Jean-Lee was injured in number 19 at WhatsApp. She joined one hardly anyone in the US had heard of it, saw it go to 450 million users, and was sitting at her desk with noise cancelling headphones on when news broke that faced with them for about $19 million. In today's conversation we discuss, how WhatsApp built natively eight different platforms with a team of 30 engineers. Why the founders said no to almost every feature of West for years? How WhatsApp's team operated with no code reviews, no stand-ups, no sprint planning, and anymore?
If you want to understand how a tiny team with almost no process built one of the most successful products in history, and what's a day's AI native startups can still learn from them, this episode is for you. This episode is presented by Statsik, the unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. Check out the show and learn more about them and our other season sponsors, Sonar and WorkOS. Jean, welcome to the podcast. It is amazing to meet you.
You have quite the story early engineer at WhatsApp, but before we get into WhatsApp, how did you get into tech? I've always been a small-town girl. My dad was an OG hipster. He was really into brewing beer. So he decided to get a PhD in beer.
In brewing. In brewing. In brewing. So I moved to San Francisco in 1999, and that's when I got really exposed to all the different tech roles. Like growing up, I didn't really even think about engineering as a job.
Of course, I used computers and I thought it was really cool to be able to use Yahoo and Search things online, but beyond that, my first exposure to Silicon Valley and tech came from living here. I got to meet a lot of people who work in tech. I got dabbled around with coding when I was a teenager, but not too seriously. But I did think it was really cool that you can just write a few lines, and it will just do things for you over and over and over. It was almost magical.
I loved the feeling of creating something that actually runs and debugging something and fixing it. It runs again. That was really joyous. And I didn't really get into coding until I went to college, but one of the reasons why I decided I wanted to go into coding was I talked to different people. So I thought maybe I want to be a designer, maybe I want to be an architect, maybe I want to be an engineer and I talked to different adults who work in the industry.
After talking to a lot of adults, I realized people who are in tech were the only ones who were really excited about their jobs. So in Silicon Valley, when you ask people, like, tell me about your work. People are often very hopeful for the future and very proud of what they're building compared to many other adults that I spoke with. They were not so encouraging. They're like, oh, don't become an architect.
Don't become a designer. So that was one of the influences for me early on. I studied computer science at USC. And one of my first internships, actual coding internships was at a small company. It was a three person startup started by one of the new grads from USC.
And you'll probably understand it was a video sharing website. But it was not like YouTube, but there were so many versions of YouTube back in the days before what YouTube was dominant, right? So you probably remember dozens of these video sharing platforms. And one of the issues of having so many options is that you have to be visiting 12 different sites to search for anything. So we had a website where you can aggregate all the different types of videos from different sources, which is actually kind of funny because lately I've been seeing a lot of AI platforms where you can just switch between the models very similar to that.
Yeah. How did you get into IBM? I really loved working for a small three person startup because I got to work with engineers. We had engineers overseas in China. So I got to work with them.
I got to also do a little bit of coding myself, but I was coming up with the design docs, like the features list and I was calling a lot of the shots. And I could also directly see the impact of my code immediately on the website. And I thought that type of ownership and speed and the visibility was really exciting that I get to see the impact of my work immediately. But one thing I wish I had was a little bit more mentorship because we were all new grads and in college. I felt like we were just shooting things to see which sticks.
And I thought maybe for my first job out of school, I would like a little bit more mentorship and training. And I started looking at more bigger companies, more traditional companies. And that's how I ended up at at the time I was literally the biggest company in the US. At what point did you decide that you wanted to leave or try out something else? Did you even decide or something just came up?
One of the reasons why I wanted to go to a more traditional company, what more structure was so that I could get more mentorship and training and IBM was excellent for that. There were so many veterans. They had so much experience. And they were willing to share with me because they were 20, 30 years ahead of me, right? But one thing I really missed was the small team environment.
It was just so big. There was a lot of meetings, a lot of process. And I missed seeing the impact of my work. I couldn't quite understand how my work was contributing to the overall company. So then I decided to take some time off and explore and have some fun.
Yeah. And what time was this? What year was this? So I started working in 2007 and I left by 2009, which was actually in retrospect, I was really brave because it was in the midst of economic downturn. My goal process at the time was I was only 22 or 3 and I figured even if I take a year off, I can still catch up, which I did.
And what happened from there? How did you eventually get to what's out of years later, right? Yeah. So I took some time off to try out different classes. I took a lot of classes.
I did a little bit of nowadays, you call it the gig work, but I did all kinds of work. So whatever I needed to make a living while taking all these classes and exploring and really finding out what kind of environment or what kind of career do I envision for myself. And after I took those time off, I decided that I want to go back to Silicon Valley. But this time, I do want to work for a startup, but maybe with people who are a little bit more experienced, maybe not new grads and maybe not a three person startup, but a little bit more stable startup where I can possibly get both the autonomy and the impact of the work, but also a little bit more mentoring because I was still in my 20s.
Okay. So how did you find the startup, which of course happened to be WhatsApp? In 2012, WhatsApp was still early. They started in 2009 and they did still have a lot of users, but they're mostly in Europe and in India. They were not very known in America.
Were you a WhatsApp user back then? I was not, but my wife and her friends were, or back then my girlfriend, but some of my friends were using it on and off. It was kind of starting to be big in Europe. It wasn't as massive just yet. Exactly.
I was lucky because I actually lived in New York for a little bit before moving here and a lot of people in New York were using it because it's an international hub. So I had used the product in the past and I saw the job listing on LinkedIn. And then you applied? What was the interview like? I don't think we did any leak code until way, way later, until when we started hiring interns and new grads, most of the interviews were talking about, I guess you can call it system design interviews.
We would talk about how would you design this? How would you design that? Tell me about your past experience building this product. And I recall talking to Jan about different messaging apps. And being Korean, I told him a lot about Kakao talk and how it worked.
That was my interview. Just like that, you got an offer, I guess it started right? Things move fast. I assume it must have been quick turnaround offer. And then you have to decide, right?
How did you decide that you're going to join this relatively unknown startup that is building some cool messaging that you kind of thought was cool, but it wasn't much information about that. In fact, their Glassdoor rating at the time, I remember had one star. It had one review, one star, someone saying, oh, I don't like working here or who knows if that wasn't even real. But that was their Glassdoor. Oh, that's so interesting.
I don't remember looking up. I must have looked up Glassdoor, but I was really lucky because I actually had another offer from a different company, but they were a little bit sore. One company was taking weeks to get you an offer letter. Another founder closed the deal in person the very next day. Speed matters and not just in hiring.
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Skip the rebuild, keep shipping, visit workOS.com. And now let's get back to Jean and how the other company could not get her written offer as quickly as what's up did. It was not a startup and they said, oh, hey, you have my verbal offer? I am going to give you a written offer soon. But then it took them a while.
And meanwhile, Jan called me a few days later after the interview and he said, come into the office right today or tomorrow. And then he asked me, what would it take for you to take the offer right now? Love it. What did you say? I mean, I wasn't looking for that much.
I mean, I was in my 20s, so I just told him a few things I would like to have and sure, I'll take offer and I signed the offer the following day. And I did actually hear back from the other company. On the first day I started WhatsApp, they called me and I was like, oh, I just started a new company. That's it. We started off, move faster, otherwise don't be surprised.
So you were employee number 19 at WhatsApp, right? It was engineer number 19. And you told me something really interesting that you were the youngest person, even though you were like by this time I'd come mid 20s or so. I thought about that. So I recall there were about four of us under the age of 30.
So I was not a young guest, but there were two people who were new grads and then myself and one other person who were in our late 20s. But they are like 15 or so people above 30. Sorry. Just kind of unheard. Why do you think this was?
This is so interesting. That is true. Is it still rare nowadays? Like, good question. I think these days it might not be as rare, by the way.
I think so because I think I read some kind of statistics from investors that actually when they look at the success rates of startups, they found that older founders tend to do better. Yeah. And then WhatsApp, I guess, like Jan and Brian, they started this at late, mid 30s or so after they spent more than a decade working at Yahoo and other places. Yeah. So I guess they must have been able to hire like their network webnotch.
Yeah. The first 10 or so engineers, a lot of them came from Yahoo. Some came from Europe. You mentioned the story when Jan reached out to you. Jan used to do that.
You would just look at who is the expert in this field and reach out to people. And we had a lot of contractors in Europe. And then we had some, like mostly from personal connection, like from Stanford, because Brian went to Stanford. And then we had some referrals from Sequoia because they invested in WhatsApp. This is fascinating because the way we connected actually is both of us know Jan.
I mean, you've worked with him, but I had an email in my inbox from him. I think six months before you joined WhatsApp, where I got a message from him and saying, Hey, I built a Windows one app at the time together with my brother called Cocktailflow. And it was a beautiful Windows one app and it was able to career opportunity. So what you're saying is there's a alternative timeline where if I said, like, yes, I'm interested, which in hindsight, if a founder reaches out, you probably should at least talk to them, don't make a mistake that I did, which is just saying, like, I'm sorry, I'm busy. I might have been a contractor from Europe.
So like, sounds like that was a strategy and that was a smart strategy. Yeah, we had many contractors in Europe and they were all very experienced people. They were basically managing themselves. We had people all over the world working with us. What was a tech stack like it?
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I actually looked it up because it's hard to count them all. We had, of course, everybody has iPhone and Android, but we also had Blackberry and Windows one, which is also pretty common, but we also had Nokia S40, S60. We had a thing called KaiOS for a while, but not for a long time and we had the web client. So it's actually eight. So you had, of course, you know, we know that iOS is Objective-C, Android was Java back in the day and all of these, like the Blackberry, the Nokia, they all had, like, the Nokia with Symbian C++.
They all had like their own different language and then we've not talked about the backend, right? And the backend was Erlang. Erlang. And I think that's because this, that is one of the most exotic tech stack I've heard Erlang in telecommunications context at Ericsson, again, in Europe. It is popular with the telcos, but startup wise, I'm not sure I heard anyone else use Erlang.
You might be right. They do have an Erlang conference. I think it's called Erlang Factory. There's a really great talk by one of our engineers, Rig Reed, if you're interested in learning more about it. Well, I'll link it in the chat below.
I'm pretty sure it is still on YouTube. I haven't looked at recently, but he gave a really great talk about why they started working with Erlang and it was the perfect choice. And he describes it as trying to maintain the engine of an airplane while is flying 24-7. Because if you imagine, like WhatsApp is so international, we can't take a break, right? We have to continuously keep running and it's always busy.
If someone's, it's 8 a.m. somewhere in the world, right? And Erlang was a really robust language that was really good at concurrency. And they stumbled upon it because they were using this other tool that happened to use Erlang and decided this is the perfect language. And I guess at the core of WhatsApp, what was the core engineering challenge?
Was it like so many messages being kind of coming in, needing to be seated out and send to different platforms? Yeah, that was one of the main challenges, like for example, for New Year's or Christmas. Because everyone's saying Happy New Year adds the exact same moment. That was always our biggest challenges every year. And we would celebrate, hey, we didn't go down after New Year's.
So the interesting thing about the seven different mobile platforms specifically is the conventional wisdom before and after has been like, look, if you want to support all those platforms, I don't be silly, do cross-platform, either build your own layer that is cross-platform or use, you know, there's all sorts of frameworks. Why do WhatsApp not do this? Do you remember the discussions of like, why, why hire seven, including some really hard to hire people like for Nokia and Symbian? And you mentioned the contractors in Europe, I didn't sound so like Nightmare. Why?
Because I always say, I want a grandma in a remote countryside to be able to use our app. So what does that mean? They may not have the newest iPhone, the shiny iPhone with the biggest memory, right? And the countryside where a grandma is using it, you need the app to be lightweight, you need it to work on any kind of device, and you need the app to be simple. So those were our goals and priorities.
And that's the thought process that went into our decision to build seven different platforms. And then inside WhatsApp, how did you get things done? Do you remember like how a project got done or was it onto the projects and kind of what engineering processes people might have followed, especially later you worked at that meta, compared to like how more kind of standards startups work? Because I have a feeling WhatsApp was not exactly a standard startup, was it? Not really.
Even meta compared to other big tech, especially when I was a meta was pretty scrappy, like not so much on writing documents, for example. So the move fast and break things model kind of allowed them to be a little bit more lean in terms of their process, at least while I was there. But WhatsApp was like the ultimate lean company. By the time we were acquired, we only had 20 something engineers, under 30 people, serving 450 million monthly active users. So we didn't have code reviews.
The only time I got my code review was the first time I made a commit, Brian, as to take a look at it before I committed it. And he asked me a bunch of questions, which I had to think through a lot, like a kind of like a coding interview. But that was it. After the first time, we didn't really have a formal code review. But I mean, people read the Git commits because there's only 30 engineers that you can read other people's code and they would discuss it on the WhatsApp groups.
So everyone was trusted all engineers. They just pushed their code to the immersion into production, pushed it to production without a manager review. And it was trusted that they would ask if they were unsure or something like that. Exactly. Okay.
And it worked. What about the release process? Like if you tell me 450 million people, the first thing I'm going to say is like, okay, they do canarying, they do feature flagging, they do experiments, they do what kind of safety next did you have, right? We didn't do much of that. But we were really big on dog fooding.
So every time we were about to do a release, we would all internally use it ourselves. And I think he might still say it on his LinkedIn. If you look up, he's that just quality engineer. His title when he messaged me because I didn't know what to see. It said chief QA officer.
QA officer. And I didn't know what that meant. I thought it was some sort of weird joke from the outside. So that would make sense. So he was going around.
He was making sure that it worked. He would try to break things as much as he can. And then if he finds a bug, he will like really try to break it. And then he'll come to and say, hey, I found this well. And you also said that Jan said no a lot.
He did say no, almost as I recall 99% of the time he would say no, which I thought as a young engineer, I was very confused because when you look at all these other apps, there were like dozen different messaging apps at the time. We chat is notorious for having everything, right? There's so many features. And I was so confused. Like, why don't we build all these features?
These are the newest coolest things that we should have because at the time when I joined, we didn't have groups. We launched groups shortly after I joined. We didn't have voice calls, video calls. We didn't have any of those stories. All the cool features were missing in my mind.
But that was by design because we really wanted to prioritize. Again, the quality of grandma in a remote town being able to use our app at an even time. What's up, help deck features for years until we were absolutely sure about quality? They worked on video calling long before they shipped it. This leads to a presenting sponsor, Statsig.
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It sounds like WhatsApp had very, very little process. This was very, very interesting because when I worked at Skype, at the same time, as you joined WhatsApp and I also joined in 2013, I joined Skype and you joined WhatsApp in 2012, the Skype was very proud that they sent everyone to scrum training. I was a scrum master, other people scrum master. So here we were with all the scrum, all the consultants, all the everything and what's about competed us with a lot smaller team and no scrum, no TDD, no I does. Let's go.
1,000 engineers. Oh, that's a lot of people. I mean, when you have 1,000 people, you kind of need these. Yeah, and in all fairness, like for example, one thing that this whole scrum thing solved for a little bit is we had more than 100 teams and everyone was working on different things. And because of all this organization, we had a prioritized list of which teams are the most important and those got all the support.
So I guess, well, that's might be that when you're just making it so much harder to move fast and a small team can help compete you. Yeah, it just takes a long time, even just to communicate with everyone. Being inside of WhatsApp, how did it feel to see this massive goal? Not in your team size, but in the product usage, the people, the media, the feedback. We didn't have much media.
Like nobody knew about WhatsApp. One interesting thing you told me about the office is you have countdown displays. Can you tell me about them? What were these? What did it display?
What was the best thing about metrics? And I think really the only metrics we dragged, like we didn't really pay too much attention to media or Skype usage numbers or other messaging apps usage numbers. But the one metric we counted down was number of days, like X number of days since the last outage. Wow. No pressure.
Well, the numbers started to go up over time. Maybe that helped to have it visible either. And when an outage happened, do you remember what happened after? Because these days in the tech industry, it's all about blame is false more. If an outage happens, you know, we first mitigated them, we get together, then we write a document where we try really hard to not say who pushed calls this, but we come up with why the system is like this and so on.
How did you go about like dealing with outages and also following up and ensuring that they don't, they won't have it again? So they, I know they did these discussions in the server group chats, but I wasn't in the server group chat. So I can't really say for sure. I mean, for sure, we did not have documentations. It sounds like a lot of things are pretty simple.
You talk with people, if you have a problem, you try to fix it, don't over document things for no reason. And it seems to just work. And then have the key thing. Like if I guess if you put out days since since since outage, people will know like, okay, I should do what I can't do, not have an outage. And everybody knew exactly who was working on what?
So we didn't have to blame. And you won't give everyone this new. What's that was a massive, massive success? What do you think made it so successful in the early years and especially for the product itself? You've seen Kao, you were aware of some of the competing messaging app.
What did WhatsApp do that others did not? There is a little bit of the networking effect. If you, it's like the thing about messaging app is that if you use it, you need your friends to use it and if your friends use it, you need to use it. And WhatsApp was the first to be in the market. That certainly helped.
But there was a lot of competition. But again, I think a lot of other apps and messaging apps were chasing features, thinking about adding the shiny as newest features. Whereas WhatsApp was very intentional. They actually worked on video calling for a very long time. We were probably working on it by the time you joined Skype when your founder said we have video.
We were working on it, but we just didn't launch it until much later when we were actually like 100% sure about the quality of the feature. So we often held onto features until we felt really short before launching them. Interesting. Because that is a little bit of a different than the conventional advice, which is if you are a startup, launch early, get feedback, improve it and iterate it. It sounds like you did the opposite.
It's like polish it and then do when you have full conviction. We did use it internally. Internally, we used a voice in the video calling features with our families. So we had a list, okay, I have family members. These are all my parents and my brother and sisters numbers.
Let's enable it for this beta group. And we launched it with the public. Two years into working at WhatsApp, in 2014, Facebook announces their biggest acquisition WhatsApp for $19 billion. What do you remember of this time? How unexpected was it?
And what kind of feelings, what kind of emotions went through you and the team around you? I actually journaled soon after the acquisition. So I looked up my journal around this time, 2014. So it's been over 10 years. I looked at my journal and I remember I was coding.
I had this Spotify playlist with noise canceling headphones. I had this playlist called Let Me Think. This is the one I listened to when I want to focus. And again, we were in a pretty small office where I can see everything. I was sitting in a pretty central location.
So I could see people bustling and hustling, which was a little bit weird, but I tried to tune it out so I can code. But then from the side, I saw Niroj, who was the head of business at the time. He was just waving his arms. He was a pretty tall guy so I could see it. He was like, stop.
Whatever you're working on right now. We had one meeting room coming to the meeting room. And I was like, what is happening? We never have meetings. We didn't have meetings.
So you didn't have meetings? I mean, we have scheduled meetings every now and then, but we rarely have, like we have never had unscheduled meetings and we rarely have meetings at all. So I was confused and I dropped whatever I was working on and I went into the conference room and then they asked, like, turn off your phones. What's that turn off your phone? That's kind of weird, right?
And I thought, oh my gosh, what's happening? Like, did we go out of business? I thought, are we getting another raise of fun, like around the funding? Like a new investor coming on board? It can't be that we sold a company because Jan used to say, you will never sell the company.
He used to actually say, so your company is like, so your baby. And I remember we were waiting for quite a while because there was one person missing. And it turns out she was getting her eyebrows done. With her phone. I tucked away.
Yeah, she came after the announcement, but the news was about to hit the public and they wanted to tell us before the news hit. And I noticed that Jan and Brian were making this face and I couldn't tell what it was. And then they made the announcement, was that husband acquired by Facebook for $19 billion? And I realized, oh, that was them trying to hide their excitement. That was a face?
Kind of smiley, but not smiley. And that was a really exciting moment. And I kind of joined out for a little bit because I was trying to remember, hey, like, how many shirts I did? Like, again, it was my first startup ever. I didn't even negotiate my equity.
And honestly, I couldn't remember how much equity I had. And I was trying to think, how much is a billion dollars? It seems like a lot of money. And how much is like 1% of $19 billion? I couldn't do the math.
And I remember sitting there thinking, like, trying to do the math. And then I thought, you know, no matter how the math works, I think one thing is clear. I'm going to be rich. And then Zuckerberg walked in. It's Zuckerberg walked in.
It's at a meeting. Yeah. Wow. And then you had like a Q&A or something. We did.
We did. Yeah. What kind of questions can you ask at this point? What kind of questions did people ask? There was a mix of excitement in the business, right?
Are we going to have to change everything? Like, because I think a lot of the engineers were more experienced and they talked about how when Yahoo acquired companies, they changed 100% and lost the essence of the business. So there were a lot of questions around that. And Mark is actually a very charismatic in person. And I thought he had great answers at the time.
He made sure everyone feels assured that nothing's going to change and he will try to maintain it as much as possible, at least that was the messaging at the time. Clearly, this was an amazing exit. And to this date, it's not really been repeated. Maybe a few companies might have come close, but definitely not with such a small team. How did you end and your colleagues deal with the fact that, wow, you've just got an amazing financial exit, but I guess the company kind of continues inside of meta.
Like it seems, seems like, you know, two things at the same time. Like, okay, I have this amazing financial exit, but there's also work. How did you balance? How did you balance? How did you decide what next?
That's two-fold. So the finance side in terms of that aspect, we actually got a lot of support or a business person organized many meetings with like the accountants or even a financial advisor. We invited a professor who was the founder of Wealthfront and he gave us an hour of finance advice and he recommended books. I read the random walk down Wall Street, which is a great book. I recommend people read it if you're interested in financial management.
And I read several other books to really educate myself, to be able to manage this new wealth that I came across as a young 29-year-old. Yeah. What changed the day to day once you officially became part of Facebook that you have to move offices, that, you know, did you get a new title, added to like the meta org chart, that kind of stuff? The changes were very slow in the beginning. We didn't even move into the meta where at the time was called Facebook, headquarters, Menlo Park until at least a couple years after the acquisition.
So in the beginning, everything was same as usual. We still had our old office. We did actually move to a little bit nicer office, a slightly bigger office. But other than that, it was business as usual, was Jan and Brian. We were hiring, but not, you know, at our similar like so steady pace.
And I think not until when we actually moved into the Facebook office, we started seeing a little bit more cultural influence and merging. Like, we started using their HR services or recruiting services and things like that. But it was a very gradual change over time. And then when WhatsApp became part of Facebook, as I understand it still is even to this own organization. Like inside of Facebook, I understand there's organizations like Messenger or like there's the Facebook group, etc.
So like did WhatsApp and Uranus own kind of organization a little bit shielded from the rest of Facebook? We had our own area or WhatsApp. And in the beginning, we even had like our own chairs, our own, whatever like walls and decorations that we were using, we brought them all over. But over time, you know, there was more and more mixing. After the acquisition, how did you start to hire more people?
How did the projects change? That things become more ambitious? Did you start to add more features? Because clearly, like you were about 30 of you. And then in a few years, there was hundreds of people working WhatsApp.
These days must be thousands of people. Like with those people, like what new work came up because the original WhatsApp was so minimalist, right? And kind of so scrappy. I guess we were choosing to be small, not that there was not enough work for us to do, right? So one of the reasons why we also tried to remain small was actually Brian and Jan did not want to raise too much money.
It actually cost a lot of money to serve so many users. You have to pay for the servers. You have to pay for the SMS registration codes. Every year, Jan and Brian would do all hands meeting. So we did have meetings.
What's the year? And Brian was very transparent. He will walk through our earnings and expenses. Interesting. So yeah, I had a lot of information around this.
So the three main buckets of our spending was the server cost was about a third and then about a third on salaries for the engineers, mostly. And then a third, the rest was for the SMS fee. And you try to register, you get that code and we have to pay that 10 cents or whatever, how much it costs to send up international messaging. Those numbers, I mean, they add up when you have millions of people using your app. So they actually didn't want to grow too fast because it gets very expensive.
Was that was free for the first year? And then after that, was that was charging $1 for every year? But they were only using it in certain countries really to suppress growth because they didn't want to go too fast. Fascinating. Because I remember in Europe and in the US, there was this $1 cost, which I think people were like, yeah, whatever.
I don't think we realized that this was a growth expression tactic. Fascinating. And then when Facebook acquired, I guess they got rid of it. Yeah, Facebook said we don't need the dollar and we can grow as much as we can because they had the funding for it. And then growth just did the speed up?
You remember? Incredible detail using payment to slow down growth. Lesser known detail about the $1 is that that $1 was enough to pay for all of these, the server cost the salaries and SMS code per year. So you were roughly breakeven breakeven. We did have funding from Sequoia, but we never touched that money.
Incredible. And we explained it as how his dad was a business owner and they would wake up in the middle of the night worried, what if I cannot pay the salaries for the employees tomorrow? And he explained that he took the funding from Sequoia as like a backup. I think it was $8 million of funding if I recall. If I looked at that backup.
Yeah. So we never touched that money. The $1 paid for everything. And it's still down growth enough to be manageable. When you joined Facebook, what title did you get and how did your career change?
So the thing about Facebook is that everyone's actually software engineer. I'm pretty sure they still don't have titles. They don't have titles at their levels. What level did you come in at? So the one of the five youngest people I got leveled as a junior engineer.
No, you did not. L3 or L4? L3, L3, L3, yeah. No. I had to climb all over again.
Oh my gosh. That must have been a bit awkward. I was not too happy about it, but what's the alternative? Do I want to give up besting the rest of the shares? And eventually I got promoted.
But it was within WhatsApp. So you got promoted pretty quickly. How many times did you get promoted there? A few times. I mean, I eventually became an engineering manager.
And then as you became an engineering manager, at some point you decided to help and start a new office in London. How did that decision come and how did you go about it? That was actually an ask from Facebook headquarters. So they said, hey, we're actually running out of space in the park. And also WhatsApp is so big in Europe.
So why not have a presence there? It would be much easier to hire engineers because everybody actually uses WhatsApp. So let's start in the office there. And we didn't have that many engineering managers, right? I was very lucky because I got asked to go along with a couple of other engineering managers.
And all three of us actually became managers around the same time. We actually even trained together. So we were relatively new managers when we got asked to go there. I think we were the only ones who could go because, you know, people have children and they have to think about school and they couldn't go. I remember one, the director that I was working with, he couldn't go because his wife says she doesn't want to move with the children.
It makes perfect sense. You arrived in London, you landed with these two or three other engineering managers. How did you start to go to the office? From a practical perspective, what can I imagine? How did you start hiring or these things?
What are the other things that you have to do? Maybe a little bit unexpected for you. A lot of the logistical part was taken care of for us because Facebook already had an office there. So we kind of moved in. We got our own section.
It wasn't big because at the time, again, we had a lot of contractors in Europe. So we had one contractor already in England. So we converted them full time and then we had one in Scotland. We also converted him full time. So he would come from Scotland every now and then.
So we had two engineers plus three managers and we started hiring there. I think the hiring part was something that took longer to set up. We worked very closely with the Facebook hiring team, which was really great that we already had people who were familiar with the local recruiting logistics there. So one thing we focused on a lot was really letting engineers know, hey, what's that this hiring in Europe now come apply because we were hiring from all over Europe and also a lot from India. Do you feel it was easier to hire for WhatsApp in Europe just because people knew about it?
Do you get more excitement, more applicants? 100%. You wouldn't believe. I used to do a lot of university recruiting. And when I used to go to Stanford, maybe 2013, like anytime before the acquisition, I would say, hey, the people would come up to the booth and I would say, hey, do you want to give me a resume?
And they would be like, tell me about your company first. Because they have never heard of WhatsApp. What is this company? I'm not even going to give you my resume. I'm not giving you my resume.
I have only 20 of these. In Europe, people were actually excited to talk to us. What were the good and bad things of working in what basically is a remote office? Like, yes, London was a big office, but HHQ was in California, a mental park that's eight hours of time zone difference, a lot less overlapping. There's probably some good things about this and downsides.
It helped because the three of us were from mental park and we actually had great relationships with other teams and other engineers and other managers. And we also traveled back to mental park every quarter. And then we had the leadership from mental park also traveled to London almost every quarter. So there was a lot of back and forth to really strengthen the relationship in the beginning. Your growth went to being, I guess, one of the most junior people in WhatsApp, which is crazy to say because you were experienced as well.
But then you were also L3 and Facebook, which I still cannot believe. But you went to become a manager. What pushed you to actually say, I actually want to try to manage people? I actually never asked for it myself. Someone on my team begged my manager.
Hey, can I please report to Gene? And that's how I became a manager. Wow. Okay. What do you think this person saw in you?
If they wanted to report you when you were not a manager? I was the tech lead. So I was already managing the project. It was sort of a natural transition for me. And when you become a manager, what parts of the job came naturally to you and what parts were hard that you had to learn or get mentorship for?
You know, I started reading books. I love reading books. So whenever there's a new challenge, I like to read, learn and research, they're actually at the time, weren't a lot of courses on how to become a manager. And not a lot of books. Like I still don't think there are too many books about how to become a manager.
They're a little bit more now. There's like three or four good ones, but they all came out after like 2015 or 2016. Yeah, the resources were pretty limited. But I did what I can to read as much as I can about leadership. And I think I read actually a lot about communication and psychology.
There's several books like I love the book, surrounded by idiots. I've read that one. It talks about the disc personality, the different types of personalities. And I try to really understand like what motivates people, how do you communicate with people in a way that makes sense to the other person? And also I reflected personally like what were some good managers and bad manager in my experience?
Because you hear the saying that people don't leave companies, they leave managers, right? Your manager can really break or make your career. They can make your life miserable if you're matched with someone you don't fight with. What are the traits that you found as you were called? What were the things you said like, I think this makes a good manager.
I want to do more of that. And I think these were terrible managers or bad managers. And I want to avoid doing that. Do you remember something that stuck out? Yeah, I try to really understand each individual person.
So for example, like one person that I had on my team really loves going deep into problems or debugging and finding out how to improve things, right? Whereas another person really loves building new features. And you cannot ask this person who loves to build new features to go debug 10 bugs. That person will go nuts, right? And then like one person who was really good at building new features was not so great at mentoring new colleagues.
So I try to really look for their strengths. And of course, you also want to set them up for challenges so they can learn as well. But you want to balance them out. So I try to really understand by asking them a lot of questions to understand like, how do they want to be challenged? When do they feel excited about their work?
Or what are the things that they're really good at? What are the things they want to improve on? So I spent a lot of time really talking to them. As a manager, you were part of calibration meetings, right? Now that you're not at what's not at meta, can we talk honestly about what are you doing with those meetings like?
What are maybe the good things about them? How can you prepare? And what's the kind of reality? Because I feel outside of a small group of managers who are in there, it's not many people know how these things go. So people, number one biggest mistake people make is they think your manager is the one giving you a promotion or a salary boost.
As a manager, a middle manager, right? Like I have no authority to give you a promotion. You have no budget. Typically, directors have a discretionary budget. Sometimes to be able to give a reward, but not even a promotion.
They can't get right. Right. And the bonuses are tied to your performance review, right? So at meta, for every level, there's exact percentages lined up by the company. Like I have no control over it.
The only control I have is I think of myself as the lawyer representing my clients. Wow. Yeah. I'm making a case for them. Yeah.
Why they deserve to get a certain performance review rating or a promotion. And obviously, I want my clients to do well. I want my team to get the recognition that they deserve because I know they worked hard. But it's not up to me. All the other managers also have to agree.
That is the nature of performance reviews. And being specific on a performance review, like, who were the people that you saw the engineers who got these high performance reviews from this committee? What kind of taxes did you see? Were there things where like, well, some managers kind of like, you know, politics where they kind of like, they're calling in favors for each other and pushing someone up or was it mostly meritocracy, meaning this engineer was actually doing great work that a lot of managers saw and they just naturally agreed that, you know, this person who's on on jeans team is actually, they should be above my great person. And I kind of agree with that because there's bucketing, right?
Let's look at his bucketing. You're going to have buckets and you need to put like, I don't know, X people in the top bucket, middle bucket, bottom bucket and so on. Yeah, when I was coaching engineers, I learned that different companies have different ways of self promotion. So like, for example, I heard some companies use emails, like they send mass emails every time they do a new release or launch or like at WhatsApp, we use WhatsApp groups for everything. But at Facebook, they used Facebook workplace, which is like Facebook groups where you have a group for team or your org and you're like, everything has a different group.
And I noticed, as I'm representing my clients and sharing performance reviews, the people who post to most often who have the most visibility usually get the easiest consensus. Because it's just like all very natural. Like if I have no clue what you worked on and your manager tells me you're great, maybe, but how would I know? I don't know anything about you. So it I'm less likely to be inclined to agree with your manager.
Maybe your manager is right, but I don't know. Whereas if you have been actively posting and telling me indirectly or directly what type of work you have done and what type of impact that has made and what are the lessons that you learned and what type of people you work with, then I already know, okay, like when your manager tells me you're ready, then I say, yeah. And then internal, this was actually like it's more than just groups. It was like this Facebook feed where, you know, like it's a bit like LinkedIn, right? Just to make it so you see these posts come across the company and sometimes you'll play like, and what you're saying is like, if you've seen this post from this engineer on some other team saying, oh, we've launched this feature.
Here's an interesting thing we've learned that we're using for Facebook and I hit like, I now remember it. And then when performance review comes like, oh, I remember that person, they wrote that. Wow. And I might even have some questions, right? Maybe like if your manager tells me, I might be like, well, what about this?
What about that? But if you make a post, I can just ask you directly through the comments, right? And I just want to talk about this other thing. And you might ask, can he answer? And I think, oh, okay.
Yeah, he's thought about it. He's really good. It's amusing because it sounds like simplifying a little bit, but to be successful at Facebook, you need to also be good inside of the Facebook app and do interesting work and not hide it, actually make it visible. That's interesting. Now, stepping up a step back, and you were a manager at Facebook, you saw a lot of engineers outside of the performance review, and people posting about it, what traits did the best engineers that you remember share?
Like, what made them so good? I struggle with this question a little bit because there's a difference between like, how do you measure skill? How do you measure what a good engineer is? Is a good engineer someone who can bang out new features? Is a good engineer someone who can design a complicated system?
Is a good engineer someone who can communicate all of this and explain it to non-technical people? I struggle a little bit with the definition of a good engineer because I can have a definition of a good engineer, but it may be different for every culture, a different company might have different definitions. That's a good one. Facebook was a definition. I remember that a lot of it went down to just a very simple characteristic impact, right?
Definitely. And I think the way, like, there are many ways to measure impact, and definitely at Facebook, their way of measuring impact was through these posts. If I know about your work, and you tell me you have impact, and I agree that's impact. So going back to when you were in London office and start to go, at what point did the London office start to feel less of a startup scrappy startup and more of a big tech? I remember a time after about a year and a half or so, I realized, I don't know what that person is or I don't know their name.
That was a turning point. And at what point did you actually start to think of leaving Facebook? I think I really enjoyed the intimate environment, so I appreciate being able to, like, at up with 30 engineers. I knew everyone's names. I knew where everybody lived.
I knew their spouses and their children and their dogs' names, right? I really like that type of intimate environment. We still hang out that we have a pretty strong bond, and I feel like when I don't even know this person's name, I just feel less connected. No. So was this the point where you decided that maybe it's time for you to leave and do something else?
Oh, so, okay. I was in London on a contract. So I had a two-year contract. They said, hey, go start this office. And then once the contract ended, I had the option to either stay there to continue working in the London office, or I could come back to Menopark.
But then at that point, I had been working there for eight years. And honestly, I think I was pretty burned out. I'm the type of personality who likes to get A+, on everything I do every single time. So it was pretty tiring after eight years. I needed a break.
Yeah. And when you left, what's up? What did you decide to do? What I say, what's up? But it was Facebook at that point.
Yeah. I actually, because I know my personality, I don't take breaks. So I actually had a goal. It's a simple, but I said, I will do nothing for the next six months. I'm going to challenge myself to do nothing for six months.
Did you manage? I did it. I did read a lot. I exercise. I went on long walks.
I did multiple meditation retreats. But that was my challenge to myself to not work for six months. So after six months of successfully doing nothing, after setting yourself that goal, what did you do to figure out what next? So initially, I thought maybe I want to go start a new company or join another startup because I like working. I love building things.
So I decided, okay, I'm going to start talking to other founders. People who are hiring or people who are looking to start a new company. So I actually talked to 100 founders. I have a spreadsheet to really see, is there any interesting opportunities that I might feel passionate about joining or building? And then after talking to 100 startups, I realized I wasn't really passionate about joining any of them.
And I thought, what would I feel more passionate about? And what was the thing that I liked the most about working at WhatsApp for the past eight years? And I realized I actually really liked being a manager because I felt like I was creating a culture of support so that other people can really be learning and thriving and be able to do things really without people bringing down your neck. There are many things that make for a happy career, but I found it really gratifying to be able to find that from each person and really try to help them out and create whatever that is. It might be different for different people and trying to unblock them so they can really flourish.
And I thought, well, if that's what I really want to do, I don't have to start a new company. I'll just do that part. But I started exploring, mentoring people. I did a little bit of coaching. I don't do anymore and making videos on YouTube, writing all that to see how would I find the best way to support other people.
And on YouTube and on LinkedIn, you have been sharing a lot of your learnings or observations. What pushed you to start sharing way more of that than before? I think you started to do this publicly after you left Facebook. I was actually writing a blog about this. So I actually just hit 100k subscribers on YouTube last week.
Thank you. And I was reflecting. I almost gave up doing YouTube because I was really not comfortable being seen in public. And I've been thinking a lot about this. My grandma's from North Korea.
She escaped during the war. In that culture, you do not speak publicly. You don't want to be seen because it's dangerous. And I think there's generations of that still kind of installed in me. The fear of speaking up is real.
I felt really uncomfortable. So I almost stopped doing YouTube. Once one of my videos went viral from early on, and I felt really uncomfortable. But luckily I was talking to a mentor of mine and she said, hey, it's okay to do something that you enjoy doing. Just give me a shot.
So then I stuck with it. I'm so glad I did. Thinking of the thing that is happening, of course, right now AI, you spoke about this on your YouTube channel as well, but from your vantage point, how is AI changing? How engineers work? How managers work?
I do find it really interesting how with AI, we're seeing smaller teams emerge. I know that a lot of teams are saying, well, we're small because of AI, but I wonder if it's independent from AI when you're small, you're just more efficient because WhatsApp did not use AI, but we were efficient because we were small. And I almost feel that even today, I cannot really point to many teams that are as small as WhatsApp and have that kind of impact, maybe. And traffic might come to mind, but I think even they're bigger. So I wonder if there is a maybe just going back to basics with all of this.
Maybe AI allows to do the way most companies would have wished they operated. Yeah. And I think there's also a shift in the mindset. I remember back in the days, people when you go to networking events, people would brag about, we've hired like a thousand new engineers or we're growing an X times bigger. And that was a point of brag.
And investors also thought that was a good thing. You need to grow. You need to hire more engineers. That was a sign of healthy engineering environment. As nowadays, investors actually think smaller is better, right?
Like they don't necessarily push you to hire more people. And I think as a byproduct of hiring less people and staying lean, they have found this new found efficiency and they happen to equate it with AI. But AI, I think it's clear it makes engineers a lot more efficient. Well, we think it makes them efficient because it can generate a lot of code. You can work on more things parallel is happening with agents.
How are you seeing the role of software engineers change and also the role of engineering managers? Yeah, I mean, I love AI tools. I use it every day as a thought partner. I often ask, hey, be my executive coach or be a hardware trained futurist and help me find the next trends. Or there are various ways of really using AI to its full potential.
I feel like engineering management is less affected by AI because it requires a lot of people to people asking questions and learning about your engineers. AI can maybe help you with that, but I don't see AI replacing that part. But again, because the teams are much smaller, if you were the type of engineering manager who was doing a lot of these like OKR and process and writing documentation, a lot of that part is going to be gone. And I'm kind of glad it will be gone because I don't think it's really necessary. Yeah, for example, a lot of performance management is gathering the impact.
It can probably be done by asking agents to gather all these things. I remember as an engineer manager, I used to go through gathering all the work that my engineers have done. So on the calibration meeting, I could fairly represent them and then turns out that the managers who showed up without doing that, I had advantage. But that was not fair for the engineers, by the way, right? Maybe I will get rid of this advantage.
Yeah, AI will do a lot of the grunt work, more tedious work that maybe engineering managers or even software engineers had to do manually back in the days. Like we had an engineer who was just there to add comments. And that is something AI can do really well. If you had to give career advice to a new grad who says, I would like to build a durable career in software engineering in this kind of AI native world, what would you suggest they focus on? I say foundations.
Tools coming up, languages coming up, foundations don't go anywhere. We mentioned that WhatsApp, it's, but that was very small, very efficient. What do you think today's AI or AI native startups could still learn from WhatsApp? That made WhatsApp successful and it probably helped them as well. I think of AI.
So we went through several trends. When I first got my first internship, I was a video sharing website and I've seen how there were dozens of video sharing websites and how the ecosystem changed over time. And then I saw with WhatsApp, there were dozens of other messaging app competitors and how that kind of settled down over time. I think we're living through something similar. There are so many new AI startups and new tools and so easy to get distracted by all the different options and it can feel quite overwhelming.
There are too many options and you can feel the decision paralysis. But really again, go back to the core foundation. I think about, like if you're a builder, think about what you're building, why you're building, if you're learning, think about why you're learning, what you want to learn. And if you have clear goals of where you want to go, it will really ground you because otherwise you're just going to be all replaced and you might work really hard and end up nowhere. Do I understand correctly that you're saying WhatsApp was successful because the goal was clear?
Yawn said no to the distractions and all the ideas, but it was very very marching. Whereas all the other competitors, even all the messaging apps, they got distracted building, oh, let's do like old school video feature, let's do stories, let's do all of these things, they got subtraction and they did a lot of these things. But WhatsApp was very good at doing the core thing well and then slowly adding things that were about, is that the fair summary? Yeah. And also I noticed this when I started advising and coaching startup founders as well.
And also for any engineers who want to join new startups, this is a great way to evaluate new founders. Like some founders, if you're the opposite of Yawn saying no to things, I call it removing distractions, right? You're prioritizing ruthlessly. If you're the opposite of that, imagine what type of startup you end up. You say yes to everything.
Maybe it might feel really nice as a 20 something year old if I were to go back in time and I go to the founder with all my great ideas and he says, that's a great idea. I just build it. But imagine like he said that to every single idea that I had, the company will be all the replaced. In terms of the long term growth, it's not a very ideal situation. Looking back, what are some kind of like pre AI or not as modern practices that you did at WhatsApp that were really good that today is very modern AI native teams or whoever could benefit from?
Yeah. Of several things come to my mind, I think one of it is by having mean teams, you get several benefits, you get to remove a lot of the distractions and process. And through that, you get two really incredible benefits, which is ownership and the really like freedom to build things, right? Because Jan was always, like Jan and Brian were always very specific about what we're building, but how we're building it was up to debate, right? I mentioned earlier that the only time we did actual code review was the first time I made my get commit, Brian would be my code and ask me a bunch of questions.
So Jan and Brian were both like so technically adept, they were really excellent at doing this. They would ask, we're trying to achieve this. Like what is the problem here or what is the best way to solve this issue? What are like different ways we can approach it? Tell me.
So to understand correctly that of course the small teams help with a lot of things, but then having the founders push people they hire, especially early on, they almost like push them to excellence, right? It's fair to say that by Brian doing that super detailed code review with you the first time, it ups your game and later he didn't even have to do anything, right? Yeah. And there's like multi fold, right? Like one is to really challenge me to think critically.
And then I took, I learned a lot just from that conversation. And then also like from then on, he never checked my code again. So I know I am responsible, right? And I do believe when you give responsibilities to people, people will step up. I mean, not everyone, but most people will.
And I think this might be a bit underrated. I wonder if we've had a little bit of two over babying of engineers. I remember for a long time, there was a talk in the, you know, in the past five to 10 years and the as injury managers like, well, I have a new grad, it will take the months to onboard. I need to sign up a mentor for at least six months, maybe even a year. And we're over babying these very capable adults, you know, they're adults, right?
Even if they're 18, but they're typically 20 something because they came out of college and they're hungry and they're ambitious. And maybe we don't need to do that as much of it. Always. Yeah. I think as long as you hire smart people, it's kind of like a mold, right?
If you make a mold too small, that's only the limit of how far they will grow. Yeah. If the mold is too small, you have to throw away a lot of things that could have made excellent material. Finally, you're a reader. What are some books that you would recommend or software engineers or people wanting to grow professionally or in a personal sense?
I love reading books. I did. So while I challenged myself to do nothing, I actually read, but I actually took a year, but I did read a hundred books during that time. That was my doing nothing. Anyways, it kind of depends on what your goals are, but you gave me some specific things like for your career, I think for me, what was really helpful was what color is your parachute.
That helped me really understand my strengths and my goals and priorities in my career and life. I mentioned the book surrounded by idiots. I know the titles kind of funny, but it's an excellent book. If you want to learn more about how to really communicate and work with different people, if you want to understand finance, I mentioned earlier, the random walk down Wall Street is a great book for understanding how to manage your money. Yeah.
I would recommend those books to start with. Any fiction books? Hunger Games was one of my favorite books. I read the whole series. I read it as well.
And I almost like it. I like the movies as well, but I love the books. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me on the channel. This was a great conversation. I hope you enjoyed this right conversation with Jean.
One thing that stuck with me was Jean's point about why WhatsApp had almost no process and why it worked. Processes exist for audits, for accountability and for tracking who didn't want. But when you have 30 people and everyone gets to see what everyone else is working on, you don't really need a paper trail. You just walk over and talk. This is a good reminder that most processes exist to solve problems that are created by scale and not by the work itself.
I also found the Sky Contrast really surprising. A thousand engineers scrum certifications, two weeks sprints, and a dedicated scrum master for every team. And then the next step is to be a member of the Met Sky and WhatsApp with 30 people and zero former methodology was shipping faster and growing faster on every metric that mattered. This is a much needed reminder that organizational discipline and actual shipping speed are just not the same thing. And I was in the middle of this and Jean was at the middle of it and WhatsApp.
Finally, it was interesting as a former manager to hear how Jean described performance reviews as a manager herself. She described herself as a lawyer representing her clients. As in, she doesn't control the promotion. She just makes the case. And the engineers who had the easiest time getting promoted were not necessarily the best engineers.
They were the ones who made their work visible. They posted about their launches in the internal Facebook workplace. They engaged in comments as requested publicly. And the managers in those calibration rooms are making decisions about people that they might have never worked with directly so visibility is not just vanity. It's how the system inside larger companies actually works.
This is an uncomfortable truth, but I think every engineer at a big company needs to hear it. If you go to join this podcast, please subscribe to your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube. A special thank you if you also leave a rating on the show. Thanks and see you in the next one.