Noah Kagan hasn’t forgotten the day he was fired from Facebook. But he seems to have taken it as a valuable experience.
Kagan, who was employee #30 at the social network, went on to work at several startups and now runs AppSumo, a daily deals website that he founded. In a self-published ebook (“How I Lost $170 Million: My Time as #30 at Facebook”), Kagan describes working for about ten months at the company in 2005 and 2006, when it was still a relatively small startup.
In the book, Kagan says he had a hand in creating some of the features that are essential to the site today – including status updates, pages and Facebook’s mobile service. Among his anecdotes are some striking examples of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s focus on growth and at-times ruthless management style.
On his first day at work, Kagan says Zuckerberg fired the manager who was supposed to be Kagan’s boss, apparently after a disagreement over Zuckerberg rejecting an acquisition offer from Yahoo:
Mark walks in and everybody gets quiet. He looks flustered — a surprise, given that all I had seen at this point was his awkward, happy grin on TV and all over the internet. But here he was, boy genius, wunderkind, in the flesh.
He looks at me.
“Who are you?”
“Noah,” I said. “It’s my first day.”
“Noah — got it. Uh, I just fired your boss,” he stammers.
It’s my first day and my boss gets fired? I think.
“How do I avoid messing up so I don’t get fired, too?” I said. It was the first thing that came to mind. Everyone laughed, but I was serious.
“Don’t try to sell my company out from under me,” he answered.
Kagan also describes late nights of coding, late nights of partying, and the perks of free meals and Red Bull that Facebook provided workers. As in other accounts of that era, Kagan says women were rare among employees and the atmosphere was decidedly frat-house.
He also describes the process of creating new products as “Mark tells you personally or tells your team what he wants,” followed by repeated instances of Zuckerberg rejecting the results as inadequate.
Oh, and there are stories about Zuckerberg threatening employees (lovingly!) with a samurai sword or a punch in the face, and Zuckerberg screaming “Re-do it” while pouring water on the computer of Kagan’s coworker, who had demonstrated a new product that didn’t meet Zuckerberg’s standards.
Kagan writes that Zuckerberg would rebuff many ideas for making money on the site.
On a white board he wrote the word, “growth.” He said if any feature didn’t help do that then he was not interested and the idea was crushed. That was the only priority that mattered and his singular focus on accomplishing something has stuck with me till today.
Kagan doesn’t go into great detail about the reasons for his firing, but he also doesn’t seem to hold a grudge against his former bosses at Facebook. In a 2012 blog post, Kagan took stock of his own strengths and shortcomings, including lessons learned from his time at the social network.
And though he left without vesting Facebook stock grants that he estimates would be worth $170 million today, Kagan writes that he got past his initial bitterness and concluded that he “actually had almost everything I wanted.”
(Photo of Mark Zuckerberg by Nhat V. Meyer/Mercury News)
