One of Facebook’s first employees has revealed the lessons he learned working with founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Noah Kagan, who is now the founder and CEO of software platform AppSumo, was the 30th employee hired at Facebook in its early stages.
He joined the company as a product manager in 2005, the same year Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard University to run Facebook full time. The company, now known as Meta, has a net worth of around $1.2 billion.
While he was fired from the job after just nine months, Kagan has shared the “non-obvious” management lessons he learned from working directly under the tech executive at an X. mail.
Since her time at Facebook, Kagan founded AppSumo, a platform for entrepreneurs to buy and sell digital products, which generated around $80 million in revenue last year.
Noah Kagan shared photos on X from when he worked at Facebook in its early stages
The first lesson Kagan revealed she had learned from Zuckerberg was to “focus on one goal.”
“Mark’s goal was to reach 1 billion users,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
‘Every idea we brought, he would ask, “Does this help user growth or not?” If it didn’t lead us toward that goal, we didn’t do it. You don’t grow fast by doing many things, but by doing ONE thing extremely well.’
His second piece of advice was to act fast when it comes to growing a successful business.
He wrote: ‘On Facebook, it was normal to work more than 12 hours a day. We were constantly rolling out new features and allowing our users to give feedback. As a startup, your biggest advantage over giant companies is speed.’
Third, make sure you hire only “A players,” noting that Zuckerberg, now worth $163 billion, would only hire people he would be happy to work for.
“Even our customer service team was full of Harvard doctors,” he wrote.
‘Facebook employees have started Asana, Quora, AppSumo, OpenAi and more. A startup depends on great people much more than a big company.’
The next lesson Kagan said she learned was to always treat her employees well.
He said Facebook did many things for its workers that are now considered the norm, including offering free lunches and dry cleaning and paying for apartments or parking tickets.
‘Treating your employees well improves work and increases morale. It doesn’t have to be money, people just want to feel recognized,” she stated.
Noah Kagan, who is now the founder and CEO of software platform AppSumo, was the 30th employee hired at Facebook.
One of Facebook’s first employees has revealed the lessons he learned working with founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Next on Kagan’s list is “scratching the itch.”
‘I used Facebook to connect with friends and meet girls. Which meant that if I saw something wrong, I could fix it myself. Most people start businesses in categories that don’t interest them. Build selfishly, share selflessly,” he explained.
His fifth tip is to make sure you pay attention to the details.
He recalled that Zuckerberg once sent him an email at 3 a.m. telling him that he had missed a point in a document.
‘Mark set a high standard of excellence for us. It was challenging, but also very rewarding,” he wrote.
Another tip Kagan learned from Meta’s founder was to “give ownership to the team.”
He wrote: ‘Surprisingly, Mark was not very involved in the day-to-day operations. He coded some of the time, but most of it was focused on the macro view.
“He was great at giving people a goal, some boundaries and coaching them from the sidelines.”
The first lesson Kagan revealed she had learned from Zuckerberg was to “focus on one goal.” “Mark’s goal was 1 billion users,” he wrote in X
Kagan’s eighth lesson was that Zuckerberg would “scream” if employees called people Facebook “users.”
‘”They are human beings,” he told us.’ On the other side of that username or email address is a human companion,” she explained.
The next lesson on his list was “hire fast, fire faster.”
Kagan explained that his boss was fired the day he started, his next boss was fired a month later, and he himself was fired after just nine months.
He added: “Mark was intense about keeping only the A players.”
The tenth and final “non-obvious” management lesson Kagan shared was having a “big vision.”
“We were all in our twenties when Mark was offered a billion dollars to sell Facebook. When he said no, he sent a message to all of us and the world. His goal was to connect the ENTIRE world,” he wrote.
