The early stages | Ben Ling

Well, first of all, thank you for coming. Tell us a little bit about your background. And I'm, you know, I don't do these interviews very often, but I'm always very interested to know the person. Tell me where you grew up and just sort of your— what was childhood like and college, you know, from— go from there.

Uh...

We're digging really deep.

Okay, well, I guess I was born in Taiwan, but I came to the States when I was 3, and I went back and forth, but I grew up in the Bay Area. Went to Berkeley, and I wanted to study business, and my parents said, no freaking way. You are studying electrical engineering and computer science. And so that's what I ended up doing. And their rationale was that if you get a technical degree, you can always switch and do other things, but if you don't get a technical degree, you can't. It's much harder to switch and actually get a technical degree. That was their rationale, and I think more or less they were right. So I studied EECS at Berkeley, then I went to Stanford, and I got a PhD in computer science there. And I worked for a couple years at an enterprise software company called Epiphany.

Mm-hmm.

And that was during the PhD, and then at the end of the PhD, I joined Google. It was sort of totally happenstance and luck, because I was about to go to McKinsey. I ran into a friend at a bar and they said, no, you should interview at Google. We're hiring technical people. It'll be fun. And I really liked the people there. They were all very, very enthusiastic about their work. So I sort of stumbled into that opportunity.

So if I look at your resume, it would almost look like it's a very well-planned, studying EECS at Berkeley and then Stanford PhD, Google, and then Facebook. But it sounds like a lot of it was, or at least some of it was random.

Well, a lot of it is random actually. So the early stages were not because they were more or less planned by my parents. But it was the randomness of running into a friend at a bar who said, you should interview at Google.

Your friend, your parents didn't send you to the bar, right?

What's that? No, they didn't. And so it was, I think it's partially being in the right place at the right time and having the right background. And then also, my gut was that I really thought the people there were really enthusiastic about changing the world. They liked what they were working on. It wasn't that, oh, I'll be here for 3 years, then I'll be an engagement manager, and then I will go to be a manager at this other company. They were really, really excited about what they were working on. And so for that, that was much more exciting.

Yeah.

And I had no idea about the economics of Google at the time. I mean, I was graduating. I could have learned a lot more, but they were a private company. There was not a lot of information about them. other than they were hiring really great people. And so it was more of a gut decision at that point in time.

Yeah, and what did you learn from Google? That was really your first or second job, right? Was it pretty unstructured? Was it well run? What was your takeaway?

Well, it was really unstructured in the beginning, but the company became much more structured over time. I think Google, teaches you a lot of different things. And I think many of you have read articles about the things that— like the 3 things you learn at Google or the 10 things you learn at Google. For me, I think one of the lessons is that even in a place like Google where there are a lot of really smart people, the value of hard work And actually being disciplined and following up, doing the things that you say you're going to do. It's now starting like— now I'm starting to sound like Melania Trump. I don't know if you guys saw that in her speech. Yeah, her speech. That was like Michelle's speech. But I think that that was a huge differentiator for a lot of people there because there's a lot of really smart people, all very, very tuned into technology, they understood what the trends were, but then there was a set of people that were extremely disciplined and they were able to continue to do well there because of that discipline. And I think that that's one of the things, and that perseverance, it's similar in entrepreneurship of having that perseverance to actually go through with the hard and nitty-gritty things.

And did you work with the founders of Google in the early days? Yeah, a lot, yeah. Then you moved to Facebook.

Yeah.

What is the biggest change and what did you learn there? And how did it happen?

Well, Facebook was a much smaller company. When I joined Facebook, it was about 600 people and it was somewhat of an accident also. Matt Kohler had—

I love these accidents.

He came over for lunch and he said, hey, you know, how are things going? I'm like, great, I like it here. He's like, have you ever thought about coming And I was like, well, not really. I don't even know what the product is. And this is explained to me— Was there a product?

What year was this?

This was 2007. They were around like 30 million mouths or so. So it was a sizable college product, and it was just in the process of expanding off of college. And so I said, yeah, but I'll take a look. I had known Matt for a couple years. And so one thing led to another, and I went to Facebook. And I thought it would really, really change and impact and shape the world, which I think it has done in the past more or less decade. And I think one of the things there is that the way Facebook sees the world is extremely different than the way that Google sees the world. Facebook really understands social dynamics and the interaction between people and the importance of people and content and the creation of content. I think at Google, it's much more of a data-oriented algorithm approach. And not really— I think there's different strengths and weaknesses associated with each company. And so Facebook really understood how to drive human, like how to captivate and utilize human nature and behavior to build a really, really popular service.

Now, if I look at the things you have done, if anyone who has done any one of the 4, they would consider pretty successful. If you look back, Again, tying back to what you mentioned about your parents sort of set you up on this track, what are your thoughts there? I'm sure we all reflect upon our parents' advice every step of the way. I remember when I was in college, I received similar advice from my parents. They're like, this has got to be one of the dumbest things. As I get older, that opinion kind of changes. I'm curious, how do you think about their advice now?

I think it's extremely, extremely useful, and I think they couldn't have predicted the way that the world would evolve, but They did a good job of understanding the basic dynamics of the ability of acquiring basic skills and having those basic skills being able to teach you how to learn other basic skills and be able to evolve from there.