How Noah Kagan Got Fired From Facebook and Lost $100 Million 236
First time accepted submitter abhi2012 writes "Noah Kagan, a former Facebook product manager, has written a brutally honest article about how and why he got fired from Facebook in 2006 and what he learned from it. The experience must be particularly painful, given that it eventually cost Kagan a $100 million fortune."
Re:Facebook has products? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you have a Facebook account? If so, YOU are their product. They sell your eyes and ears to people who give them money for the privilege.
why do we care? (Score:5, Insightful)
At that time, here’s the order of what was important in my life:
1- Facebook
2- Myself
3- Food / Shelter
OK, it sucks the get fired, but he lied in that list above, in reality he actually put himself above everything, and really abused his relationship with Facebook. As he later admits:
I wanted attention, I put myself before Facebook. I hosted events at the office, published things on this blog to get attention and used the brand more than I added to it.
Add to that he wasn't paying attention at all in meetings (well, I don't blame him for that but sometimes meetings are important), he didn't work well with others, and eventually he just annoyed the wrong people too much.
Re:Facebook has products? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nowadays there are ad networks that you can cash easy with this, but back in Google's time, it was like the underpants gnomes equation.
The irony is Classmates.com was first on the scene for meeting your fellow highschoolers, but they charged you for the privilege!
This teaches us one thing: Don't put any barriers in your website for adoption, even if the barrier is a paywall to profit you in the short run.
I think this is why freemium games are coming into their own. You have more people playing, money from ads and some money from premium good sales, and if your game is good, more people will come play it than a traditional 60$ game.
'How' may be a bit of an exaggeration. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Facebook has products? (Score:3, Insightful)
If so, YOU are their product.
I love that people keep saying this like it's correct. No. They are not in the business of slavery. Grow up.
They sell advertising space. That's it and that's all. Same as a newspaper, same as a TV show, same as a magazine, same as Slashdot. There's no reason to try to make it sound more evil than it is. They just do it better because they know you're (probably) between 30-40 and like automobiles.
He didnt... (Score:5, Insightful)
And he wasn't very insightful, I mean, he named 3 specific events and a SINGLE reason he thinks contributed to why he was fired.
His reason is stupid. He's was a show-er (rigid non adapting thinker) and not a grow-er (some one who adapts and 'grows the brand') or a veteran (some one who grows a bunch).
Completely arbitrary and meaningless stuff. He sounds like he was working in an environment where hyperbole sold, just apparently not for too long.
like the guy says, everyone should be fired once (Score:4, Insightful)
it teaches humility
Moral: marketdroids get sacrificed first (Score:4, Insightful)
The guy's basically a marketing manager. You might be the smartest person in company, but if a glorified salesman is all you are, you can easily be cloned. The exception is if you developed enough good connections OUTSIDE the company that you can take a shitload of the client base if they fire you. I don't think this is the case with Facebook users, fake or otherwise.
Of course, marketing types get paid more than the typical engineer if the product is successful. But if you want a more stable job, it's better to be the craftsman working at the product, than the pretty face selling it at the counter.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Facebook has products? (Score:5, Insightful)
What exactly does Noah Kagan do? Writing blogs is certainly not his superpower. After reading it I felt I knew less than when I started.
Re:why do we care? (Score:2, Insightful)
So quit.
wow (Score:5, Insightful)
How about this lesson: be a little less superficial and worry about something besides getting famous.
Two lessons not learned: discretion and the ability to abide by someone else's decision when you disagree.
Re:Facebook has products? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you must be an optimist: They're no *less* evil than television networks, newspapers or Slashdot. (TV shows are sold to TV networks, i.e., the TV show is the product.) When organizations like this are private they (potentially) *can* retain the goals of their founders, but once they're public (and they're founders sell off their stock), they're *required* to try and make the biggest profit possible. They do this by selling certain demographics of eyeballs to certain advertisers. The user's attention is the product.
Re:why do we care? (Score:5, Insightful)
Generally, no. People are not replaceable. When you try to replace one person with another person who on paper seems to be equivalent, you will end up changing the company. At low-levels, the effect will generally be localized, although even at this level the Butterfly Effect can come into play. As you move up the pay scale, switching personnel can have more and more noticeable effects on the company. What role they are in tends to have different effects -- switching out people in a role of creating value for the company can change the company's value in an extreme way. Replacing middle managers tends more to have a multiplier effect on the value creators. And then there is the social dynamic one brings, which can cause huge problems within the company organism.
I think an equivalency to your statement would be: you have no job security. And from an employer perspective: you have no security in retaining the people who give your company value. When either of these parties take those statements for granted, one or both parties will hurt from the loss.
Dont Care (Score:2, Insightful)
about some asshats reflection and regret brought on because he lost money
Re:Facebook has products? (Score:4, Insightful)
They sell advertising space. That's it and that's all. Same as a newspaper, same as a TV show, same as a magazine...
I don't write the content for the newspaper, TV, or magazines. That little distinction there is important enough that everybody else gets it.
"Everyone is replaceable" (Score:4, Insightful)
One of his lessons learned is that "everyone is replaceable", which is the sort of things action movie villains say when they're pointing a gun at the hero's head.
Re:'How' may be a bit of an exaggeration. (Score:3, Insightful)
why doesn't the blog article mention any attempts at intervention before he was let go?
That's what I was wondering. From the sound of it, things went from hunky dory to gone in 60 seconds. Weren't there any warnings? Don't people communicate at FB? (Extremely ironic, that.) That end run around marketing, a instance in which communication was very badly handled, sounds like the likely reason, and could justify an immediate firing, but we can only guess. Zoning out at meetings is bad too, but not necessarily fatal. If the meetings were just big wastes of time, as too many tend to be, then he should have done something about that. Don't go to those meetings, or cancel them, or refocus them. It doesn't sound like those meetings were wastes of time, rather it sounds like they were about vital functions, but he found the subjects (massive spreadsheets and more meetings) "boring". Typical non-engineer attitude.
He also goes a little overboard on eating crow and humble pie, which has me wondering about the sincerity of it. He may be doing some posturing, in order to better sell people on something such as his reformed character.
Finally, he recommends that everyone go through the experience of being fired. Like hell! Good for people with hugely swollen heads, perhaps, when it is their fault. But many people are not massively overconfident braggarts, and many firings are very unfair, executed to cover up someone else's mistake, or to make room for the boss's nephew, or out of personal dislike and jealousy, or sheer and totally impersonal bureaucratic bungling, or dozens of other reasons that would get the employer sued for wrongful termination in a heartbeat if disclosed. All a firing does in those cases is show workers that employers won't treat them fairly. Stories of such firings are legion, but employers don't have to care because there are more desperate workers than jobs. We're expected to suck it up, and for the most part we accept this treatment.
Re:Facebook has products? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's money in niche products, but things like broad social networks are not built on niches. When you have a social network, you either get as many people on it as possible, or you alternately find a smaller group who is willing to pay and capable of paying. This is not an easy task. And if they pay, you'd better have some first class service and content, preferably service because content these days is pretty easy to copy unless you are marketing something with a short shelf life.
Something like Facebook was started for college students and spread to everybody. They did what they needed to do, which is market for mass appeal. I can't argue with what they did, although I do wonder how far they can take it. The craptastic IPO was just another signal that FB needs to do something or it may not fare so well in the near future.
Re:Facebook has products? (Score:2, Insightful)
"they're *required* to try and make the biggest profit possible"
Prove it. I keep hearing that this is "the law", until I read something much more intelligent and educated sounding that said that's not true. I don't know.
All I know is that the one time I was "given" stock options, it ended up as a tax burden for me and a tax right off for the company.
Re:Facebook has products? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing in that language asserts that "client's best interest == biggest profit possible".
Re:What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Facebook has products? (Score:3, Insightful)
Check the letter section (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you think the letter section is?
Oh and what are you doing when you create a post on slashdot which generates revenue from advertising?
Re:Facebook has products? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ad-blocking FTW
Re:That.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Almost everyone learn them for free.
I beg to differ; IMHO, I'd say most never learn them at any price.
No one will ever hire him again... (Score:2, Insightful)