Jocelyn Goldfein discusses how Facebook built and maintains a culture of openness and humility. The conversation covers workspace design, hiring practices, and the deliberate choices leaders make to keep teams hungry and innovative rather than complacent.
So let's drill down. You said the culture of Facebook was amazing, and you walked in and it felt so comfortable. Can you paint a picture of the culture of Facebook? I mean, you know, imagine we're all visiting.
What would we.
What would we experience?
You would experience unfinished ceilings, concrete floors, desks everywhere. No offices. Not even Mark has an office. And writing all over the walls and posters. And you would see company slogans like, this journey is 1% finished. Or move fast and break things or fail harder. And Facebook was born out of disruption and was born out of trying things and seeing what happened and it not working out and trying again and trying harder and never being. Never being daunted by failure doesn't mean we set out to fail. It just means, like, we're not afraid of it and we're willing to keep taking risks. And the entire environment is meant to keep you from feeling complacent or comfortable or like, we've won. We never want to feel like we've won. We always want to feel pretty hungry and like, somebody could come eat our lunch tomorrow because somebody could. And. And we never want to take it for granted. And so it's the most humble, successful company I've ever known. And it may sound strange to say that Facebook is a humble company, but it really is. We really don't take success for granted, and we think that our users are choosing to be there, and they could just as easily choose not to be there if we don't deliver a great service.
I love the fact that the first thing you said when I asked you to describe the culture was to describe the space. Now, it's something we spend a lot of time thinking about in the classes I teach on creativity. And certainly we're in this really remarkable space here at Stanford. How important is the space to the culture there? And I know I've spent time at Facebook, and it's really interesting, especially with the new buildings. What sort of things did people think about in creating this space?
Oh, it's very deliberate. It's absolutely deliberate. Culture. You cannot just think of the culture you want and then create it. Culture arises from so many small things. Someone actually, a Stanford professor, gosh, I wish I could remember his name, but from the business school once said something that really stuck with me, which is culture is the behaviors that you reward and punish. At the end of the day, people look around and they mimic the behaviors that they think will be successful, and they try to avoid the behaviors they think will be unsuccessful. I think that's really true, actually. And Deeply true. But you've also got to try to show people what behaviors you want and what behaviors you don't want. And the space is one of those things that just sort of sneaks right past all your human defenses and cynicism and processing, and it just goes straight to the hindbrain and tells you. And you understand it on a gut level. When you walk on those concrete floors, you know, oh, we're not finished. We're not luxurious. We're not taking it for granted. We're scrappy. And the open space is another huge one. You guys are all. I think many of you are probably computer science majors. Hopefully you've all taken 106, if not, take 106. But before you leave Stanford, it's the best opportunity of a lifetime. And you know, if you've programmed that, you need focused attention, right? You need flow time. And you know that even small interruptions like it takes you a long time to get back into the stream of things. And so the idea of having programmers sit out in open space at open desks with desks all around them and talking in conversation in foot traffic, that's controversial. For many years, it was the gold standard in Silicon Valley was to have offices. Engineers are housed in offices, preferably a single office, sometimes two people per office. That's what VMware did. And when we took over the campus from sun, it was all offices. We told the builders to actually start by knocking down every wall that wasn't structural and make as big an empty space in the buildings as we could, and then we'd sort of fill it in from there. And why. Why was it so important to us that we would actually sacrifice engineer productivity, which is what we're doing, to have everybody out in the open space like that? It's not density. It's not to save money. Well, it's because one of the key values of Facebook is be open. It's what the product is for. The product is for sharing communication. And that's also really fundamental to our DNA as a culture, too. It's actually that we expect every individual to be informed and in the know about what's going on. And that empowers you to make good decisions. And so we sort of set the expectation that everything's out in the open, everybody's plugged in, everybody's aware of what's going on. And then we put headphones in the vending machines and try to create lots of private spaces where people can hide and give everybody a laptop and have a pretty loose work from home policy. So we do everything we can to mitigate the productivity impact of that openness. But ultimately, every time we have to choose, we choose openness.
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