Mark Zuckerberg once gave a Facebook engineer startup advice at 2 a.m. while ‘hanging out with all the interns’—she quit and raised millions after
When Sophie Novati landed her first job as an engineering intern at Facebook in 2011, the social media giant was firmly in its “move fast and break things” era.
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“The energy was buzzing early Facebook,” the now-tech entrepreneur recalls to Fortune. “There were so many people just trying to build and ship cool stuff.”
“It honestly almost felt like it was college,” she adds. “People were literally sleeping at the office… It felt like everyone that I was there with were just all buddies and hanging out. Everyone was working very hard. But it felt like the dorm room.”
A few years later, Novati left Facebook (now Meta) to join the platform Nextdoor as its second iOS engineer hire. The millennial helped build it from the ground up before founding her own firm, Formation, in 2019. The job placement company offers various subscription packages and programs to help engineers secure work or increase their earning potential. For a fee, job seekers can get access to resume reviews, negotiation coaching, mentoring, mock interviews, exam drills and more.
Within just five years, Formation had raised over $8.5 million in funding and was working with the likes of Netflix, Google, Twitch, Dropbox, Adobe to place thousands of workers into roles.
And, Novati says, Formation’s success today is partly due to a late-night chess lesson from her former boss, Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg’s late-night advice over chess
It was 2 a.m. one night in 2011 when Zuckerberg was “hanging out with all the interns,” including playing a couple of chess matches with Novati (who claims she won).
“That was the vibe of the company at the time,” Novati says, adding it was the first time she was able to ask him the million-dollar question: How’s the social network going to make any money?
“Facebook was growing users at a pace that no one’s seen before,” she adds. “But it couldn’t make any money.”
Of course, today, Facebook—or Meta—is a $1.55 trillion social media giant with Instagram and WhatsApp under its wing. However, up until 2012, the year Facebook went public, its mobile app didn’t actually make money.
It didn’t feature ads and the move to incorporate them was considered risky.
In the end, the company was able to turn likes and shares into profit, by turning its users into the product.
The “aggressive” strategy lifted Facebook from “no meaningful revenue” to $153 million in mobile ads, The Atlantic reported at the time.
“His response to me was, if you can figure out a way to capture people’s valuable attention, you can always figure out how to turn that into money later,” Novati recalls.
“What he was really focused on building is figuring out how to deliver value to people,” she adds. “Later on, you can always turn that value into dollars.”
It’s why Novati has always been hyper-focused on promoting how Formation is adding value to engineers’ lives instead of worrying about its list of clients or sign-up rates.
“We look at increase in compensation as our number one metric,” she explains.
“College in the U.S. costs on average around $100k for 4 years. The average compensation for people who go through versus those who do not is about $20km. So people are paying $100k for $20k value—we are the flip here, we’re helping people make $127k more and we’re charging $10-15k.”
“It’s pretty crazy that people are making over $100k more as a result of going through a program,” she boasts.
So far, Zuckerberg’s ethos has been on the money.
According to Formation, just a year after launching it had already raised a $4 million Seed Round led by Andreessen Horowitz—the first venture firm to hold stock in Facebook, Groupon, Twitter, and Zynga, all four of the highest-valued privately held social media companies at the time.
“There’s still a lot more that we can do to better capture the value that we’re creating,” Novati concludes.
But for now, her attention remains “on getting people into these top jobs and significantly improving the trajectories of their career.”
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on August 17, 2024.
Read more success stories from Fortune’s Orianna Rosa Royle:
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- This AI founder is hiring Gen Z with zero experience because they’re not stuck in ‘old ways of working’
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