Early Facebook's Chaotic Growth

Noah Kagan shares his experience working at Facebook during its early days, highlighting the chaotic culture and Zuckerberg's leadership.

"When I started at Facebook, my boss got fired the day I walked in. I just left Intel where I had 8 meetings a day and all this training. I go into a room and Zuck says 'Your boss Doug, who ended up founding GoodRx, I just fired him because he tried to sell the company. Welcome to Facebook.'

I grabbed literally a corner of a desk and started working. It was a stark contrast from Intel where everything was regimented. What was interesting was we saw the internal metrics about growth. We were at 10 million users the day I started, by the day I got fired it was about 50 million.

Zuck did really clever things to reduce all distractions. He paid for all our parking tickets, our cleaning, paid for us to live close, paid for everything so all we had to do was focus on work. His vision was to connect the entire world. His quote was 'We want to be a tollbooth for the internet.'

He rejected a $1 billion sale from Yahoo at age 24. The threats were serious - Google was a threat, MySpace was a huge threat. But we had Harvard PhDs working in customer support - people wanted to be there so badly it didn't matter your degree."