The Untold Story Behind the Facebook Like Button with Soleio

7 Oct 2025 · 33 min
33:00

In this interview, host Dara Lajevardian talks with Saleo (also known as Soleio), an early Facebook product designer and former Dropbox design lead. Saleo recounts the chaotic birth of Facebook’s Like button—originally called the "awesome button"—which spent two years in product limbo, was built as a 2007 hackathon project, and only launched in Q2 2009 after rigorous internal dog‑fooding and A/B testing proved it doubled reads and writes. He explains how Facebook coined the term "product designer" to describe a hybrid role that combined front‑end development and visual design, emphasizing speed, ownership, and the mantra that “code wins arguments.” The conversation delves into Facebook’s culture of rapid iteration, top‑down strategy blended with bottom‑up hackathons, and the importance of data over intuition, illustrated by lessons from onboarding, retention, and the eventual realization that the Like button acted as a social lubricant. Saleo then describes his move to Dropbox, where the culture shifted toward reliability, exhaustive system thinking, and “space‑shuttle quality” software, forcing him to adapt his intuition. He reflects on how modern AI‑native companies must balance speed with trust‑and‑safety, align strategy with core team strengths, and consider whether design can serve as a moat. The interview closes with Saleo’s excitement about Delphi, inspired by a 1985 Steve Jobs interview about replicating human minds, and his belief that building AI‑first UX patterns from first principles is a worthwhile pursuit.

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