Mike Hudack
speaker
274 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Mike Hudack’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think that the strategy that they have right now of open sourcing a bunch of models makes a ton of sense. It's like the right strategic move if you're in their position.
um you're kind of like salting the earth in a pretty meaningful way you know giving everybody access to this thing um instead of so that it's no longer a war between like two or three or four titans it's just like okay we're all in this together you know um this is very smart And we'll see.
I think it's going to become, I think that one of the really significant advantages that Facebook has, and again, this is one of the reasons why distributing the models in this way makes so much sense, is Facebook has one of the largest permissioned training sets in the world. It's not clear whether or not OpenAI really can train on all of the things that they train on.
um there's a really great clip i think of their their former um cto you know being asked about whether or not they trained on youtube and you know she just goes like oh you know like totally that she makes and like you know facebook actually has the right to like you know has just like a giant content library um so i think that there's a lot of stuff that they're doing which you know
takes real account of like, what are our strengths and what are our weaknesses as an organization here? All right, let's change the landscape around us to favor us with our set of advantages. And, um, you know, I, I think it, you know, they're doing a very good job at it.
Um, very good friend of mine is actually running, um, generative AI, generative AI there now, um, who I think is totally brilliant. Cool.
I think that the real art of product, the true thing, is understanding what people want to achieve and helping them achieve that with the minimal amount of work. I think every product team should be probably between six to eight people. Most of those people should be engineers, if possible. One of those people should be a data scientist. One should be a designer. And then I think a PM is optional.
Man, I've basically wanted to build things on the Internet for the entire time that I can remember, even before the Internet. My brother had an Amiga back in the day. He used CompuServe on it, and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. I think from that point on, I just wanted to make digital things.
And I dropped out of high school when I was 15 and went to work at a startup and just always wanted to build things on the Internet.
First of all, I think that every founder that I've worked with or for has operated in one way or another in founder mode. I think it's just like the natural thing that people do. You do skip levels, you get involved in the details. Everybody does it. Like, I remember hearing stories about Bill Gates doing product reviews
You know, he'd do a product review on Excel and he'd be like, click on that menu, go down five levels. Okay, why is that there? And if you could answer the question, he'd be like, oh, okay, all right, the rest of this kind of looks good. He wasn't like, oh, the person in charge of Excel, just go. You know, he would do a product review. I think it's very normal.
There are founders who are better or worse at doing this at different stages of company. You could be really great at being in this thing that we now call founder mode in a 20-person company. and terrible at it in a 2,000 person company, or the other way around. You might be bad at it at 20 people and great at it at 2,000.
I think it's just like good branding around something that people have already been doing. Do you think it will have more harm than good as an impact? I think that founders who behave badly don't need any additional excuse to do it. Like I think you see it all the time. I think it's... Kind of normal.
I think that people will now, instead of saying, hey, you know, some version of like, this is my company where I feel really passionate about this thing. They'll say, oh, well, I'm operating in founder mode. But I don't think it's going to lead to like a dramatic increase in bad behavior.
I mean, Facebook is still very much the best run company I have ever worked at. Why is that? Kaz from Shopify said the same. Yeah. You know, there are a lot of like very simple examples I can give you. But generally, in the time that I was there, there was no bullshit. It was incredibly flat organization. Mark was always in founder mode. You know, I remember once he like commented on a diff.
Somebody was making a change to the composer on the web and he commented on the diff and was like, I don't like this change. It was like an entry level engineer. Like, you know, it's like a. making a small tweak and he was like, I care about this, please come and see me and talk about it. That's very unusual.
When I was there, there were vending machines all over the office with good headphones and mice and whatever you would need in order to do your job.
if you forgot your laptop you could go and get a loaner laptop if you didn't have headphones with you you could wave your badge at the machine and get a pair of good headphones out because they understood that the value of the time that you were spending that day like your focus and writing code at that moment was more valuable than the hundred dollars that the headphones cost i've never seen anyone else do that you know before or since but it's correct when you review product decisions i think we learn a lot from successes and failures when you think about the single best product decision you made at facebook
I'm going to give you two examples. I joined the ads org, I don't know, like a couple of months after the IPO. And a lot of people don't remember this, but the Facebook IPO wasn't great and ads revenue wasn't really performing the way that we wanted it to. And to support the kind of valuation that we had or that we wanted, we needed to accelerate revenue growth really significantly.
And I think part of the challenge for the company was that historically, Mark had said, you know, there was a perception that he didn't really care about ads. And I think the ask that I got was to just go over there and kind of, I don't know, make it okay for good consumer PMs to work on ads. There was this view that that was important.
Showing 81–100 of 274 · page 5 of 14
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