Bold Nightingale asked
answered Aug 28
Hi Philip, I've followed your career and journey through tech over the past few years. Working at Meta, its also a boon to get to read the Notes left behind by great Engineers like yourself.
What I found interesting was that you chose to move to OpenAI when it was a relatively small lab. I recall your words being-- If I'm going to leave its gotta be for something better. (Paraphrased).
These days the list of "something better" than Meta seems to be growing bigger. I've completed 5 years at Meta now and initially I thought I needed to get away so I ran towards OpenAI and Anthropic. I interviewed at both, didn't get past the final rounds at OpenAI and I've been in "team-matching" at Anthropic since April now which is kind of funny. Looking back now, I can tell that that's not the environment I was truly looking for next. I've had a child who is now a toddler and I've gone through a big change in life and gone past the tumultuous times of the first 18 months. I've matured at Meta through the companies tumultuous times too. Now, I think I'm ready for the next step. I believe I want to go to a much smaller startup and my window is from [Founding my own company --> Series B ]. It's genuinely a reflective and exploratory moment for me in my career and I don't have all the answers, yet. I'm sharing this context, because I want to understand how did you do it yourself? What brought you to change after Meta? What drove your decision for "the next step"? How did you choose the right startup?
Do you have any advice for me navigating this time where there seem to be too many right answers and it's not clear what the right one is?
Thank you.
Philip's answer
I didn't leave Facebook — Facebook left me. (Hmm. My feelings about the Democratic Party didn't quite map as well as to this situation as it sounded in my head. Never mind.)
I've often left employers much later than was ideal, primarily due to my loyalty to teammates and coworkers. When I joined Facebook, it had 500 engineers globally. It was much easier for me to shine in a relatively small company (I had left Microsoft when it had 130,000 employees). But generalists like me tend not to shine as well once a company is huge. I left the Seattle office to go to London when Seattle was 120 people; by the time I came back to Seattle 5 years later, it was over 2,000 employees. I found it much harder to play a senior role as a generalist when the company was that much bigger (without myself being in a large-scope management role).
I left Facebook without a plan... which, until that point in my career, had never before happened. Because even though I didn't have another job lined up, I knew that I didn't want to continue in my current job. My strengths were no longer as needed in the company; I also felt a little lost and less connected to the internal employee community compared to when the company was much smaller.
I spent some time as an EIR at Madrona investigating ways to bridge the rising income gap in America because I was concerned about upcoming technical unemployment and the strain that those tensions would place on our society. I ended up founding a nonprofit to build free software for global health, not because I had any expertise in that area, but because an opportunity to learn from and work with the Gates Foundation seemed priceless (and it was). So my transition out of Meta wasn't strategic. I didn't know where I wanted to go, but I knew staying wasn't right.
In your case, I'm often reminded of Roy Disney, who said, "Decisions are easy when your values are clear to you." For portions of my life, my values and priorities weren't super clear, which made decision-making hard. Although I don't know enough about your context to give a concrete suggestion, it's great that you know you want to join a relatively early-stage startup. This narrows the field significantly and can help focus your searching.
FWIW, I've found the following model to be useful when deciding between job opportunities. Imagine a triangle with three vertices: Technology, People, and Role. "Technology" includes things like "what is the product" and "backend / frontend." "People" is about who you work for and with. "Role" is whether you're an IC/manager, PM/dev, etc. You likely have a point on that triangle that represents your current interests. The key is that each job opportunity also comes with its own point on that triangle. One way to pick a job is to find one where your preferred location on the triangle matches its offering. I go deeper into this model here.
I wish you all the best in your next opportunity!