You are the easiest person to fool. Part 1.

What I wish I’d known before I quit my job at Facebook

[Author’s note: This is part 1 of a post being published in three parts because I’m a slow writer and a week has gone by since I started writing it. There was a time when I wouldn’t hit post until it was complete but I’m trying to apply what I’ve learned: Make the other mistake.]

In late 2018 having recently turned 26, I left my job at Facebook. I worked as a software engineer building features inside the Facebook and Messenger apps.

I didn’t plan on having a career in tech. I grew up building websites for fun and, occasionally, pocket money. I studied Computer Science in college because I didn’t know what else to choose. In 2010, working in tech wasn’t the established lucrative career that it is today — to me anyways.

Ending up at Facebook after college felt like winning the lottery. A couple years earlier you would have found me lamenting about how hard it was to find an internship. I had imagined myself working for a few years before taking a shot at one of these legendary companies.

From that first day of orientation in Menlo Park, California, I knew I would leave to start a company. I didn’t know when exactly but building things on my own is how I’d gotten into programming and I knew I would want to get back to that. In college I also read Hacker News. Reading about startups exposed me to a world I never knew existed. In retrospect I should have left earlier but that’s for another story.

Having won the lottery made me feel like I was playing with house money. And in a sense, I was. The high compensation and brand name on my resume gave me a safety net.

So 3.5 years later, I left. And what ensued was two of the best years of my life — but I didn’t succeed. I failed to build a business. One that I would want to work on for a long time.

I’ve spent the last two years reflecting on the mistakes I made and what I would do differently to prepare for the next time I was ready to give it another run.

This series of posts is my attempt at documenting these lessons along with stories from those two intense years.

1. Make the other mistake

George Costanza: Every decision I’ve ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every aspect of life, be it something to wear, something to eat… It’s all been wrong.

Jerry Seinfeld: If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.

–Seinfeld, “The Opposite” (1994)

This memorable phrase was first introduced to me back when I worked at Facebook [0]. It means that if you’re not getting results — whatever it is you’ve been doing — give the extreme opposite a try.

The premise is that deep down you already know what needs to change.

But you keep reasoning yourself out of it. You’re too afraid to try.

One of my 2022 goals was to be more prolific. I missed it big time. The effort was there but the results weren’t.

What clicked for me is understanding that there’s a psychological wall in the way.

Mine is: I don’t feel like I’m adding anything of value if I build something that already exists or write something that has already been said.

So I come up with novel mechanics that sound plausible in my head, spend months building an MVP, then throw it all away when I inevitably realize it’s bad.

I realize now what’s going on. My instinct is wrong.

Here’s another way that this mindset has set me back. I’ve wanted to be more active online. I used to be. I was a carefree kid in the 2000s who spent all his free time on battle.net and gaming forums. Now I can’t get past this mental blocker. Every thought I have is a rehash of what someone else has said, someone more interesting and more credible. I have nothing new to say is the mentality that has held me back.

Frankly, the longer I spend on this post the larger this feeling grows but I’m trying to make the other mistake.

2. You can create luck

Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down. — Charles Kettering

You will be better off if you ignore the oft repeated trope that hard work is all you need to succeed. It may be true on a long enough time horizon. But if you think of luck as a critical piece of the puzzle — right next to solving a real problem and knowing who your users are — you’ll want to work on it and you’ll learn that you can take steps to increase the amount of luck you receive, in turn improving your odds of success.

This insight occurred to me as I spent more time studying successful people. A pattern emerged: they were all the beneficiaries of luck at one point or another. And the best seemed to get lucky more than once.

I wouldn’t have the life I have today if I hadn’t been lucky once but more on that later.

Defining luck

Luck is opportunity meets preparation. Most of preparation is knowing to spot opportunity so that you can seize it. So let’s turn our attention to opportunity.

While opportunity can be loud and hard to miss like finding your side project on the front page of Hacker News, opportunity can also whisper and slip away:

• A cold DM.
• An invite to a group chat.
• An introduction.
• A tweet about an upcoming hackathon.

The authors of the book “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned” would call these stepping stones.

“All these treasures are worth finding even though none of them may be something you’re seeking in particular. But if you’re lucky enough to find one, it comes with a bonus — a map of clues pointing to even more treasures. That’s the stepping stone principle — one good idea leads to another. Treasures lead to more treasures, chaining and branching out across the infinite stepping stones of possible discoveries.”

The shortest path is not always the quickest. To get more lucky, traverse more stepping stones.

Crucially, opportunities are fleeting. Being lucky is about seizing them in the moment just as much as it is about spotting them.

Seeing more opportunities

The insight that surprised me is that you can create opportunities. Be the one who messages first. Be the one who starts a group chat. Be the one who organizes the meetup.

And to get full exposure to lady luck, you can’t be the only one initiating. You also need to invite opportunity. Repeatedly.

How to go about doing that requires it’s own post but in short: do interesting stuff and let people know about it.

“Success begets success” is an interesting phenomenon. Winning leads to more winning.

Be careful of aiming too high for your first win or you may never get it. Better to lock in a small win and let that be a springboard for bigger and bigger wins.

In college, I unknowingly followed this blueprint and it led to an internship at Facebook.

A chain of events started with a lunch that I almost skipped. There, catching up with a relative I hadn’t spoken to in a while, I learned about a programming job they had lined up that summer. They floated the idea of me joining and I said yes. I prepped, interviewed and got the job.

That summer, my cousin and I worked together. Both at work and after hours where we built a course scheduling tool for our school. We launched it when school started again but didn’t get much traction. Not everything leads to an opportunity but I improved my coding chops and added an interesting bullet point to my resume.

At the end of the summer, my cousin showed me a job posting for another programming job, this time at the school’s Academic Web Technologies department. I hadn’t been thinking about getting a part-time job but it paid more than this internship so I applied. Again I prepped, interviewed, and got the job.

One day at the office, I got to talking to the student working next to me. I didn’t know them then but we got to talking about their recent interview at Facebook. He hadn’t received an offer but I asked for his recruiter’s email anyway.

He gave me two and mentioned that one of them had graduated from our school. Obviously I emailed that one. Fortunately I’d read tips on how to send good emails somewhere (probably hacker news). I wrote as the subject: “Fellow anteater interested in internship”. I like to think the subject was the difference between that email being read and that email being ignored.

The rest of this story is still euphoric to me. I got a reply, talked the recruiter into postponing the interview for two weeks so that I could interview prep like a madman during winter break, interviewed and got the offer.

For a kid with a background like mine, that internship has made my entire career. And it all started with grabbing an opportunity that didn’t seem like an opportunity: lunch.

3. You are the easiest person to fool

• You’ll delude yourself to think you found a problem worth solving.
• You’ll overestimate how many people have this problem.
• You’ll misjudge your ability to find users.

I’ve had to be taught this lesson time and time again.

Leaving Facebook in 2018 freed from the shackles of being physically located in the US. I immediately bought myself a one-way ticket to Asia. There I found a problem that would consume my first 6 months of w-2-free living: finding a founder community outside of home.

I wasn’t the first to quit my job and travel abroad. Indie Hackers and Nomad List were thriving communities. So I set out to build a network of hacker houses for founders abroad.

I devised a plan. Build a landing page. Record a promo video. Share it everywhere founders congregate online: Hacker News, YC Startup School, Indie Hackers, Reddit. The first milestone was to recruit 6 founders and demo the proof of concept. Using the first cohort as marketing material, I could get the flywheel spinning. Ultimately, I wanted to create an Airbnb-like hosting and booking experience.

It flopped hard. The promo video got nowhere. My posts got little to no engagement. I had no following and no trust. I stopped working on it after months of stubbornly persevering.

In contrast, here’s the story of a startup that launched one year later. In the middle of the pandemic, 20 alumnus of a well-known program called OnDeck (a community for aspiring founders) organized a week-long trip to hang out and work together in Tulum, Mexico.

Capitalizing on the publicity and attention that the experiment garnered on Twitter, three of the organizers came together to start a company based on the same concept. They called it Launch House.

Riding the momentum of the Tulum experiment, they raised a seed to launch houses across the United States, eventually raising a Series A from Andreessen Horowitz (the startup later flamed out in controversy but that’s besides the point).

When I decided to work on this idea, I thought I had my user acquisition story figured out. I’d get my first 100 users from communities like YC Startup School and Indie Hackers. But I was wrong. Whereas I grinded for 100 views on Youtube, the Launch House founders launched with a 500-people-strong community of densely connected, influential technologists at their back and with a well-publicized demo already under their belt.

Counterintuitively, the more you read about startups and business the easier it is to fool yourself. I hadn’t expected that to be the case. I thought the more you knew the less mistakes you’d make. I now believe the only antidote is to ship early.

If there isn’t absolute certainty that you’re building something people want, timebox your efforts. Most ideas should take less than a month. Some ideas may truly require many months to build. In that case, figure out some way to ship a scoped down version of it. No matter how good you think the idea is, if you can’t do that, you need to let it go.

The difficulty with that advice is that it’s easy for scope to creep on you as you build out your MVP. You’ll convince yourself that some feature is table-stake. If you’re a perfectionist like I am, your mistake is to see it as a strength rather than a weakness. I’ve adopted one mindset to help me combat this ailment. I now see it as an act of laziness. It’s lazy to not spend time figuring out how to make more with less. Building more features is easy. If a barebones proof of concept is not enough to ship and get some feedback, then you probably have a bad idea [1].

Richard Feynman said it best:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Part 2

I cut the size of this post down to three lessons so that I could avoid adding one more item to my graveyard of abandoned drafts.

Some of the lessons I didn’t get to write about in this post: the importance of sizing your bets, and why you want to avoid starting from zero at all cost.

If that sounds interesting to you, watch out for Part 2.

P.S. In trying to follow my own advice, I’ll be more active on Twitter, starting with sharing bits and pieces of this post that didn’t make the final draft and my thought process as I was writing this. My twitter is here.

[0] I stole this idea from Mark Rabkin who does a much better job at introducing it. I highly recommend reading his post: https://medium.com/@mrabkin/make-the-other-mistake-7f449077839b

[1] A good idea that you can’t execute on is a bad idea. Let someone else work on it. You’re better off finding an idea that’s a better fit for you.