Rob's Notes 4: On to Building Future-ish Things (2023)
Tldr; While I’ve helped multiple teams ship products impacting billions of people over the last 6 years, I want to get closer to the metal once more and so I’m returning to the startup world. I want to play my part (however small it may be) in building a better future. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an enormous venture, but the bar is whether my kids feel that it makes the world a better place. Having started companies before, I know how all-consuming it is to build a brand new venture, or even to scale an already fast-growing startup. So I’m going to take my time deciding what to build and how.
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Looking back on these last 6 years (almost to the day): I’m grateful for the opportunity given to me to work at Facebook (now Meta) and Google. These were both excellent chances to get to know some super-smart and highly motivated colleagues and to solve difficult and impactful problems, especially in the realm of building trustworthy experiences for people.
At Facebook I worked on keeping ads and other commercial products safe; we scaled out massive AI systems to understand images and text, verified people and businesses, sued scammers, and built first-of-a-kind transparency tools. I helped grow our business integrity product, engineering and cross-functional teams by greater than 10x in less than 4 years. We accomplished so much; the end of 2020 felt like a good time for a new challenge. I then joined Google in January 2021 to lead their privacy product management team.
Albeit with various personnel and organizational changes, my team and our charter continued to grow. Some of the data protection/privacy work, however, was becoming more spread out across other parts of the company (not a bad thing!) and closer to specific product areas. Many central privacy functions still continued, and I managed the awesome PM group we had working on privacy. I also took on supporting the growing security product management team – this work was less front-end user-impacting, and more backend infrastructure and regulatory coordination. In addition, I’d built out an engineering team reporting directly to me, working on highly impactful provably private networking technology that was a prominent part of the recent Pixel 7 launch, and of my areas I found this “b2b2c” type combo of infrastructure and user work most energizing. Two VP roles were pitched to me in other product areas at Google in January, but I’ve decided it is time to leave ‘big tech’ and return to being a builder!
I love growing teams and building products that solve real problems for people! Not only do I enjoy growing people and their careers, I also like to connect dots between people and organizations. Whether that’s explaining or writing about complex technologies, or leveraging my network to connect people. It’s one reason I made a small angel investment in Climate Draft: we need more talented people to work on the existential climate challenges facing us, and it can be hard to know where to start.
Thank you to the >100+ product managers I’ve been honored to support directly across the two companies: you know who you are, and I am here for any of you, any time. Thanks too to all our fantastic engineering and XFN partners and all the highly capable people who’ve helped me and our teams in turn these past 6 years. There are too many to mention, but I will always greatly appreciate the people I worked alongside like:
Keith Enright and his privacy legal team, and Sarah Hammond and Jonathan Bellack: some of the best collaborative legal, UX and PM partners and friends one could want at Google,
Rob Goldman, who showed me how a startup entrepreneur could become a successful product leader in a big company,
Natalie, Ryan, Yasho, Suba, Eugene and the other members of the Business Integrity leadership group at Facebook, and
Ami Vora, my first manager at FB - a supremely supportive human and amazing product leader now at Faire.
It’s been almost 10 years since I sold my first startup. I know that my experiences scaling large product and engineering teams since then make me a far better leader and entrepreneur than I was then, whether that’s going to be in climate or elsewhere. While I take time to figure out what I want to start or build, I’ll likely help a handful of companies who want to scale their fraud/abuse countermeasures, re-work their products to be more private, monetize their products, or reason how to accelerate building their product and engineering orgs.
Many folks at Google and FB/Meta have thanked me for my “Rob’s Notes” over the years. In many cases, I have never met these people, but I love getting feedback on what I write. I’ll do my best to continue to write about ideas and problems on substack, and to connect you all to the smart people who usually understand these things far better than I do!
If you need help or have great ideas to discuss, please DM me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Thank you y’all!
Rob
Austin, TX