This mail is so very spot on. In large companies there are so many people trying very hard to sidetrack the company goals and would come up with a lot of excuses of why it should or could not be done. In a large company, adding a form field to an internal UI (yes internal UI which has much much less constraints than user facing) with an optional field takes so much back and forth and multiple committee meetings that the feature itself becomes secondary (Note that this doesn't happen if there is external pressure on the company for the feature, like competition or government mandates). I don't think this is a solvable problem easily other than keeping hiring very very selective and keeping the company as small as possible.

One example of this is the Bill Gates mail about MovieMaker where he points extremely obvious issues and in response none of the VPs says "This is unacceptable. We will take care of it". The response mail is just all of them saying not my scope.

I believe this is the app they were talking about. So after this email it still took some 8 months to ship Facebook Camera https://about.fb.com/news/2012/05/introducing-facebook-camer...

That was a surprisingly direct and non-hostile directive. Wish my company communicated like this.

In 2012, I created a photo app for the VK social network in 2 weeks. The app quickly gained 30k users and I was planning to adapt it for Facebook, but my partner disappeared. Later, it turned out that he sold the app to move to Thailand. If I had known back then, I would have sold the app to Mark Zuckerberg and become incredibly wealthy

The more interesting question I have is how he knew the speed that IG user base was growing. The threat that Google may acquire IG when IG was barely a year old seemed quite paranoid, especially when Google had almost certainly ceded its Google+ effort by then.

If anything, the rumors in startup land at the time had Twitter as the likely buyer and IG was quickly integrating with them. It was a product that, to this day, never felt at home with the FB News Feed. Threads is the proof that it really should have been a Twitter product.

Zuck does make fair points, and his direct reports calling out "team issues" seems like excuses. If anything, the "efficient" mono corporate culture of Facebook makes launching a whole new product that isn't just a feature of a bigger product almost impossible. I was on a couple zero-to-one efforts that never made it past the prototype stage because it couldn't really find a home in the bigger orgs. Camera was no different.

Interesting to see these companies before they became "infinite money generators". I'm sure Zuck today could call upon 500 engineers if he had something that urgent he wanted done.

I see how the urgency of this email can be appropriate or even admirable, especially in social media where the fastest growing apps tend to dominate. I just wish they shared the same urgency when it comes to protecting their users—e.g., the latest case of password storage negligence that hit the news earlier this week.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41678840

I think it's interesting that Threads was built in only about 5 months, and from my understanding did well in the initial flood of traffic it received.

Does anyone know to whom this email was directed? It's not on the techemails.com site, nor could I find it on the linked twitter thread, but I'm assuming it's not redacted in the discovery materials on the lawsuit.

So I’m more junior so I don’t understand why this letter is controversial. Is it not important to meet your business goals in a crunch and address systemic issues in some sort of post mortem or retro? I do understand that there exists “management debt” for intra team issues, similar to technical debt, but I don’t see how it’s problematic to ask to prioritize finishing a project that’s been signed and on for and deal with the issues later, especially with the state of the business at that time.

Multiple comments here talking about how Zuck doesn't care about the team. That is not my read at all. He specifically says that he wants to both fix the team and ship the product. What he does have a problem with is the sole focus on the team (aka fixing the team as the milestone on its own) while the company is losing its competitive advantage. That feels like a pretty reasonable stance from a "wartime" CEO [0]. A healthy team in a failing company is not an outcome to strive for.

[0] https://a16z.com/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/

Starts with the business reasoning. Then, shouldn’t be hard. Finally, get it done.

That last line gets bodies moving

We can't have a real understanding of it without knowing what "fix the team" means. If this team that is in a broken state is responsible for shipping an app, not fixing it means not shipping the app, that's seem very basic.

Pretty easy to say when you got an app that prints money by stealing data.

>As soon as we launch a compelling product a lot of people will use ours more and future Instagram users will find no reason to use them.

It's so fun to watch after the history happened and see what worked and what didn't and how they ended up just having to pay $1 billion for their competitor. I'm dreaming of a world where companies can't just buy their monopoly, crazy I know.

I don't know what folks are finding inspiring about this. Mark rants about how they need to copy Instagram, and as history points out, they failed to do so and just ended up acquiring them. This is reactive management, the worst kind of leadership where quick, hasty decisions are made.

Was Mark already trying to court Instagram founders when he sent this email out?

Aside from llama I haven’t used any of what they’re “shipping” in a very, very long time. Is FB still a thing? Why?