Mark Zuckerberg explains why Facebook hires for raw talent over experience. Nearly all product group heads started in different roles and grew into them. The company regularly brings in people straight from university.
Another thing that I think Facebook has done exceptionally well is hiring. And I always tell founders that this is the thing you have to get good at. So how have you hired your team, and what do you look for when you bring people on?
If you think about it, you know, I started the company when I was 19, right. So I can't institutionally believe that experience is that important. Right. Or else I would have a hard time reconciling, you know, myself. Right. And the company. So, you know, we invest in people who we think are just really talented, even if they haven't done that thing before. And that applies to people who are fresh out of university, as well as people like the CFO who took the company public, had not taken a company public before, and a lot of his background was in production development at Genentech before. So just focus on really talented people.
And so if you don't have the experience to look for, how do you assess someone's raw talent?
Well, often you can tell from different things that they've done. Right. So it's not that, you know, obviously everyone's done something right. I mean, Even if you're 19, right. You've done side projects and interesting stuff. And, you know, I think what's important is not to believe that someone has to have specifically done the job that they're going to do in order to be able to do it well. One of the things that I think we've done well is just given the people at the company a lot of opportunity. It's not just me who started when I was 19, and now I'm running this big company. There were a number of people who joined, who were people I did problem sets with at Harvard or dropped out of Stanford or different programs who have grown with the company over this long period of time. One of the things that I'm the most proud of is we have about 12 different product groups of the company, and all of the people who are running them, with the exception of one, did not join the company running a product group or reporting.
To me, that's amazing.
And the one exception was is David Marcus, who was the CEO of $50 billion public company. So I'm pretty happy that he's on board. And having him run a product group, I think is a pretty big coup, too. But literally none of them started off reporting to me. They all start off in different roles. Some were engineers, some were data analysts, some were product managers. And they've all grown. But I think what happens is people see that you create opportunities for people and that also, I think, keeps the best people engaged and makes the best people want to come work at your company because they feel like, oh, I'm going to get those kind of opportunities, too.
