Noah Kagan cold-emailed Mark Zuckerberg with mockups for a Facebook Maps feature and got hired, even though he wasn't a designer. He'd planned to quit Intel once his health insurance vested, and walked into an office full of cables and chaos where Zuckerberg seemed fearless but socially awkward.
Did you just cold email Zuck? I sent in my resume, but the differentiator was that I sent in mockups. I took Facebook and I was like, here's Facebook Maps. If we ever have a Facebook Maps feature, here's how it would look. And they were like, wow, you have a bunch of businesses for college students and you're showing us what you would do here. And you're not a designer, right? You're scrapping these mockups together. You paid somebody. What'd you do? No, that was myself. So I was either using Google Slides, probably Microsoft Paint. I'm talking super basic. It doesn't have to be fancy. I was going to quit Intel in December because I was waiting for my health insurance to kick in. I wanted to get my HSA payment and then I just saw the job listing. I didn't know anyone there. What was your first impression walking into the office? When I came in there, it was chaotic. I posted one of these photos. It was a good memory where, like, there's cables everywhere. The desks were kind of all over the place, but it felt like there's something special happening. It felt like, holy shit, we're on a mission that no one else is a part of and we know where this is going. And then we have this truly fearless leader that seemed like a savant. He's definitely awkward as hell, but I was really impressed about what he was able to do and how big he was thinking about this company could be.
