens of thousands of employees. Shrepp was one of the key leaders who forged the culture at Facebook, particularly the technical culture. It was a very distinct and very powerful culture. So today we're going to talk about how he went about shaping that culture, what he learned while doing it, and why he thinks it's so important.

5:33So I want to ask you a bunch of questions about culture because I watched you really build and craft the culture in engineering at Facebook over many years. And for me, culture is one of those words. I call it a black hole word, which is like a word that doesn't have a definition. Or I have a definition and you have a definition. And if we don't decide to define it, then it sucks all the meeting out of the meeting or the room. So I am curious, what's Mike Schrepp for his definition of culture? I mean, I think it's the shared norms and values a group of people have when undertaking an endeavor.

6:10And I think my biggest, like my two things, my little pet peeves of culture are by definition, a culture embodies trade-offs. And I think if you describe your culture to me and you don't describe what the negative connotations are of that culture you've chosen, I don't think you fully understand what those trade-offs are or you're not exposing them. Also, like I live in the rules of three, which is like most humans can remember three to five things. You know, if you have a seven or eight or 12, you know, tenant culture, like it's a fun game where I was like, I'm pick random employee. Hey, what's number seven?

6:42And be like, uh, I think it's, you know, it's like, nope. And you've got to keep it real simple and say like, this is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it. And this is the thing, the cost we're willing to bear. that this is most important to us. And like, we'll do our best to minimize that cost. But we understand that that cost is the con of the pro. And this pro is so aligned with what's important to our business that we're willing to do it. Every group of humans has norms. You can decide to try to shape them or not. So any group of people is going to have, you know, things they do. And I think the job of a leader is like, I think that, you know, setting the goal, making it clear what we're doing, giving people the context of like, what information do they need to do that?

7:28And then setting up the environment in which people can do their best work. And environment is everything from like, do I literally have the tools, software tool, you know, expertise, et cetera. But also do I have the sort of the cultural norms that are most efficient for the way in which we need to work together? And I think that that is a very critical and under underappreciated, it's part why I wouldn't talk to you, like super underappreciated part of like determinant of success of organizations. I agree. Okay. This is great. This is, I want to, I want to dig into a couple of things you just said, because first of all, very much agree with you on the, on the memorability point, you know, and three is my, my number two.

8:04But, but I, but one is even better, but I, do you have like an example top of mind of sort of like a great culture description that embodies trade-offs and, and sort of that memorability and it doesn't have to be one you've built? well i mean there's a famous one which is you know one a place you and i both worked um which is both slightly misunderstood um which is you know move fast and break things and the the first thing that people miss on this is like it's actually a shortening of the full phrase which was like move fast and don't be afraid to break things 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.

8:48The 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 100 million to billion user scale, you've gone beyond being able to guess at 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.

9:27If 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'd 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 100 million users, 100 plus million users, you know, without a giant like QA process.

10:14And 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 So 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 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.

11:06But 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 others. So 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.

11:56And 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 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, very good. very different. You know, if you're launching things into space or a lot of what I do now is like energy, like there are places where you want to like measure a couple of times and then cut before you sort of test and iterate.

12:36And so you really have to tune the process for the problem at hand. At that time for that product, speed was sort of the speed of iteration 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 that's what you asked for.

13:08And 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, that is where a lot of the engineering went into. It's just an entire process improvement that building technical systems to make it easier to make changes, but not have catastrophic failures, you know, as a result.

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16:47So you just named something that I think is actually like, it's like one of the least understood parts of that value of Facebook's, right? Like, and I think this is often true of companies like this move fast and break things and don't be afraid to break things was actually about learning. And I would say, I think you probably agree that I actually think that's Facebook's single greatest strength, which is its ability to learn really, really quickly and move forward. Culturally, I think that's the thing that has made that company so incredibly strong. So I remember early on that there was a little bit of pride.

17:21I think this is in the first year that you were there. There was a little bit of pride in taking the site down. 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?

17:52I'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.

18:25And 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, engineer made a code change and there was a site issue, you know, user visible or not. We had this Friday meeting, the sub 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.

19:07And I, 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, well, 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 or anything. And like 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?

19:42Like, 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, same error twice. Um, and set a culture where people were comfortable talking about their failures because they knew they weren't going to get pounced upon. Um, and the celebration you're probably remembering is, you know, we had, you know, I didn't clear 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 um kind of like took it like the whole site went down and that was not his intent but he's just like oh wait and so um we literally with every young so like and it's kind of like 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.

20:46And we like named a system of testing after this, this intern X test, I don't name him. Um, but, and, and, and then we started instituting that as a process, which is, and then 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 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 simulating the Eastern seaboard, like fiber ring went down and like, does Facebook stay up?

21:29And we were 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. We nobody knew until you turned everything else off or you turned that thing off and 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 sense of people sharing information rather than trying to hide it.

22:02Cause 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 yell that I'd 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, um, you're saying what happened and how can it never happen again? So I'm like, that is such, um, conscious development of a culture like you and Jay and, you know, Mark and everyone, uh, and Jeff, like all being aligned around this is really important.

22:40So like, cause 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, 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?

23:15Like, is this Shrepp 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 fields. And so, um, you know, Mark embodied a couple of things that I really like, I think I learned from, and I continue to, to, to, to carry forward. So I think number one, he embodied that sort of like always be learning at an individual level.

23:51And 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 on sentimental um 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 um and um 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 marketing who was responsible it's more like well what happened and how do we like what do we do now 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 going to be hard to build a learning oriented culture.

24:38So I think this is like a good lesson for any individuals, like make sure you're aligned with the values of the corporate values of the founder. Otherwise, you're going to have a bad time. So we have the environment in which all of these, and this is the thing of culture and corporations, they all got to line up. Like your founders got to feel this way. Exec teams got to feel this way. It got to be close enough. Like it's got to work for your product and your market and where you are, because if any of those things are misaligned, it's going to feel real bad and it's going to push you in a different direction.

25:05That means that you're choosing a personality to work for when you go somewhere and you got to be careful in terms of what you buy into, particularly the more senior you get and how your values align with that. Just to stay for one more minute on these earlier years and deciding what you wanted to build, were there things where you were like, you showed up and you were like, oh, we got to change this or, oh, we got to really push the organization in a different direction? And if so, like, how did you do that? All the time. What are some examples? I'm so curious. Well, I mean, they're not bad. They're just like, you know, I would think of it.

25:42So when I joined the engineering team was, I don't know, a hundred, 150 people. You know, by the time I left, it was my team was in the tens of 35 ,000, I think. And so at some level of scale, you start asking yourself a simple question, which is like, okay, if I spend 50 hours a week writing code or doing this, like, am I gonna, you know, and I, even if I'm a top engineer, I'm still like 1 % of the organization. Um, and so versus what are the things that if I sort of like nudge the org in a different direction, that it's not already naturally going like that's the optimal thing. And so, and usually it's just, you know, um, when I think of a smart group of people who are a little bit off kilter, it's one of two things.

26:25It's either they're missing some data, like there's some context, there's some information they don't have. And if they had that, they would make a different decision. So I think that's like job number one. It's like, okay, they're like, do all the people making decisions have the data they need to make the decisions? And then I think number two is particularly common as orgs grow is, you know, I like to say that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe, which is like, you have a group of people been very successful doing a certain thing in a certain way and the world has changed we have to do things a little differently and like you'd be surprised at how much people will resist that change you know if it involves changing the thing that they've been doing that's very successful there's a whole lot of like wait a second do we really need to do this but this has been working and so there are times when inertia is pushing the organ one direction it was the correct correct way to go and now we've got it we've got a twist and turn um so so i think there was a constant in my head i was always running a loop of my brain.

27:20It's like, what information do I have? What can I give people more information that will help them make better decisions? And do I need to like nudge the organization in a direction because it's like naturally not going there, which also means you have to be very cognizant of sometimes it's like, it's just, it's actually perfectly aligned and you need to get the freak out of the way. So like, you know, the goal isn't to nudge it. The goal is to nudge it when you need to, and then know when you don't and like, don't mess it up. Cause there are just times when you're just like lined up and you're just like, all right, I'm, I'm literally just, I'm fetching coffee at this point.

27:51So how do you, how do you, how do you know, like, how do you know when you need to nudge it? And how do you know when you need it? You just got to like map the state of the world to where we are. So, um, you know, so in the early days, I'll just talk early days, cause it's easier to talk about than, than, than, um, um, you know, is, is, you know, when I first got there, you know, as you said, Facebook had a culture of sort of like 90 % is good enough. And we're not going to spend two years building this like super elegant engineering system. We're going to like take a piece of open source software, throw it, like put it in production and then like just start modifying it.

28:25And, you know, the net result of that combined with like scaling really quickly is we had a lot of like relatively brittle systems when I first got there. And it meant that we were literally burning people out because the way we were keeping the site up is a little bit brute force. It's just like a lot of engineers on call all the time, patching, restarting, doing things. When anyone's been in this environment, when you're like, those hoses out, putting out fires, like, it's not the time to talk about, like, fire prevention, right? Like, the captain doesn't roll out and be like, hey, can you put the ladder down?

28:57I want to talk a little bit about, like, Q2 planning, right? It's like, bro, like, it's literally on fire right now. I think I'm going to worry about that first, and we'll talk about Q2 a little later, right? It's very hard. And so this is an example of a nudge, which is like, okay, great. I have to figure out how to open up some space in this organization to like do some slightly longer term stuff. Hey, if we rewrite this caching system in this way, then that will like remove an entire class of problems that's causing people to get paged in the middle of the night. And thus we'll have a lot more energy.

29:27I'm just like default course and speed is just like everyone's fighting the fire. So lots and lots of other examples. Such a good example because, I mean, one of the things I hear as a pattern in what you're saying is sort of what is the root cause. It's so funny because I was talking to a leader the other day that was like, I'm so annoyed that my team keeps coming and asking me about stupid tactical stuff. We're like, where should the logo go on the bag? And I'm like, why are you asking me? and what your answer to that would be, I'm guessing, is what is the behavior that you have created in the past, like that you have repeated, that is causing people to believe that they need to come to you for that kind of approval?

30:07Right. Just probably at some point someone made one of those decisions and you're like, why the heck is it in the corner? You know, it should be in the middle. And you're like, oh, right, great. I got to run these by the boss. Right. Which is fine if that's what you want. You should just like be cognizant of the impact of the decisions you make. The other thing I'd say about leadership that is very counterintuitive is like, especially as an organization grows, is like, it's the difference between saying and hearing. And I would describe it as like the number of data points that like resolution of data that people have to understand you, like just decreases dramatically as the org gets bigger.

30:43Meaning when there's 10 of you in a room, you've seen me six hours a day. You hear me on phone calls. You kind of like, you get me. When you see me once at a quarterly all hands up on stage, you like if I'm up there kind of like sad and depressed and you're like, oh, God, this is trouble. Right. Because that's all you have to to like go off of. You didn't see me for the other 30 days, 60, 90 days. So it becomes really important as an org scales as a leader. You have to think very carefully about how you interact and communicate with people because they're reading tea leaves on much more sparse data.

31:15um and you know it i would joke for a while that like it you could predict with perfect accuracy if you said like hey shrepp what's up like the next two minutes of this conversation were entirely predictable at any moment i would say this i'm just like because again back to nudging it's like at different points of time it's different things like all i'm worried right now about is reliability like i'm on message all the time again that's back to context of like here's what i think is important and thus I think you should think is important and how we get that sort of communicated. So it's a really hard thing that you're like, I said this thing once, everyone should know it.

31:51And like everyone's busy and doing their own things. You have to communicate very clearly, consistently, and often like three to five times before someone actually hears it. And that's really hard to internalize. This episode is sponsored by Kohler Smart Toilets. The objects we interact with most are often the ones we notice least. Kohler Smart Toilet changes that assumption. What if the most overlooked space in your home could become the most considered? Their Veil Smart Toilet is a sculptural silhouette that isn't just intentional. It's a philosophy that design changes everything. The Kohler Veil Smart Toilet is sleek with a rounded shape that's more like architecture than just plumbing.

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34:46You 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, I mean, it was more than engineers. We were doing product management. 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. It was one of these like, oh my God, I didn't like, maybe this is 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 just like it, you have to change at every 10 people, 50 people, 150 people, 500 people, 1500 people.

35:16You have to change the way you lead, not change you, but change the way you interact with the organization to respond to the scale. um and if you don't this is where a lot of people were 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 it's like this is just not physically possible i have to figure out a skill in my communications um to them yeah what was the biggest team you'd managed before you came to facebook it was a few hundred so i that 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 It's like, you know, I had this Firefox had more users in Facebook at the time.

35:57And 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 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 all together.

36:35and those people are sort of magic because they they're like you you can't predict where they end up um 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 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, so we had a site outage. And if anyone hasn't been in a very high stress, high stakes situation, when Facebook and all the products related to it, WhatsApp, Instagram, are all down, it's a really big deal.

37:23I forget the exact millions to tens of millions of dollars a minute, you know, 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. Cause this is by this point, we've done all the things I'm talking, we've got triple redundancy everywhere. Like, you know, backhoes can cut fiber lines. You can crash a truck into our building. Facebook ain't going down.

37:54Like, so something really weird has to have happened. And so you're like, it's chaos. Somehow this is always on holidays, because our sites are used very heavily on holidays. So I had more than one of my holidays with me hunkered in the back room 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 theory. It's like, okay, we think it's this. Like someone pops in, I think it might be this. And they like linked to a diff and it was their diff. So in other words, like, I think I took the site down. Right. And we like took a look at it and it was like, like a minute.

38:30It'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.

39:11Thank 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. Um, 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.

39:50Yeah, 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, oh, 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 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?

40:23Yeah. I mean, I would start as 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. 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? And so I think fit for purpose in terms of understanding the culture for the problem at hand 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.

41:01And 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. So like you have to align everything. So again, back to my cut and paste, I think what people do is they kind of look at another successful company. You know, this is kind of like the open office thing. It's like, oh, they have open offices. We have open offices. Like, oh, they like move really fast. We move really fast. And it's like, you got to stop and think, what are we trying to do?

41:29Who am I? And because humans are really good at detecting dissonance between what you say and what you do. So if it exists at all, everyone's going to know. And then it's just not effective. I mean, culture is a funny word, but it isn't just work, right? It's you and I both spent our lives building a company that, you know, however you slice it, had a massive impact on culture through society and around the world. I am curious how you think about your legacy and that legacy and also just like looking forward, like how do you think about the impact that you still hope to make at that scale? Yeah, well, I think there's a couple things there.

42:12And I mean, we talked about sort of the pride in the culture. I think the other part of the culture that I'm really proud of is we, you know, tried to create conditions where people could build solutions that work for them. That sounded like a lot of enterprise gobbledygook. So let me like break that down, which is like, we made React and PyTorch and React Native. So React became the most popular way to build web front ends. And then when mobile was here, React Native became one of the most popular ways to build, you know, mobile. And when the AI revolution took off, like PyTorch became the way everyone was doing state-of-the-art sort of AI research.

42:45And I can give 30 other examples, but those are three really big ones across three technological domains. It wasn't just one where like Facebook basically built a set of tools that became sort of the de facto way. That to me is one of the things I'm most proud of. And again, gets back to culture, which is the way we did that wasn't like me brilliantly magicing up these things in advance, but rather creating a culture where people had the freedom to sort of build tools that worked for them. And then like, I had a little bit of taste and an idea of like, Ooh, that one, like people seem to really like that.

43:16Let's like double down on that. And so I didn't have to come up with it, but I had to like create the conditions for it to exist. And then once it does exist, it's like spot it. And basically like, great, let's invest more. So I'd hope that that like tools that help people in the world move faster and like build more stuff is good. I hope some of this culture. And then, you know, what I'm doing with, with, with this experience now is, is, is, you know, instead of helping one company, I'm hoping 25 companies and we're building fusion and next generation vision and battery storage and offshore data centers and, you know, power electronics and all sorts of things and trying to figure out how I can do this sort of at scale across now 25, soon to be 50 companies going after and tackling the most important problems for humanity.

43:57Most people are pretty busy and are making pretty rational decisions. You and I are in very privileged positions. We get to make a lot of choices about what we do, But if we make like the economically rational thing, the cheap thing, then people will adopt it. Because like if it's a cheaper way to power your house or feed your family, of course, they'll do that. And that that is our goal. I love that. Well, Shrepp, thank you so much for coming. This was I love learning. Every time I talk to you, I learn something and I just love this. Thank you. So here's some just major things I took away really quickly.

44:38The first is culture comes from the top. The second is the best cultures make their trade-offs explicit. The third was that it has to evolve as a company grows. And the fourth was that culture is set by what you do, not what you say. But the thing that I was thinking a lot about as he was talking is just that he is and was so conscious of how he shows up as a leader. You have to really be conscious of everything that you're doing and saying because it basically has this downstream effect of affecting what people do next, what they decide, how they show up, how they behave. And he did such a beautiful job of really explaining what extraordinary leadership looks like in terms of trying to send a message and create a culture and reinforce that culture.

45:33That came from all these micro decisions that Shrepp and all those other leaders that he mentioned made. It came from day-to-day decisions that shaped a culture where people were willing to try things and fail. And that's why it matters. It matters because it's how you win. right? You can have big goals, but how you show up every day, how your team shows up every day, how they know what to work on and what matters most is shaped by the leaders at the top of a company. Work Life is a production of Ted and Pushkin Industries. This episode was produced by Isaac Carter and Leah Rose. Ban Ban Chang is our story editor.

46:10Mixing by Hans Dale Shi. TED's executive producer is Daniela Balarezzo Constanza Gallardo is the executive producer for Pushkin Special thanks to Roxanne Hilash, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tansika Sungmanivong, and Ashley Murphy If you like the show and want more, come join the discussion on my Substack lessons I'm Molly Graham, thanks for listening

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47:13If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. Hey, Pablo Torre here. As a sports journalist, I've covered global sports for many years now. And there is one thing that I can promise you. Nothing compares to the World Cup. And this time, it is even better thanks to McDonald's. You have the chance to take home one of nine legendary cups when you order the FIFA World Cup meal.

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