Julie Zhuo: Early Facebook Days, Leaving Meta & Building Data-Informed Products

Hi everyone, my name is Felix. I'm one of the co founders at adplist. And today we have a very special guest with us at adplist Growth sessions, we have Julie. Hey, Julie.

Hi Felix. Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Thank you so much for joining us. Just first of all, your session is one of the most popular in the history of AEP list since we started about two and a half years ago. So we're just super excited and I think very, very honored to be hosting you. Fun fact, it's 2:30am here where I'm at in Singapore, but I am just, you know, I've been staying up the whole day just for this. So I'm really, really excited. So thanks for joining us. Julie.

You don't look it. Felix, you look so energetic. I would not have guessed that. Thank you for staying up. And I'm honestly super honored as well that so many people are showing up here at all different time zones.

Thank you so much. You know, we have been, I think we have got so many mutual friends, so many mutual connections as well. But finally we, you know, we are here on the same stage on this. But for everyone, welcome to Ad Clears growth session. So today we have a very special guest, as we mentioned, Julie. So for some of you who might not know Julie, which I don't think so, I want to introduce Julie a little bit on her background as well. So Julie Zhuo is the co founder of Sundel, a modern analytics tool to help companies understand their story, to use data to make better decisions. And before that she was also the VP of Product Design at Facebook where she has helped scale the platform from 10 million users to over 2 billion users around the world during her nearly 14 years there. Very long time considering for any Gen Zs who are watching this, her few guide to management, the Making of Manager. That's a really popular book. I think a lot of you are here because of that as well. Became an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller and was selected as one of Amazon's best business and leadership book of 2019. I read that as well. Incredible book, Julie, where we're going to talk a little bit about that later. She writes a lot on technology, design and leadership on her popular blog and mailing list the Looking Glass. And Julie graduated from computer science in Stanford University and now lives with her husband in the Bay Area and her three kids. So Julie, super excited to have you here. Such an incredible honor and obviously I would love for you to maybe share a little bit of her story. I'm not sure if I missed anything out, but.

Yeah, no, you. You got it. I mean, that's. That's the story. Let's see. I think one thing I will say to all of you, because I always want to set the context a little bit, is since I wrote a book, and I think I write a lot about design and technology, sometimes people get the impression that somehow I am like a master expert at all of these things. And I just want to reassure you all that I am a very ordinary person. Like all of you, I do a lot of writing in a lot of ways, because it's aspiration. It's like it's letters to myself. It's oftentimes I want to first understand the theory of and the intent. Right. And if you have, you know, designers here in the audience, like, this is sort of like the North Star of where I would like to be. The practice of it is what is hard. And I'm still on the same journey as all of you on how to continue to work on the practice of this every day, whether it's becoming a better designer, a better communicator, a better manager, a better colleague, everything.

Thanks so much for setting the context, Julie. I think you're being extremely humble here, but we're super excited to dive into it. You have worked at amazing companies, I think, at Meta, and tons of things that we want to dive through. So we're going to start off today's session with your early days at Facebook, known as Meta today, and we're obviously going to go more into the future starting from Facebook. So let's start off with something interesting. I've always been very curious, looking at your career from afar, what has been the most fun and interesting part of your Facebook journey? Which period of Facebook was the most interesting one out of the 14 years for you and why?

This is a hard question for me to answer because my initial. What first comes to mind is I think all of it. And I know that's not. Not a super useful or maybe interesting answer, but what I will say is I think it was that Facebook was always, always, always changing so much. And so sometimes when I think about it, yes, it was one company and yes, I very much had that impression, especially towards the latter years, of what are other companies like? I've only ever experienced being at one company, but in reality, because of how quickly Facebook was growing, it kind of felt like I went through a hundred variations of a company. So it was very, very different. When I joined, it was a hundred people it was so disorganized that nobody even really asked me a coding question in my interview, even though I was applying as a software engineer, somehow snuck in there like, you know, to this day, maybe, maybe, maybe I could never actually code right. But, you know, the kind of energy of really that startupy mindset where everybody was really young, we didn't really know what we didn't know. We had a big dream. All of us were just checking in code all the time. Things broke a lot. We didn't always have, like, systems and rules. I love that time. And sometimes when I reminisce with people, I know it was a time that was so special because it felt like we knew that we really, really believed in what we were building, but the rest of the world hadn't caught up yet. And I think that when the team and a group of people have that kind of conviction and it sort of feels like you're ahead of the curve a little bit in terms of no one else recognizes it. It's actually a really, really special time. And I treasure that. But even as Facebook scaled, I have found that I enjoyed a lot of that part. And the reason I enjoyed it, even though it also came with, in some cases, like a little bit of a loss and grief, I think it's actually normal for us to also grieve that new incarnations of a company is not the same as what it was. It will never be the same. Right, because it was a moment in time when we were that small. But new incarnations as a company, scales also present new opportunities. And I got the chance to do so many things that I am now so grateful. I got the chance to lead and manage a team. I got a chance to figure out how to scale a team. I got the chance to write principles and design standards and guidelines and look at many, many, many versions of products, many of which failed, some of which succeeded, but all of them were learnings. And so when I look at that time of 14 years, I felt at every year, I learned more about myself. I learned more about the world. And even though it wasn't like they'd always check the boxes of what, you know, on paper, looks like success, I don't think I would trade that for anything. And that feeling, that sense of constantly being on that adventure and not knowing what will happen and taking some risks is one that I grew to seek out. And that is a lot of the reason why I ended up starting a company and trying to dive into the unknown, especially in a field which, frankly, in the beginning I did not know anything that much about. Right. Data analytics because that. That sense of I'm still learning, I'm still growing, there's still adventures, yet I don't know everything about myself or frankly any of this stuff about building products. I don't always know how to how what the end of the creative process will be. But now I have enough faith that the journey and the leap is worth it. That's what I continue to want to aspire for.

Well, thanks for saying that, Julie. I think a lot of it. I'm sure not everyone can relate to that because Facebook is such a big company. You've been there in the early days, but so much of what you have said about processes changing and just that moment in time, I think it resonates so much, I think, with myself as well. I think. Moving on to the next question, which is also about your time at Meta. Looking back, what was some of the biggest surprise that you encountered during your time there in terms of the platform's impact and sort of like your design work directly having on that? I just wonder. There are so many things like the like button, the newsfeed and acquisition of Instagram and so much more. Like, were there anything that surprised you about your work in the company and its impact?

I think just the fact that the work had as much impact or reach that it did is always a bit of a surprise to me. I had, and I continue to discover new examples of this. So recently, you know, I, because again, I was there, I saw this work. I know myself, I know the people who worked with me. We all just seem like any group of, I guess, young people who had big dreams and knew, you know, how to code. Right. Like which I think everyone here in this audience, many of you guys are in teams that are just like that. And because I was there and I got to see that, I realized very importantly that, like, I don't think that we are really all that special. And I'm not saying this right, I truly, genuinely believe this with every fiber of my being. I don't think that it was the person or the people that were special. I think it was something about the context and the belief and maybe the process or that moment in time. And we were of course, lucky in where we were. But it basically gives me this feeling of like, this can be done, it can be replicated. Other people can do this. Like, there's not some secret manual that me or other colleagues of mine read that allowed us to do that. And so I think that, because I know that it, it in some ways makes me more bold to try new things because I realize everything that is big started out so small. It started out with like two people, a whiteboard, a group meeting, the first iteration. Sometimes the first iteration really sucked. Then, you know, we would keep iterating and frankly, at the time that we're building it, we don't know what's going to work and what doesn't. I have been wrong so many times because I've, you know, again, shipped many, many things through that course. Right. And if you had asked me, oh, like the like button, did you know that that was going to be somehow very. No. No way. Because like, I tried 20 other things and many of them are lost in the sands of time because they didn't work. But I don't think any of us knew it was just a matter of doing and trying. And I'll give you another example. Some of my friends went and they went and they built this thing internally. They thought it would be like a useful thing called React. And then a lot of that got open sourced. And I didn't even realize this until I left Facebook and I'm starting my company, I'm talking to engineers and everyone's like, have you heard about react? We got to build. And I was like, well, wait, what? Like, that was a side project that I thought, you know, Lee, Byron and some of these other people were working on. Like now it's, you know, like it's as you know. So this goes back to like, it is always surprising to me. It is not known ahead of time what it will be. And I think that is part of the joy of the discovery process. You just try and you try and you try. And if there's one thing that I think we did really well at Facebook, we just tried a lot of stuff. We tried, we moved really fast and we tried so many things and people only remember the ones that end up actually being important. But I want you to know there's like a giant graveyard of thousands of things that didn't make it and we wouldn't have. It's not like we were good at choosing. We just tried a lot.

Thank you so much for that. When you mentioned that, what surprised you most is what started so small had become so big, almost used by 2 billion people. And I just want to call out something which is I love the fact that you're using real examples to back up your point, which I think it's a really, really meaningful part of what you're sharing. So thanks for sharing that Facebook we talk about all these experiments that you've done at Facebook. Facebook is a consequential company. I think I came across one of the videos recently that Zuck posted that Facebook has crossed 20 years of birthday. Everyone was obviously very excited about that. But we can also see that Facebook is such a consequential company. I mean, one or almost two decades of social networking defined by almost one company by itself, or maybe just a few companies in that metapp obviously play a huge part, I think, in my life as a 26 year old right now. I mean, looking back, are there any, I would imagine, are there any sort of unintended designs or decisions that you have made that you felt like you might have handled it differently today, looking back at the landscape of social networking or just how Meta operates as a company?

Yeah, it's a harder question to answer because I think the thing that often we who are in the creative space, who are often thinking about building, I think we have to have a lot of respect for what is what I call the unknown unknowns. Because whenever you start a project, there's no way to always know for sure what it is that you could know to make the decision. Sometimes you, you know, there's no creativity without some leaps of faith. And what leaps of faith often mean is you end up trying things later on you will learn a lot of stuff, but it's not ever going to be the case that you could have prepared yourself by knowing the consequences of a set of decisions that beforehand. And so yeah, if I somehow had a time machine, I could go back in time, I could understand the consequences of all of the decisions and start, I probably would. And I think the thing that stands out to me the most is all of the different iterations that we tried on how we think about newsfeed and what is a good set of norms. And I think we got to where we got to just by doing a lot of experiments over and over again and then realizing and adjusting and realizing, adjusting. But I realize that so much of the way because ultimately what Facebook is about, right? And I think that the dreams of all I'm sure there is, it's ultimately about connection. It's about building connections with people. And that is complicated. It's complicated because people are complicated. We are very complicated. And it's not so much like the tool or even the outcome. It's often the feeling and what mental state are we in where something will work or not work. And I feel the same way. It's like the same event can happen to Me. And if I'm in a low mood, I will interpret it one way, and if I'm in a great mood, I will react and interpret it in a completely different way. But I think we learned a lot of this as we came across and again, did all of those experimentations now that we have, I think, a much more nuanced understanding of how people communicate, what is true to people. How might a tool help us bring us closer together? I think those are some of the questions that I would probably go back and hopefully try and implement some of these things earlier than they ultimately were. But, yeah, I think that you can't always prevent usage of a tool in a way that might. That isn't what you intended because, like, the whole point is it's a tool. But there are things, and I'm a big believer of this, that the tools that we create can encourage certain types of more positive interactions than others.

Well, thank you so much for that, Julie. I know it's a tough question, but that was a beautiful answer for that. And, you know, just to sort of like, you know, think about your earlier days where, you know, I don't think I mentioned this yet, but you were also the first intern at Facebook back in 2006. The only time I could remember in 2006 was if I ever watched a movie. Social network, you know, that was when 2004 was. Facebook was created. But what were some of the very pivotal moments in those days for you as the first intern? Like, what did you observe about the early days there? What did you absorb from that? Because it's such a. There are moments in history where I always tell my siblings it is an inflection point in moments of history. I mean, probably when Apple was created, Facebook was created. What did you take from there? 2006, if you could really zoom back.

In that time, the first day that I showed up, there were a lot of engineers working at their computer. Nobody came to greet me because everybody was, like, in the zone. It was fairly disorganized. It doesn't look that different, frankly, from just any group of engineers working out of a building that's playing Daft Punk. I guess there's music at nighttime. A lot of us were young, so we were night owls. So usually the office was still bumping until 2 4, 6am and then it's very quiet until maybe noon or 1, because that was the hours that we worked in those days. But I go back to that idea of, like, you know, at the time, I don't think any of us knew that this was some sort of pivotal moment in history. I think it was just like any day, because really, when you're living it, you don't know it. The story comes later, after a lot of things happen, then you can go back and you can look at the story again. You can rewrite it, you can make a movie about it. You could be like, oh, that was like, must have been. No, but at the time, that's not the feeling. Nobody knows, right? We, we had dreams, we believed, we clearly loved our product. We believed that it was something cool. But we could have been wrong as well. Like, we all knew that. So it's not, I think, anything other than going back to what we were saying before about taking those leaps of faith, continuing to do what we believed in as best as we can, and then letting time do its thing.

Yeah. Thanks for that. And just to wrap up on this, part of your life, part of your career, which is at Facebook, which is more relating to design, you have obviously, I think, set very, very good, I think, practices at Facebook with design, and I think with a lot of practices as well, I just can't help but to wonder, if you were to have look at the. The major three design principles or strategies that contributed to the phenomenal growth of this company that you have helped to contribute, what would you say those three strategies or design principles are where you think would be most important for Meta or even any other companies that wants to continue growing and thriving?

I think the first is try a lot. So the more shots at goal you have, the more goals you will make. And this isn't a game where people measure you by your percentage. People just measure you at the end of the day on how many goals did you make? And so try and do more shots at goal. And that's probably the first principle. The second is reflection. And every time something happens, you do something right. It's not enough to just do like you can do and not learn, because you're not taking the time to reflect and look at, hey, did this work? Did this not work? If it didn't work, why do we think it didn't work? What is our assumptions? If it did work, why do we think, did it work? And so a lot of it comes back to that curiosity of not just being happy with, like, oh, did we get the outcome or not? Check. No. But going back to what sense do we make out of why we got that outcome? Because that is the thing that we learn. And over time, learning compounds. And so the more the. That you can learn from every Single thing that you try, the more that you will become quicker, you will become more knowledgeable quickly. So the rate of growth is, in my mind, far more important than pretty much any variable. And so much of the rate of growth comes from that learning. And so at Facebook, one thing we did very early is we built an experimentation platform. I think we were one of the companies that probably popularized the idea of a B testing. And what a B tests do is they make it really, really easy, this formal way of trying a thing, getting a result, but then having the team go back and say, wait a second, why did we try that? Why didn't it work? Why didn't it work and not work? And then just being able to continue to build on that. The other thing is because at Facebook, we used an internal version of Facebook. It meant we were always sharing our knowledge. So if one team tried an experiment and they learned something, they would post to our internal Facebook, many more people would read that, gain that knowledge. And so the bottoms up proliferation and communication of what we were all learning, I think, helped us strengthen and learn faster and faster. And I think the third general principle is this idea of trusting the process. And I think that I am a big believer, right. As a designer, there's this tension we often face. The first is we would, of course, like everything to be very neat, tidy, adhere to schedules, adhere to deadlines, and like. It is the job of certain people, particularly product managers and management in general, to try and craft a clear way that we can make progress in a fat, In a way that can be observed, controlled, predicted. There is another tension, which is that the creative process often does not follow such a process. Because if you could playbook your way out of getting a hit feature, a hit strategy, every single time, then we would all be in companies that were doing hit things all the time. And that's just not reality. Right? Part of what makes a hit strategy a hit feature, a hit product hard, is because it is by nature unpredictable. You cannot follow a playbook and somehow get the same result. And I think that that is a very important thing for us to recognize and acknowledge. So as a result, there's a tension here, right? And I think the tension is healthy. It's healthy because what we want to do is we want to be in balance. We do want to put some guardrails. We don't want to just keep exploring forever and never have an endpoint or destination. But we also need to bring a healthy respect for the creative process. And when it's done well, then both of These kind of operate as little guardrails against each other. And we get something good. It doesn't mean it's clean. It will be messy. I guarantee you. I've never seen something that came out the end that was good, that didn't feel crazy and messy and chaotic somehow in the middle. But I think that there is this element of like, we can trust that process. Like, we can trust that we may not know what the answer will be. We may not be able to do it, but we can do things like figure out the next milestone. We can do things like make sure we have iteration and feedback and more feedback and more opinions from smart people who care about the end outcome the same as we do. Probably pushes the work to be better. We can understand a general thing like talking to customers and understanding the people we're building for. That always grounds us somehow. And so these are elements of the process that we can have faith in. Again, I can't promise what the end result will be, but. But I can say that having seen enough cycles that doing more of these things, getting more feedback, talking to customers more, trying more iterations, knowing that it doesn't have to be perfect, but as long as we keep learning and going, we eventually will get to something good. Have faith in that.

Wow. Thank you so much for that, Julie. So to sum it up, first one is try a lot, second one, reflect a lot. And third one is just trust the process because things are going to be chaotic and you should just trust the process. So thanks for that. So I think it's such an interesting thing when you talk about trusting the process because results are not always predictable. So I want to move on to obviously, I think this topic where you are so deep into right now at Sundale, which is data and design. I read one of your blogs where you talk about the common misconceptions of terms and that company uses, which is being data led or data driven versus being what you call being data informed. I don't think a lot of people have read that, but would love for you to maybe share a bit of context as to what are the different terminologies and what are the differences as well.

Yeah, before I do that, I want to just paint a landscape because I used to think this way and I imagine this is maybe a common mental model, which is that on the one hand you have design, which is very subjective in some ways. Right. You have people who are focusing on maybe an experience or a feel and that it is using a different part of your brain. There's an element of aesthetics. There's an element of, like, what does this convey to people? Which is very, very hard to capture in a very tangible, measurable way. So that's like, one side, and on the other, you have maybe people in data who are like, numbers. It's very precise. There are metrics. They go up and down over 3%, 5%, week over week. And often this can feel like they're two ends of a spectrum and that there is a little bit of attention there. Because, of course, I've been on both sides of that equation. I have been with people who are like, we're being too metrics oriented. What happened to caring about people and their experiences and what's happening? And on the other, I've also heard, wait, we just seem to be going with our gut. What happened to having a sense of, does our work or ideas have impact? So I just want to paint these extremes because I want us to recognize that, like, neither of these extremes are really where we want to be, Right? So where we're talking, we're really talking about where in the middle should we be? Like, are we too much here? We should lean this way, Are we too much here? And we should lean that way. And the answer is going to differ from team to team and again, what the context is. But in my mind, I feel that design and data are actually quite unified by a very important trait. And I think that trait is a desire for truth. So the best designers I know, the best data people I know, are absolutely obsessed with this idea of what is actually happening, what is actually happening in the user's home, in their minds, when they are choosing to use this product, when they're going through these steps, when they actually either use the feature or not. Like, we are obsessed with trying to know that we wish we could read minds. We wish we could actually have all of that context. And what is that? That context is data. That is how I think of data. Data is context about what is truly happening. And if you want to make good decisions for the future, you want to be able to shape your product such that it is better at directing people towards one type of behavior than others. You want as much context as humanly possible. And that is what I believe. And data wants that, like, data people want to provide that context so that we can make better decisions. So at the core, there is really not dissonance here on what it is we're trying to do. So where we struggle sometimes is in the interpretation and in, like, where are we on a particular use case, on a particular Metric, Right. So we're kind of usually debating the concept, but I don't want this to be sort of like a fundamental, like, are you with data? Are you with design? I think that's totally the wrong framing. I think it's more like, okay, let's understand that data is just context. It's trying to help us provide a lens on the truth. Now the reality is there's no way we can totally get all aspects of the truth because we aren't mind reading machines. Maybe one day we will, we will invent something and then like all designers will be like, hooray, we, like now know everything. We can make better decisions. But I think we're, we're far from that. So often what data gives you, what these numbers give you, is some approximation of some facet of what is happening. And that approximation could be single dimensional. Let's imagine the truth is I have this mental model which is often the truth of what's happening with all of these hundreds, thousands, millions of users using. Whatever it is we're building is very, very complex and we can't see that all the time. Let's imagine it's like a very multidimensional thing. Maybe it's 12 dimensions. Just pretend. Now, we're humans, we only see in two dimensions and we can kind of wrap our minds around three dimensions. We can maybe a little bit wrap our minds around fourth dimension with time. But the higher the dimensionality, the less like we can actually fit it into our minds. And so what we do with data, with any metric or any aggregation is we're sort of like taking some aspect of the truth and flattening it. Like, you know, you have a 12 dimensional thing, you're flattening it to like two or three dimensions. You're like, here's a view of the truth, but remember, it's just a view. It may not be the view is true, but it may not tell you all of the stuff that you need to know. And therefore we need to be a little skeptical of any metric, any number. Right? It's not that it's false, you know, and that it's lying. It's just that that lens of the true 12 dimensional space may or may not be valuable enough for the purposes. And so if we keep this in mind, it helps us be able to, I think, contextualize any metric, any number. Right? So this is sort of where I go back to. These things are not fundamentally different. I like the term data informed because I think that's generally what we're trying to do. We're trying to make decisions. We want as much contextual information. By the way, talking to users and customers is a kind of data that often can be married with, okay, but what are people doing? Are people clicking on this thing more or that thing more? Are they coming back after they click this feature? So that's all information as well. So what we want is, we want is to try and triangulate a picture from all of the data, research data, metric data, analytical data, so that we have a good foundation to make these bets. And remember, we're still making product bets. I don't like necessarily the term data driven because it somehow implies that that data will drive the decisions. And remember, data is only ever going to be a fraction. Now, the more data we have, the better. Sure, yes, we can trust maybe that it gives you a higher dimensional view, but we're always going to have to take a leap of faith. And if you want more convincing why data can never be certain, I go back to. Everything we talk about, when we talk about metrics or numbers, is predicated on two very important human decisions. The first decision is what actually matters. So why are we even doing it? What's the mission? Right? What are we trying to get humans to do when we build a product? What's the change we want to see in the world? That is always going to be a human decision for a company, and that no data can tell you what you should care about or what your mission should be, or what should matter to you. That is a human decision. The data can then support and help you get more context about that. But you have to make that call. That's the first reason why no data can never actually drive any decisions. You first have to start with, what do I care about? The second human decision is on what time frame am I willing to wait or see things through. Now, very practically, we're humans. We generally have a lifespan of what, like 85 years? So usually for most of us, if something's not going to happen in the next hundred years, we probably don't care that much about it. We don't have the patience to see that through. And again, that's true with every single decision we make. But the reason that matters is because if I said, felix, tomorrow I need you to make a design for whatever for a quiz app, and I absolutely need it tomorrow or otherwise you're gonna, I'm gonna like, rob your house. You can do it. You're gonna come up with some design and it's gonna happen, right? But if I Were like, felix, like, I really want a design, but I. It's gotta. It's supposed to sort of help our users. Over the next two years, you're gonna approach it with a very different strategy. So it just like, I mean, how much time you often give to the meaning of the story and how much patience you have to see something through is also a human decision. By the way, no piece of data can tell you that. These are two things that, again, where we go back to it. Data cannot help us answer those. We have to choose. Then in the context of choosing, we can now use all of this other contextual information to help us make better decisions. That I strongly believe.

Well, thanks for setting that straight. And I think a lot of what you say is that there's so much that data can tell us about a certain part of a story or product or service, but at the end of the day, it's still a human decision that has to be made. It's still a human element that is involved. Which brings me to my next question, I think, with regards to what you've just said. How can we ensure that a lot of these data, informed decisions that we make, whether from a leadership position or from a designer position, actually also captures a sense of empathy and also emotional experience. Because I think if we let data kind of just inform us all the way, then it kind of misses out on, I guess, on the more emotional part of things. How do you continue to keep that there? Is there a system for that? Is that a culture? Or. I just wonder.

Yeah, I go back to what is it that data can help us do? Right? So data can provide context. It's sort of like looking at the past and using the past to give us a grounding for what we know. That said, it doesn't design the future. So often you should think about it as, like, diagnose and build context with data. But in order to actually invent, in order to actually create, you're going to have to think about design. And so these things kind of go lockstep, right? So now you design a thing, you launch it. Okay, now data can help you understand a little bit more of did it work? Did it do what we were going to do? What's the reality of how it's now behaving in market? But with those learnings, you go back to that doctor. Okay, cool. We diagnosed that. Another round. Now let us. Let us actually treat the future with that design and that invention. And so that is kind of how we think about it. So in that frame, the idea of like people's experience or what's the feeling we want to create, or what's the purpose of what we want to do for humans? That continues to be a part of what we should discuss. When we think about what a great invention looks like, that continues to be part of the conversation because again, we diagnose with data and we treat with design. One is the past, one is us continuing to move towards the future. Of course, any future we try eventually becomes the past. So then we can learn from that. Cool. Go back in, go back in, go back in.

Thanks for sharing that, Julie. I love your saying of diagnose with data and treat with design. And it almost seems like everything maps back to what you said, which is the intention. What are you trying to solve? What are you trying to make people feel? And is that intent that shouldn't be lost as data comes in and the solution comes in? I haven't really thought of this question before this fireside chat, but it came up while you're talking. I've been in a couple of meetings where designers who design something where obviously it has strong intentions with great user stories and everything, but doesn't have the data to back it up. Or even in some cases where we have seen CEOs or just founders or just rather just PMs as well, that comes and say, hey, look, where is the data for this? And if there's no data, we're not going to lean in and commit fully into this. How do you look at those situation where you don't have much data to work with? Would you say that we should just run fast with it and how do you look at those situations?

Yeah, I go back to. I think it's a great point you brought up, which is, look, if you do stuff fast, it honestly doesn't matter as much if you have a lot of think about it this way. If we have let's say two weeks, there's team A that's going to try 10 things in two weeks, and team B that's going to try one thing in two weeks. Then obviously if we think we can only do one thing in two weeks, we're going to build. We need to be like, well, let's be really sure because we can only do one thing in these two weeks. So let's like make a better case for it. When you were like, we could just move fast and try all 10 of these things in two weeks, you kind of lower the bar for trying something. You don't need as much evidence. And so I go back to like, one strategy is if everything just becomes faster to do, then you can take more shots at goal and you don't need as much evidence for every single thing that you try. Right? So that's one over overarching strategy. Now, it still is the case that certain projects you just can't do, you know, they're going to take a lot of time and investment. And so if it's going to be, let's say a three month type of project, a six month project, then rationally, we kind of do want to make sure that this is a good use of time. Because we all would, all, all of us would hate to do six months on something, launch it and have it be inconsequential. Like nobody wants to be wasting six months of their time. That will happen from time to time because again, we're not perfect at predicting, but we want to be a little bit more intentional, right? I think any reasonable person would probably say that, like, if this is going to take six weeks or six months to do, let us be a little bit more intentional about, like, what are we going to get out of doing that? Right. I think even everybody who's on that team would want that. And so what I often think a designer can do, if you're going to pitch something that is a really, really big idea, it's going to take six months, is, wait, is there a way we can break down some of these assumptions that are big and test them out in a smaller way? And often what that forces you to do as like a designer or builder is you need to actually get really good at walking back. What is your chain of assumptions? And so I wrote an article about this recently in my blog. But this is a concept that for me has been very powerful, which is that often when I'm advocating for something, right, let's say I'm looking at your design. Felix and I have some comment to make. Like, I think this is too complicated, it's too cluttered. Why don't you try and remove some of the elements that might be what I prescribe, but underneath that is an entire chain of assumptions. First, I must be assuming that for the type of user we are designing for, they want fewer things on the screen because they're going to get confused. Is that true? First of all, who is the user that I am designing for? Is it true that these things are all less important and can be hidden behind the screen? Is it true that they would prefer just to see? There's all these things that I'm generally assuming about When I say do this and if I can walk my way backwards and actually pose all of those assumptions as questions, often what happens is I start getting ideas of like, oh wait, if the question is, does this type of user want these seven features right off the bat? Or they only care about two of these features more than the other five, maybe there's a way I can go and validate that. Maybe I can just Go talk to 10 of those users, or maybe I can do a much simpler thing to try and get at the answer without investing all of this time into this giant redesign. The more you can break up all of the ideas you have into what is the underlying assumption? And is there a way to get faster signal on the assumption, the easier it is for us to have that conversation. Because again, it's not like I don't want us to look at it as like, oh, the PM said we can't do this until no, reasonable people don't want to spend six months on a thing that isn't going to work. You don't want to do that either. So how are you going to go and prevent that? Walk your chain, come up with ideas and let's see if there's easier ways for us to get more of that context and certainty.

Well, thanks for that, Julie. So it really seems like it's what you're saying is really breaking down to the most fundamental truths and assumptions and posing the assumptions as questions and then seeing if there's a simpler way that we can approach it, understand if it's actually an assumption or truth, and then workbook from there. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. It's super clear and definitely love the way that you really explain and break that down so simply. We're coming towards the final segment of the day as well and obviously we'll go into all this Q and A. But I want to touch a little bit about your current state of your career, which is being the founder at Sundel. I know that you spent some time across US and India specifically. I think some of your team members are there as well. But I just want to maybe start this part of your career's question with One thing that really caught my attention throughout the Fireside chat today is the fact that you spoke a lot about trying a lot of things. You sound very experimental and obviously I think you practice being very experimental as well. Obviously. I think the culture of Facebook's early day of move fast, break things seems to run super deep, which I actually really appreciate that as well. I think some people don't these Days. And also your emphasis on trust the process and the patience to see through certain experiments and certain things. I think that as well, it's super obvious with the work at Facebook, it seems like a lot of things are also super long term vision. So I just wanted to kind of call that out. And I know that you have interacted with the great leaders at Facebook, invested in a lot of angels as an angel investors. You have invested in a lot of startups as well, like Galileo AI, which we'll talk a little bit about that. I think it's in one of the Q and A. You know what, being a founder of Sundale right now, first time founder, you know what has surprised you the most? I mean, being in early days of Facebook and then now you're a founder, what has surprised you the most?

I think what surprises me is that it's like so it's freaking hard. Like it's freaking hard to start something. But I also am so happy that I'm doing it and I would love to see more people take that leap. I really do believe that the world needs more founders and especially founders of all types of backgrounds and mindsets. Right. I think that often you see this profile of a founder who maybe like, was this very, you know, get it done. Like, like very like type a type of PM person who goes and becomes a founder. And I love to see actually more and more of people who come from like that creative or design background go on and build companies. Because I just think that you build kind of a different, you know, the company in a lot of ways is a reflection of how you think and who you are. And I just think the world could use more of that. And I love, you know, for folks who have probably seen like Brian Chesky from Airbnb's talk at the Figma Design conference last year, he also spoke to this sentiment. And it is one thing. So if anybody in the audience out there, I hope that, you know, it doesn't have to be now. Right. For me, I like thought about being a founder for like decades before I finally pulled the trigger. It is very, very hard. It is way harder than I imagined. But it is also way more satisfying and fulfilling in the, in the things that it taught me and the way that it helped me evolve and I think in a lot of ways become a better person. Wow.

I mean, you thought about it for 10 years and you finally put the trigger about maybe two years ago. Like, was there something that triggered you to kind of just make the leap of faith?

I mean, you know, it's really like I loved, I kind of laughed a little when you said that you thought I was experimental person. I am a very risk averse person. Okay. I'm a very risk averse person. I have learned to in some ways maybe dial down the fear of a little bit. But I think that when you grow up from a background of scarcity, sometimes all you seek is stability and just, you know, not having to worry and having like a good job and you can put money on the table and pay the bills and all of that. And I think that's all I wanted for a really long time when I was young because that's just to me, the dream that my parents had instilled in me. And it's only after certain of these things are checked off in my life that I was able to then probably listen a little bit more to my own voice and reflect a little bit on like, wait, what is it now that I want to do? And so this idea of like taking more risks is actually a very long standing kind of narrative in my own life or what I want. And so if you ask me the question, why did you start your company then and not when? I was too scared to do it when I was 20, I was too scared to do when I was 30, I was too scared to do When I was 32. It just took the time that it took until I think I was not scared enough to do it. And so that I think is maybe so. I have a, I have a huge respect for people who take the leap. Right. Again, no matter what happens. Because obviously we know that there's so much luck. There's so, you know, most companies don't make it. I'm still in the middle of it. I don't know what's going to happen. But still the process has been transformative for me. I wouldn't trade it for anything. And I like to believe that that is true no matter what is the outcome of what this is.

Well, thank you so much for sharing that. It really brings back to what you preach and what you mentioned. Trust the process and just learn from the outcome and learn from whatever that the process has to offer. Thanks for sharing that. And I'm curious also, when we talk about your transition from a big tech company to Sundel, what do you think remain true in terms of practices, in terms of culture, in terms of running a company? Are there things that remain true at your time at Meta versus Sundel today?

Yeah, I think about companies a lot. Like, I think about people, like they all have different personalities. There's no one right way to be a person. There is no one right way to be a company. In a lot of ways, what we do as people is we try and understand what's true to us. We try and understand a little bit more of like what do we love, what do we not love? And then how do we use the things that are our gifts and our intentions to go out and live our lives. And I think about that too a lot with the company. And so in a lot of ways Meta has been hugely influential because like it, you know, my co founder and I both came from Meta and we both shared that experience in that language and much of it was very much what we loved. And so some of. And so as a result, it's become part of who we are and how we think. And so when we start a company, a lot of that gets translated. But of course we're also different, right? We're different people than Mark Zuckerberg. And so there's going to be elements that are different because a company is in a lot of ways a translation of the personality of the people. And when you're very small, it's really frankly the founders and then it's the early team and now at this point it's the whole of the group that we have assembled. It's the kind of, it's like maybe a distillation of like what are all of those personalities and beliefs, but one of a couple of the shared beliefs that are very similar between what we experienced and what we brought to Sundial is a very, very deep desire for it to be bottoms up, for it to have deep relationships, for it to, for the whole to be, or maybe the let's call it the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. Now again, I'm not, I don't say this as judgment, right. I know that there are companies that are run very top down that are hugely successful. Apple is one such company that comes to mind. It's a very different culturally than Meta is. But I didn't grow up at Apple, I grew up at Meta and I'm used to that way of working. And so when I start my own company, like you know what I bring what I know and what I am used to to that context. And so I have a very deep belief that I want us to, at Sundial to be, I want us to, to have ideas come from everywhere. I want people to be able to be truthful to everyone. I want people to call me out when they think I have a Bad idea. Or I. Or I, you know, made a mistake. I want to feel like I can do the same to other people. I want us to understand each other as people and respect the things that we each bring. You know, because all of us do have unique knowledge, unique skills that we bring to the table. And I want us to know that about each other and respect that and utilize that to create a thing at the end of the day that is much, much better than any single one of us could have created. So those are some of the things I learned from Meta that I want to bring into Sundial. And I believe that with all of my heart.

Well, thank you so much for that, Julie. That definitely sounds like the dream company that any one of us would want to be a part of. And fun fact. In fact, I think one of your talks actually inspired me to apply for Facebook right after my military service. I actually got into the final round, but because of COVID I didn't get the flights to the Bay Area, but I would have been in Medi and life would have been very different.

But Archie, look at what you're doing now. Felix, this is incredible. I mean, ADP list and what you've built. I know you're still also, as a fellow founder on the way of that journey, but I think we can all appreciate that it happened the way that it happened.

Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, definitely, you know, staying up at 3:30 right now, 100%. I love the journey and thank you so much for that. And just, you know, last few questions, I think before we, if you have some time to go into the audience question. I think it's so, you know, unique that you really talk about sort of like your time there. And, you know, it almost feels like whatever that is familiar could also look very different, you know, from someone from Apple. Like if they grew up in Apple, that is, what familiar. But it's also, you know, different from that. And you talk about difference in terms of skill sets and expertise. I want to ask you something because you spent a lot of your time in the U.S. obviously you grew up there, you know, in the western culture. And now that you spend little bit more time in India, you know, what have you observed in terms of, you know, the difference or the similarities between Bay Area and being in Bangalore or just being in India, you know, like, what have you learned learned about those different places and what surprised you?

Yeah, I think from. I think the things that are probably. I actually think everything is in some ways more similar than I imagined. And then of course There are differences. I'll speak to both. Right. What's, what's more similar than I imagined. Like, honestly, I don't think that the talent, the raw talent is really any different in any of these networks or worlds that I'm a part of. Like you have brilliant, smart people, you have very excellent engineers, designers, etc. In all of these places. You can find them in all of these places. And, and so there's, you know, I like, I think our team here that we have built, I don't consider frankly that different from a skills, just smarts, just capability, talents wise than any team that I've been a part of at Meta or that I've seen in other contexts. So that I will just say outright, I like talent is everywhere, skills everywhere. It is very global. And so I don't want people to feel like they're constrained. Right. Sometimes people like mythologize, like Silicon Valley as somehow there's something more here. But what I will say is different and what I also appreciate about Silicon Valley is I think it's more of like an attitude and a belief. And the key difference is this attitude of both abundance rather than scarcity. So it kind of comes from this. Like you generally believe things are going to be better, you would generally believe things are going to pay off in the big, like the long run. And so there's this. So maybe it comes from confidence or maybe it comes from, but it's an abundance mindset as opposed to scarcity mindset. And the difference in my opinion is that it comes into behavior. So as an example, in Silicon Valley, like I can just call up anyone and it's very common, it can ask for a favor and people are like, sure. And many of, many people will say yes, not everybody. I'm not going to, you know, don't want to pay, but a lot of people will just do it and they don't expect anything in return because it's not because we all believe that in the future these things kind of take care of themselves, right? So if I ask for a favor, it's not like they're keeping track and like, oh, you got, you owe me a favor. It'll be like, things will work out. Like, people have done favors. Me, I will do favors for other people and somehow it'll all work out. And we kind of have that again. And it's this because it comes from a belief that the future is always going to be bigger, wider, more abundant than the past. And I think it's harder to do that when you in a scarcity mindset. Right. And so I think that, you know, one of the things I do witness is like people are maybe a little bit less open to asking for favors or maybe there's a little bit more of like a respect of, oh wait, my manager says this, I must listen to them because somehow they are more knowledgeable and important to me. And I'm not saying that, you know, that often happens too in the Western culture, but I think it happens a little bit less in Silicon Valley. I think there's also this sense of like all of us are here, like maybe, yeah, you're the CEO and I'm just starting out, but one day I'm, you know, like we're all going to still, like we're kind of on that equal playing field. And that happens a lot. I think if you look at Silicon Valley, like even people who are extremely senior and you're like, wow, aren't you like a legend? They still have the same kind of like seeing let's say a 22 year old as like kind of an equal and a peer because they know that hey, this 22 year old will one day be like an older and learn these skills and they maybe become somebody who is like the next, the founder of the next billion dollar company. And so like all of these things are possible, right? And so there's a little bit less of that. True, you know, that, that like, oh, gotta respect hierarchy, gotta do what the boss says in that zone. And I think that perhaps in other companies in India and China, like that's a little bit less common. Now that said, again, we're trying to build our company very much like what I'm used to in the model. But so anything can be, it's just a set of beliefs, right? And so any company can go in and I think just at least if you're intentional about the set of beliefs that you want to have, all of this can be changed.

Well, thank you so much for that, Julie, and I 100% agree with you. My first time to the Bay Area was actually in 2018, right after my high school. And the only question that I seek coming from Singapore and being the first time in the US was why was it that the Americans in Silicon Valley was able to create the global companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon and stuff like that right from that place? And why is it that we have only been able to create regional companies at best, sort of like Asian companies, not global. And I think you're absolutely right about talent, about money is almost international as well. It's almost like the ambition, that sense of abundance. I think it's somewhat missing as well. Almost still missing today, by the way. A few years down the road, we haven't improved much. But thanks for sharing that. That's really, really interesting perspective. Now, Julie, if we can, we will pick up two questions, two of the top voted questions and then before we wrap up today's call. All right, so we have the first question by Kevin McGrath. He is a senior experience designer. Hi, Julie. Thanks for the time. Given the rise in popularity of UX product design and recent layoffs, creating doubts for many, what advice do you have for managers and mentors? It feels harder than ever to support each other in our community.

It's a really great question. I know that it is very tough out there for many people who have been going through layoffs. It's obviously tough for managers. It's tough for everyone, right? People who lay off, people who didn't get layoff but have to say goodbye to a lot of peers that they love and of course the managers. I think the most important thing that I would advise is just being honest and real with one another. It's okay to feel whatever feeling you have, it's okay to express that doubt. I think that there is this maxim that I generally believe in that you know, for at least a great team and, you know, maybe you don't feel comfortable or safe to do this, but even then I would maybe still encourage that, which is that if you want to worry, never worry alone. If you have a doubt, if you have a worry, can you talk to somebody about it? Can you share that with your manager? Can you do it in a way where it's not necessarily like an expectation on them, but it is more like an opening up for you. So that requires a leap of faith, right? It starts with I feel X. And same with managers. Sometimes you feel like as a manager, as a leader, you need to come up all buttoned up, you need to have all the answers. You can't express doubt. But I have found that when I am more real with people on my team about what I'm worried about, what makes me stressed out, they actually feel more connected to me. They don't. It's not, it's the opposite of what I fear, which is like, oh my God, if I don't, if I make it seem like I'm worried, they're going to lose motivation. No, it's usually the opposite. If I'm more real and truthful and honest, it actually helps us become more connected to one another. And so in all of these cases, as a manager, as an individual, the feelings are what they are. Let them be. Let us share them. In the spirit of honesty. That's a risk. I'm not saying every single time it's going to turn out well, but I think that in the spirit of we are all humans relating with one another and trying to make the best that we can of uncertain, difficult times, I think that honesty is, at least for me, has been the most productive thing.

Thank you so much for that, Julie. And yeah, just sum up, you know, as what Julie has said, which is, you know, really, if you are going to worry, don't worry alone and be honest. Be honest with each other. With, be honest with yourself. Thanks for that, Julie. The next question is by Sherry. I think this is a great question as well. Sherry Wu is from San Jose. She's a senior project manager. Hi Julie. Super excited to have you. You talked about AI before and invested in Galileo. How do you think AI will change design in the next three to five years?

Great question. My feeling on AI is probably how I think about a lot of other great technical logical leaps, which is that ideally it helps us do the parts of our work that are the pieces that maybe we don't want to do. Right. And so usually what happens in the history of technology is we always worry that it's going to take away certain jobs. That is true, it does, but it also creates more. It creates more opportunity for us. And so I don't think that when I think about design. Right. And again, it depends on how you define design. I have always thought of design very, very expansively. I think I define design as anything where you have an outcome that you want to try and influence and direct towards and you need to figure out how to do that. And so that's very, very general. But as a result of that very broad definition, I think of practically everything that I do in, in my day to day that I find enjoyable and fun and challenging intellectually as a kind of design problem. I personally think of org like, hey, what role should we have in our team as a design problem? Right. I think of. So it's to me, it's not just like pixels and boxes on a screen and all of that. Like I think we, if we think about what design is a little bit more expansively, I think I hope what we will see with AI is that it can take away pieces of our job, of the job of designing and creativity that are more manual, that are more maybe inaccessible because it requires A lot of depth of technical knowledge and it makes it so that more and more of us can be able to create. I think Steve Jobs once said that often a computer is like a bicycle for the mind. And what that always meant to me is that all of us are capable of immense creative expression and freedom. And I think that a lot of what human potential looks like is every single one of us being able to take all of that creative potential and energy and having that be translated to life. And today it's hard because a lot of things get in the way. Like if I have an amazing idea right now, it's like, oh, can I, can I build it? Do I know how to code this thing? Do I know how to get the servers? The more we can remove some of those obstacles because we've developed better technology, the more we probably will have more of these creations and expressions of each of our individual creative freedoms out in the world. I think that's a wonderful thing. I think that ultimately that is still how I think about design. While the format may be different, will you spend all your time in Figma, you know, moving things a couple pixels here? Maybe not, maybe not. Maybe it's not color, maybe that's like not as much of what you will spend your mental bandwidth on. But the idea of like, will you still be creating, will you still be able to try and make things that didn't exist in the world now, hopefully utilizing more and more powerful higher level tools, I think that's a beautiful thing. And I go back to this example of when I was starting out in college. It was kind of difficult to make a website. I mean, they had like geocities and a couple of other website creators. But if you really wanted to make anything interesting or cutting edge, you would have to get into the code and do it yourself. And that just made it very difficult for a lot of people to create websites. Fast forward, today you have Shopify, okay? You're like a restaurant owner. You could have an awesome website for your, for the things you want to sell and you don't really need to know how to code. So what did we lose? Did we actually have less need for engineers? No. Or do we have less need for creators? No, we actually a whole new generation or group of people that otherwise wouldn't have been able to create these things can now create these things. This is what I think sites like Framer or webflow or various other things are trying to do. We're always just trying to push the problem to a higher level so that it can be more accessible to. To a wider group of people. And so that's kind of how I think about what I hope that AI is just the next leap in us being able to do that.

Well, thank you so much for that, Julie. It seems like AI is really going to accelerate the progress for the rest of humanity to unlock our creative freedom in what you mentioned, which is removing those things that might not have seemed to be possible or might have seemed to be a huge barrier. So I'm pretty wary of our time. So we're going to stop taking questions, but we have tons of questions. Just know that we've got over 2,000 people tuning in right now. So we do have tons of questions. But before we go, I think I've always got a question for our speakers here, which is really about harsh truth. Great advice, and somewhere along those lines. But what is one advice that you would, you know, obviously give to people here that you think no one else would agree with that, but, you know, with every inch of your body, you feel like, okay, this is an advice that, you know, you want to share.

I think the thing that I probably believe most, and I'm not sure most people will agree with me, is the more you know yourself and spend time with yourself, truly exploring who you are and why you think the way that you do, the more everything in life just becomes easier. Relationships become easier, the job becomes easier. I can't explain it, but I just think that the things we often struggle with, that we think is the colleague, the problem, the work, the company, the economy. So much of that goes back to. It's how we think, it's how we are built. It's the set of beliefs that, that we have, that we were raised with. And so the more internal work that we do, the more it actually, you know, even if nothing about the external world changes, actually, everything changes. And so, I mean, I don't know how to make that more tactical other than, you know, it goes back to that cliche of like, know thyself. But that is something that I very strongly believe. And in fact, I'll give one more anecdote. When I wrote the Making of the Manager, the first chapter that I wanted to create was the. It became chapter five, but it was like managing yourself. Like, because that was the first thing that I really thought about when you're like, how do you become a better manager? It's like, get to really know yourself, know how to manage yourself before you start managing or before you really, you know, think. And then my. My publishers were like, well, you know, this is a little like, I'm not sure most people are gonna resonate with that. Like, why don't we move that? You know, and they kind of convinced me we should move it later in the chapter. But it's my instinct because it is truly what I believe.

Well, thank you so much for that, Julie. It sounds so philosophically deep as well. I think for a lot of things that just beyond career as well. I think this is something that we should all take away. This recording will be available for everyone and so everyone can replay that all the way. Now, before we let you go, Julie, is there any last things that you want to share? How can people find you? Follow your work, you know, about Sundial, about what you're doing right now as well, and read on your thoughts.

Yeah, so I would not be a founder if I did not pitch my product strongly. So if you guys are at a company, what we're trying to do with Sundial is make the story of your data better. We are kind of like a data modeling slash analytics, slash data visualization tool in one. And I love what we built and I really do think, think that we've gotten a lot of really cool ideas. So if you work at a company, you're like, I don't really love our analytics tools, our stack or so forth. Come reach out. I have a book, obviously you guys maybe know about it, Making of a Manager. So if you're interested in management, you can definitely hear my voice in your head through reading that book. And then lastly, I am a frequent writer on my sub stack called the Looking Glass. And so even in fact, tomorrow I might write something that is related to what we were talking about today, Felix on data and design. So some of these things that even shared it was like top of mind for me because I've been ruminating on them as part of these blog posts.

Thank you so much. Yes, I just shared a landing page of Sundale and hopefully everyone recognizes that. And then this is Julie's medium as well. So from another founder as well, supporting Julie here. So, yeah, please check Julie's resources out and Sandel as well at the company. Definitely. I'm going to check it out right after this as well. Julie, that has been one of the best sessions that I've ever had personally and I'm sure everyone had as well. So thank you so much for being so kind, so honest with us today. We are so, so grateful and we hope to be following your work along as well. Thank you so much for joining us too.

Well, thank you, Felix. Thank you for everything that you do as well for the community. I'm a big fan of your work and everyone on ADP list, and it's been incredible to just see the community support each other through mentorship. And everyone here, you guys all play a big role. So thank you.

Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, bye. Bye, everyone. Have a great day or night.

See you.