Pod Insights The Peterman Pod Frontline Manager at Meta to Senior Director at Snapchat in 3 Years (Career Story) About this episode Rong Yan went from a frontline manager at Meta to a Senior Director at Snapchat in 3 years. I interviewed him to ask what led to that rocketship career trajectory in management. We went over how he job hopped into his first Director role and much more.
𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:
• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/frontline-manager-at-meta-to-senior
• YouTube: https://youtu.be/BHlko_Mg-Jk
• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835
𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀:
00:00 - Intro
00:46 - Joining Facebook
03:06 - Moving up into a Director role
05:09 - Director skill gaps
15:31 - Domain knowledge & management
18:45 - LA vs SF cultures
20:48 - Senior Director growth at Snapchat
22:43 - Evan Spiegel stories
24:59 - Recruitment at higher levels
32:05 - Career planning in hindsight
34:08 - Biggest career regret
35:33 - How much of growth is luck?
38:19 - Advice for younger self
41:53 - Outro
𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝗼𝗻𝗴:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rong-yan-2004692/
• Personal Website: https://cs.cmu.edu/~yanrong
𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝘆𝗮𝗻:
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• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/
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• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 No matter what happens, you should never fire the first 15 engineers in the company.
0:05 Ryan Peterman? This is Rong Yan. He grew from a frontline manager at Facebook to a senior director at Snapchat in three years and shared everything he learned along the way.
0:13 Speaker 00 A very critical cultural philosophy I learned from Facebook is that everyone who work on engineering need to be technical.
0:21 Ryan Peterman? At Snapchat, he shared interesting learnings working with the founder and CEO.
0:25 Speaker 00 Everyone have a really high bar for performance, and it reminds me of Steve Jobs.
0:29 Ryan Peterman? Part of his growth was from job hopping to a director role at Square. And then you were thrust into a director role. What were the biggest gaps that you saw?
0:38 Speaker 00 There's a lot of gaps. But the biggest gap I saw...
0:41 Ryan Peterman? Here's the full episode.
0:46 Ryan Peterman? I'd like to go into one of the first legs of your career, which is when you joined Facebook. What is the story behind you joining Facebook?
0:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I think that's an interesting story. My career path is a little bit non-traditional. I was a PhD. I used to be a researcher for more than eight years. So, and because after I graduated, I spent five years in PhD program and then I spent another three years in IBM as a research scientist, mostly focused on computer vision and machine learning, right? And then I started to realize industrial research model, like IBM Research or Microsoft Research, with this kind of 50% mix between research and engineering, it's probably not going to be sustainable. I have to choose either 100% on research or 100% on engineering, one way or the others. So that's why, that was back in the year of like 2009, I started to reflect on that.
1:38 Speaker 00 Then I started to question myself, okay, which path I should go? There are three paths in front of me. One is I can be a faculty in some school. In fact, I do an interview with some top school at that time. Or I can be a coin developer or coin trader in a financial engineering firm. I also have offers from some of the top quantitative trading firms. Or I go to a software engineering company like Facebook. So when I was thinking deeper, first I wanted to be software engineers. I think that's the way that you can creating some things that was influence more people than just doing trading.
2:17 Speaker 00 The second thing is that I want to go to places that can make engineering to be the first-class citizens. I think in the financial world, engineering is always a second class. It's not a first class. I can be a faculty, but being faculty, I think the impact is smaller because you can only impact the scale of a school or maybe the community, but not the entire world. So that's why, that was the years I make up my minds that I want to be in the software engineering world. And then if I want to be a software engineer, well, I want to join a company that are fast-growing and have the potentials to influence a lot of people. And I think Facebook, it is the one that fits with my criteria.
2:59 Speaker 00 So that's why I'm lucky enough to be part of a Facebook during their fast-growing years, like in the early 2009.
3:07 Ryan Peterman? So I think at Facebook, you you transitioned into management. And I think the things in your career that I'm most interested in is at the subsequent to companies, at Square and at Snapchat, your career had explosive growth. Because at Square, I saw you were there for a little over a year and you went from a frontline manager to a director. Your team was around forty-plus engineers. So I'm kind of curious to dig into how you got that opportunity and how that growth came.
3:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'll be very transparent here. In fact, like when I joined Square, I was taking a director offer to join the Square.
3:46 Ryan Peterman? Oh, okay. So you signed up with a team that was
3:49 Speaker 00 That's right.
3:49 Ryan Peterman? Already director size.
3:51 Speaker 00 Exactly. Yeah. So and of course, Square is a smaller company. So that's why they are willing to give me the opportunity to perform at a director level. After I joined the company, when I started the team, it's about twenty-five people. And then I grow the teams into fifty-plus people in the years before I left the company. So I I indeed spent a lot of time to grow the machine learning teams and data science infrastructure teams like back in Square. I think it's actually a very helpful exercise. But one thing I do have to say that, and in fact, this is one of the the lesson learned for myself, is that I do things like my transitions from managers to director teach me a lot of things.
4:34 Speaker 00 I start to learn a lot about the difference between line managers and directors, and why they call it directors. So because director is about directing instead of managing. So it really opens my minds about what's the right way to managing managers instead of managing ICs. So you need to use a completely different philosophy to do that. And it takes me some time to adjust to it. But after this exercise, I think I've become a better managers at a different level.
5:09 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, I'm curious because you, your career grew so quickly that I wonder if there were any skill gaps. You were, you went from a frontline manager and then you were thrust into a director role. What were the biggest gaps that you saw?
5:23 Speaker 00 Yep, so the, there's a lot of gaps. But the biggest gap I thought, it's about back to the word directing. When I first stepped into the director role, I actually don't understand the difference between director versus managers. But when I started practicing, I started to realize like managing a managers require a different set of skill. Because like typically, the line managers are the one that knows the detail the best. Unlike my Facebook experience, I grew from IC to become a managers. Then I'm the one in the teams knows most of the detail. So that's why I continue, I can continue to use that as the anchor points to managing other people. Because almost most of the other people in my teams joined after me.
6:07 Speaker 00 So that's why I'm the senior people in the rooms. But you start to go to a new environment, you become the more junior people in the company. But you're actually leading the more senior people in this, in their tenures of the company. They are more senior and but you are leading them and also they know more details than you. Then what's the right way for me being a director positions to actually provide my values to those people? That's the most interesting part of it. Because like I don't think I do well in the first half a year. And once I don't do well, they may start to just feel like, okay, why do I actually need this layer at all? Because I'm not adding any values to their their daily life.
6:50 Speaker 00 So and that was the time I start to reflect is that if I'm becoming a middle layers between them and the higher level executive, what are the value that I should bring in for the organizations? So I think like what you end up landing on, it will be about like high level thinking, about strategical directions, about like the possibility that you can help to connect resource across different departments, about like solving the most difficult problem for the organizations. It's all about those kinds of directions.
7:32 Speaker 00 And that's why it speak to the difference between directing and managing. So it's no longer simply about managing people anymore. It's about directing an organizations towards to a better positions in the futures. So essentially it means you need to operate at a very different level than what it used to be. So it takes takes me some time to understand.
7:54 Ryan Peterman? So the thing that took you from maybe underperforming initially to fitting into the director role was you stepped away from directly managing people and you thought more strategically about the the group and that you were leading.
8:10 Speaker 00 Yep, so that's totally the case. And also like put some more thought around what does your direct report was looking for from you. So and there are some, there's definitely a reasons why the original leader choose not to promote any of the existing leader into my role. Instead, they choose to hire another persons into that role. There must be a reason behind that. And this means that there must be an area for improvement for them. As a leader myself, then I need to. Make it clear and then need to understand that, okay, what I can do to help to grow that persons from their current levels to the next level. What's the missing pieces? Like what other thing I can help them?
8:54 Speaker 00 So, and when I start to understand that, that going back to my analogy of like comparing management to psychological doctors, right? So you start to understand what they are looking for. And then I will align my work towards that. And once you start to do that, you start to get more respect from those people because they understand that you are here to help them to grow to the next level. So, yeah, I think that's sort of a turning point for my director career.
9:25 Ryan Peterman? I can imagine that there's a psychological effect here. If someone gets hired a level above you, you know, maybe these people were hoping for that. Did you deal with any incidents like that? And how do you, how do you handle that kind of situation?
9:41 Speaker 00 So first, yeah, I definitely dealt with that. Because it's a, it's a human nature things. Everyone want to get promoted. And everyone with questions why they are not the one that can promote it. So that's why the way to handle that is to really help them to understand that with me coming in, it's actually much better situation for them in terms of their career instead of a negative.
10:10 Speaker 00 And in that cases, you need to find a common grounds between you and your direct report. So you are not a blocker for their career instead, but you are actually a promoter for their career. So this is actually one thing I only realized half years after I become the director, to be honest. So, but after I do that, I think I'm doing much better in my following career in the future. So every single time when I go to a new places, the number one thing I would do is to build a trust layer. And this is a place I really recommend a book called The Five Dysfunctions of Teams. I think that book taught me a lot also. I mean, basically. The book, one of the key narrative for that book is about
10:52 Speaker 00 the most foundational layer for a successful team, it is trust. Everything building on top of trust. So that's the first things I would do is to build up a trust relationships with that persons. So he needs to trust me that I'm here to help him. Then I need to start to execute a few things to make him understand that. So and also you need to help him to unblock some of the things that he cannot unblock himself. That also shows the value of you being an upper management to help your people. So I think that become a more and more important things like so for for building a successful teams.
11:30 Ryan Peterman? You mentioned that you were hired in as a director. So that makes me think about, let's say you are a really ambitious manager and you're thinking about how can you go in level? And you know, there's the approach of staying somewhere, trying to get promoted. And then there's also job hopping. Do you think that job hopping is kind of the best way to to jump up tiers as a manager?
11:57 Speaker 00 I never think about job hopping is the best way to jump up to the managers. Yeah, in fact, even when I talk about Facebook, a lot of my old team members are already in a very high level. Some of my friends are already VP of Engineering in Facebook. So that's why I don't think job hopping is the always the only way or the right way to do it. But I can speak to like why I choose to do that. My philosophy is about North Star. I always have a North Star goal in my mind is that I want to become a CTO at some point for AI company.
12:35 Ryan Peterman? You did it.
12:35 Speaker 00 So, thank you. Yeah, so that that that has been a North Star goal, even like after I get my PhD for machine learning.
12:46 Speaker 00 I have been imagining a world at some points that AI can become a business by itself. But when I, when I graduated, the world is not like that. I mean, AI is just always amplifiers. It's just like a component in a bigger company who can make the business better. That's interesting, but that's not the most interesting part of it. So that's why when I start to make up my mind that this is my north star goal, then I want to make a plan out of it. My plan is that if I want to become a CTO, I have a lot of a weak link for that. Especially when I coming after my research career, I know from being a research scientist to be a CTO, there's a lot of gap.
13:31 Speaker 00 So I recognize my gap, it's about not understanding the industry, how industry operate. Don't understanding infrastructure and backend, don't understand front end, front product. And don't understand like many other things. So that's why I need to choose my career to help me to fill in those gap step by step. And in fact, here's a story. Before I joined Snapchat, I'm always a data and machine learning person. All of my position was related to data and machine learning.
14:01 Speaker 00 And when I joined Snapchat, there are two options in front of me. Either I choose to become the director of data, or I choose to become director of camera, which is the first page of Snapchat.
14:13 Speaker 00 I intentionally choose to become the director of camera. And I need to learn about iOS and Android programming from scratch. I literally spent like two months learning about iOS programming. Again, I think this is a very unconventional choices because I believe most people would just like go with director of data because that's the, that's most comfortable selection you can make.
14:34 Speaker 00 But my north star is trying to become a CTO. I think in order to become a CTO, I need to understand product. I need to understand working with product managers and product designer. And arguably, if you just like follow your traditional career progression within a company, it's really hard to do that. It's really hard to jump from a backend team to a more product-facing teams at that point. So I think that I should take that as a very great opportunity to challenge myself, to learn something different, and to inch towards my, what I'm looking for at the end. So, and I'm glad I made that choice. In fact, the first two years in Snapchat is probably one of the happiest periods for my career, because I really enjoyed that period. I'm learning new things.
15:18 Speaker 00 I find that myself was developing my knowledge base every single day. And that's the reasons why I was choosing different things at a different stage of my career.
15:31 Ryan Peterman? You worked in very different domains in as an engineering leader, and I was curious, how much do the details of the teams that you manage matter?
15:42 Speaker 00 This is a very critical cultural philosophy I learned from Facebook. It's that everyone who work on engineering need to be technical. I still remember the times that like Facebook have this six weeks bootcamp process. I don't know whether they still have it right now. So but when back in times, everyone need to go into the six week bootcamp process before they can choose their teams. And I remember there's a VP level hires sitting right next to me. And she's just like doing the same thing as what I was doing, like finding bugs, fixing bugs, writing pull requests. She was doing that for six week. That actually shocks me because I come from IBM, like IBM's VP never code anymore. I mean, I don't even, they probably only write PPTs at the end, I think.
16:27 Speaker 00 But this is one thing that was deeply planted in my heart afterwards. Is that I believe being technical, being data-driven, it's a very critical thing for us to success in the futures. And that's also part of the reasons why I also love to get into detail these days. So I write, I still write codes, I still review codes. Like right now, I at least write two or three pull requests every single week. I'm also the kind of person, I'm not really good at speaking up if I don't know the details. I want to make sure that I understand the details. So that I know I'm not making mistakes, so that I can make the best strategic decisions for the teams.
17:08 Ryan Peterman? How do you find that balance, though? Because even as an IC, there is some balance where you start to, you know, lower leverage tasks. You start offloading them to scale yourself and you only take on the very critical things. I can't even imagine like as a CTO or director, what even detailed work is worth picking up?
17:30 Speaker 00 I think the best way to scale this is to always going back to your first principle. So at the beginning of every single week, I will ask myself, what are the top three things I need to achieve? Only focus on those top three things and then everything else is less important. So and sometimes one of those top three things will be development, getting the details. So I think that's a very critical part of it. It's not, so that's why I'm not saying that every single week you need to do the same things. But every single week, you need to have a themes for your work. And you naturally understand how each themes is going to bring the best bang for the box for your North Star goal.
18:14 Speaker 00 So that's why you keep recalibrating yourself towards it. And I think this is the best way to scale because like at the end, every, every, every people only have eight hour working time or maybe 10 or 12 working time every single day, but that's it. So you, you can't have more. I think the best people, not really just like spending more time, but they're really good at allocating their time. And by understand the priority of each directions and spend the right time at each priorities.
18:45 Ryan Peterman? I understand that Snapchat is in Los Angeles, which is, you know, very different from Silicon Valley. I'm curious, did you notice a big difference in the cultures in LA versus Silicon Valley?
18:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I think specific for Snapchat, the culture is actually very similar to Bay Area company. And in fact, when I joined Snapchat, I found it surprisingly similar to Facebook's culture. It's all, it's a moving fast places, break things, guessing, stand, done is better than perfect. All those things apply to both Facebook and Snapchat. And partly because a lot of early people coming from Snapchat or working in Snapchat, they come from Bay Area or Seattle. So that's why Snapchat has built a culture very similar to that. But broadly speaking, I think L A is a way more diverse space than Silicon Valley. I still remember like when I was living in Bay Area, I lived there for five, six years.
19:38 Speaker 00 Whenever I go to an event or dinners, like you can find that like most of a topic people talk about on the dinner table, tech, stock, startups, the topic are almost always the same. So because that's a that bring Bay Area to fame, but also means that a lot of people was working on the same things. But in Los Angeles, you get very different vibe. You get access to a lot of different kind of people. For example, um, in my neighborhoods, one of my neighbor, it's a, it's a doctor, it's a medical doctor. And another neighbor, it's actually a photographer for Michael Jackson's. I think I can never get access to those kind of people when I was back in San Francisco. It really help you to broaden your views outside Silicon Valley.
20:24 Speaker 00 You start to understand that, oh, it turns out a lot of our people, a lot of our users are not just techie, are not just A I people. Instead, there's a lot of common persons who can still benefit from your product. And it help you to put yourself into their shoes to understand like how your product should be built in that cases.
20:48 Ryan Peterman? I saw your team grew to the size of two hundred and fifty engineers at Snapchat. What drove that growth?
20:54 Speaker 00 I think we grow that organically in the sense that like Snapchat become a bigger company over times. I remember when I first joined Snapchat, the whole company only had one hundred people. I'm probably the one hundredth employee. And Snapchat grow into about three thousand employee in two years. So that's why like my team size also grew together with that overall company growth at the same time. Of course, there's a lot of efforts putting into recruiting, like really shout out to the recruiting teams. I mean, a lot of efforts like to our interviewers for making it happens. But overall, I think like for a size of a company that worth like tens of billion dollar, I think that's a reasonable size of a company that you can, you want to build at that time.
21:39 Speaker 00 We do learn a lot from that process. And this is what I always call a painful period for fast growing. You will quickly realize the cultures that you want for a 100 people company is going to be very different from a culture for 3000 people company. You will see a lot of different sort of cultures start to clash with each other and in a good way. So that's why every single time when you double your team, you almost like you're building a new company at that time. And this is the period that the leadership has to be very resilient and we need to be very adaptive to the new environment. Just cannot always just hold on to one thing to say, okay, I'm not going to change that.
22:24 Speaker 00 Like in fact, that's different because we are building a very new company now. We are very different company. We need you use new way to think about the problems. So yeah, but that also really helped me to grow to seeing how you can grow a much smaller team to a much bigger team. What kind of a process you need to go through to make it happen.
22:43 Ryan Peterman? As a senior director at Snapchat, I imagine you might have had some proximity to Evan Spiegel. Do you have any stories working with him and what made him effective?
22:51 Speaker 00 We do have direct access to Evan. So in fact, I work pretty closely with Evans like for a few projects. I really like Evan as a leader. So in fact, the two things really strike my mind, like when you work with Evans. First, Evan have a really high bar for performance. So and his bar is even at the pixel level and it reminds me of Steve Jobs. So and then basically, for example, in our product review, if we show him a demo, he will actually point out pixel level issues and ask us to fix. So that's why sometimes I would say that, okay, if we're building a demo, we say you need to build an ever-ready demo, not a normal demo.
23:36 Speaker 00 But that really helped him to be very successful in terms of like building a great product. That's what he's really good at. Second thing is that I think he really care about personal connections. Especially with the engineers. Like he really keep his promise and he appreciate the value of engineering. So one thing I remember very clearly is that like he actually told one of our leader is that no matter what happens, you should never fire the first fifteen engineers in the company. Because they are the founding member for the company. Snapchat was like start in a, in a place is called a blue house. It's actually a very small house. Back in random speech. And then because the company is growing, expanding very quickly.
24:21 Speaker 00 So that's why they, they no longer working in their small places. But after four years, I think it's two thousand seventeen. Like Evan bought the house back. And then he start hosting the board meeting back in their house. So you can see he's really deeply care about this kind of connections. This like personal relationships. And that also probably explain why he was trying to build Snapchat. And which inherently it is a, a tool that help people to build like more intimate connections. And, and creating like conversation with each other. So yeah, he is a, he is a really good person for that.
24:59 Ryan Peterman? You know, after you left Snapchat, I saw that you went to a series of startups. And now that you explain that you're, you're overarching your star, everything's not making sense. So now, at this point, it looks like you're starting to take on larger leadership roles at smaller and smaller companies. I'm kind of curious, how does the recruiting work at these levels?
25:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, I have to be honest on this one, maybe bragging a little bit, but I never look for a new job myself. I never look for a new jobs proactively at least. So it all, it's all coming inbound like from either personal connections or like some recruiter outreach. And in most of the cases, I would prefer to go to a places that I actually have personal connection with. Because this is this is my fundamental belief. My fundamental belief is that no matter where I'm going to, I'm going to go through up cycle and down cycle. There will be a period the company do well and there will be a period the company will not do well. And this is true for almost all company I've been to like Facebook and Square, Snapchat.
26:03 Speaker 00 And like, things like that, right? So I want to be not only I can grow with the company during the up cycle, but I also want to grow with the company during the down cycle. But in order to go through a down cycle, I want to work with persons that I like. And I can think alike with them. So that we can all working together as a team to go through that. And that's why I really feel like personal connection is a big part of it for their decisions. And the reality is that like, it's a good time for engineering in the sense that like I keep getting recording email almost every single week, like for different positions. But I ignore majority of those email.
26:47 Speaker 00 But if it's a things come through a personal connections, I value it way more. I find that that actually will be the more interesting part that can help me to excel in the long term. So that's why, yeah, this is basically my story. Yeah, overall, I think that also speak to the fact that building a professional network, connections early and it's a very useful exercise. So because you never know this kind of opportunity, when this kind of opportunity will come, but you want to capture that opportunity when it arrives.
27:23 Ryan Peterman? How do you compare the roles that you that come your way? Because when you're in a well-established ladder, you know, you're a director, a director role comes and you kind of decide on some. But let's say you're, you're CTO of a certain company and you wanna consider another leadership role at another smaller company. Do you, is it number of people working there? Is it valuations? How do you make those calls?
27:49 Speaker 00 To be honest, I never take those two things into account. The valuations or the people report to me. I actually want less people to report to me right now. So, but it's all anchored against my North Star goal. Yeah, so maybe I bring that back before, but I want to bring this back to that also. I want to understand, is that choice actually helped me to move closer to what I want to do? I start to feel like this is getting more and more important in my career. Because the, the one things I gradually realized, like when I was spending more time in the industries. I start to realize, levels and titles, those are the things the company give that to you. It's not your things.
28:33 Speaker 00 And as an example, my original, I mean, I would say my, my role model, uh, ten years ago. Was like senior people in the company, like executive VP in a company, senior VP in a company. That was my role model. But I also start to realize, when they left the company, you would immediately hear much less about them externally. I'm not saying that they are not doing meaningful work, but you were seeing, you're hearing less from them externally. And people are still calling them XVP of some things. I start to realize, okay, yeah, the title is about the company, it's not about you. So people are not going to say, okay, you did these things. Instead, they would say the company did these things.
29:17 Speaker 00 And the more I think about it, the more I feel like, okay, maybe this is not what actually interests to me. Instead, I want people to remember myself as someone who actually built this product. That can make their life better. I feel like that's actually way more fulfilling for myself. So that's why like a lot of my decisions end up anchoring towards that direction. So you can see it's less about number of people I manage, I don't care. It's less about like the valuation of a company, I don't care. I care more about, am I doing something that are impactful right now? In fact, I literally joking to my friends yesterday is that I'm waiting for the times that two people can make a one billion dollar company. And it's probably going to come in pretty soon.
30:00 Speaker 00 And you may not have any direct report at that time, and that's totally okay. Because I'm making a lot of impact out of it. So that's actually what I want to anchor towards. When we're trying to hire good talents, the number one thing I want to do is to be very honest and transparent to them why they should join Hagen and they should not join Hagen. So for anyone who joined Hagen, I want them to believe that we can grow into a much bigger company. Yeah, and also want them to believe there is like only one percent chance we can do that. But they have to believe in that. Because this will be a tough cycle. And this will not be always smooth.
30:45 Speaker 00 This will, you'll have a lot of bump to get there. So, but I think I want people to feel, feel excited about being part of it. To go through this kind of up and downs to get there. So, and I think style is only good for that kind of people.
31:02 Ryan Peterman? It's interesting that you, you want them to know that it's, it's a very low chance of success. Why would you sell that to the candidate?
31:11 Speaker 00 I believe that's the winning strategies. I always believe in the power of being honest and transparent. So it's much better off, they know that upfront and they intentionally make their choices to join us. So that they won't leave the company when they start to see like some slight difficulty. I also believe that like when you go to a battlefield with the soldiers, you want all soldiers to be able to understand the difficulty they're going to face. But they are pumped up for it. They're not going to scare by that. This is the kind of preparations we want to get after. So, at the end, I'm not going to hire the entire world of the engineers, but I want to sift out five percent or the one percent of people
31:53 Speaker 00 who really truly want to go with us along this journey. And hopefully we can get that. But we will do that with, with like all the transparencies that we, we, we can give that to them.
32:05 Ryan Peterman? Coming to the end of the conversation, I want to go over some career reflections. And one of the first things that I think was interesting to me about your career is you defined a North Star on that you wanted to be a CTO at an AI-first company. And that kind of guided all of your decisions. Whereas I see a lot of other people, their career strategy is I want to become as high as I can go, or I want to make as much money as I can, or something like that. What's the pro and con of designing your career like you did as opposed to these external factors that a lot of people design their careers around?
32:46 Speaker 00 First, I think there's no right or wrong for any of the criteria you just mentioned. In fact, I would even consider my career decision is a little bit unconventional. Because, for example, most of my friends back in IBM Research, they would never choose to go to Facebook. It's a smaller company at that time. It's like the most common choices they're going to choose is go to a school to be a faculty or go to another industrial research lab to be another research scientist. And I think they can do really well also at that time. So that's why I don't think there's a right or wrong at this one. But it's really about like what you as a person want to do. And one thing I believe is that everyone is different. And everyone was motivated by different things.
33:31 Speaker 00 And that so searching process are very important. And my criteria will be, let's say, 15 years later, if I choose to retire at that time, if I look back at my career and I feel regret for anything, and I feel regret of not doing these things. If I would feel regret, I'd rather do it now. So, and then I know that I would feel regret if I never do an AI company and make that happens. I'll probably feel regret. So that's why I'd rather do it now, in this moment.
34:08 Ryan Peterman? When it comes to regrets, is there anything that you feel like you wish you changed along your career path that others could learn from?
34:17 Speaker 00 This is a very good question. Yeah, there's a lot of things I can change and... I would say that in fact, my career progression is not the smoothest progressions. So maybe back to my very first questions. If you ask me whether I would choose PhD or not. If I know that I'm going to software engineering, I'm probably not going to choose that. But it doesn't really means that I did not learn anything from my PhD or get anything out of it. But it is not the most like smoothest path that you can get. So and then, but there's no such things in the world that I can have a magic minds to predict what's going to happen in the next 10 years. And to be honest, I cannot even predict what AI is going to happens in the next three months.
34:59 Speaker 00 So that's why I think the most important thing I realize is never take anything for granted. Always learn to adapt, always be able to like learn about the new knowledge as quickly as possible and adapt yourself. And if you have a short term setback, for example, while you are, while I'm transitioning from research world into engineering world, or transitioning from a line managers to a director, don't be disappointed. This is just a moment for adjustment and learn how to adjust and you'll be a better self afterwards.
35:34 Ryan Peterman? I think a lot of your, like when I look at your career, a lot of your growth, if I were to plot it, it really kind of took off when you got the Square Director offer. And then also when you went to Snapchat, Snapchat grew a ton. And you know, some, some of that growth is the opportunity. And it seems, you know, there's a Snapchat could have also went down too, but you, you had the right situation, the right market for you to have the career growth that you had at that time. I'm kind of curious, how much of manager career growth do you see as situational? And how much of it is something you can control as you're looking forward by making the right decisions?
36:19 Speaker 00 The more I progress in my career, the more I realize I cannot control too many things, particularly for manager positions. Because manager position by its nature is heavily constrained by organization structure and organization need. These are the things that relate to overall company strategies, not really to yourself. So that's why like the only thing you can do is to do the best. In the positions that you have. And then everything else will be a lagging indicators. And the one things that I also realize is that the happiest time in my career is that when I start to realize this is that don't don't aim for promotions. Don't make promotions to be the objective of your work.
37:04 Speaker 00 If you start to do that, you're going to feel really painful. Because there's one exercise I sometimes see from the people I mentor is that they would just like look at every single bullet points of the next level. They start to check, okay, do I made this? Do I do, oh, okay, I made everything. Now that I'm talking to managers, okay, when can I get next promotions? That's very wrong. Don't do that. Because when you start to get into that mindset, you start to counting your your happiness or your career growth towards some things that you don't have fully full control on. In fact, you think about things reversely. Control the things that you can control, which is making impact for your current positions.
37:46 Speaker 00 And drive your career towards a positions that you love in the long terms. And don't make yourself feel regrettable at that time. That's the things you can control. Controlled it, everything else will be a lagging indicators. If you're lucky, you get the promotions. If you're not lucky, don't worry about it. Sometimes something will come afterwards. You can even found your own company at some points and you may be even richer at that time. Always focused on things that you can control. I think that's the that's how you can become happier in your career, I think.
38:19 Ryan Peterman? And then the last question I'd like to ask is if you could give yourself some advice right when you had graduated from the PhD program, knowing everything you know in your career, what advice would you give yourself?
38:32 Speaker 00 You don't need to always follow the calm conventional wisdom. And everyone is unique and everyone can choose the past they want. As another anecdotal example, like before I choose CMU as a school, I actually have a few other offers like Princeton and Cornell and those school. And my dad later asked me, okay, why you are not going to Princeton? Because Princeton is like much more well-known school back in China. I did not listen to his advice and I think it's the right call. Because CMU is a much better places for computer science. But that's a conventional visit, so you don't need to always follow.
39:10 Speaker 00 And as another example, I mean, I sort of mentioned that a little bit is that there's almost no one in the research community will consider joining a small company like Facebook. Like Faire was created back in like two thousand fourteen, but two thousand nine, five years earlier, it's very difficult for researchers to completely reset like his research career and join a software engineering company like that. But I don't think that will apply to me. I would just want to try something new. And once I know what's a north star that I'm aiming for, then I'm going to apply the strategies behind that and go towards it. I think this would be a more difficult path, to be honest. It's like less comfortable.
39:55 Speaker 00 But I also believe that only the people who can think differently early, they can see the new opportunity that no one else can see. That will increase your chance to win the game at the end.
40:07 Ryan Peterman? Well, thank you so much, Rome, for your time. I really appreciate you sharing your career story with everyone. And now, if you want, maybe you could talk about HeyGen and why it's a good place to work. I think there's a lot of software engineers in the audience that might be interested.
40:24 Speaker 00 Totally. Yeah, so HeyGen is all-in-one video generation platforms. Our idea is very simple. We want everyone can be able to access to video generation and visual storytelling. We have a, I would consider as the top-tier technical stack on human-centric video generations. And we can build the best hyper-realistic avatar for people. And compared with many other video generation platforms, we are really differentiating on quality, consistency, and controlability. And also, another thing is that most of the other people want to focus on creative professional, like movie makers, Hollywood stuff.
41:08 Speaker 00 We really want to focus on content professionals like marketers, salespersons, and everyday corporate persons like us. We really want to enable not just the Hollywood people can make video. We want to enable everyone to make videos at any source, at any languages, at all times. So my dream is very simple. I want to make camera obsolete. I want to make the storytelling accessible to everyone without a camera. So that's what we are hoping for.
41:37 Ryan Peterman? Yeah, maybe one day I won't need to be in front of the camera for the podcast. I can just give a script to one of your models.
41:45 Speaker 00 I'm literally thinking about the same things. Maybe in the future, we just have two literally interactive app that are talking to each other. We can finish our podcast in that way.
41:53 Ryan Peterman? Thanks for listening to the podcast. I don't sell anything or do sponsorships, but if you want to help out with the podcast, you can support by engaging with the content on YouTube or on Spotify. If you want to drop a review, that'll be super helpful. And if there's any guests that you want to bring on to, please let me know. I feel like sourcing very senior ICs. There's no well-studied list out there on Google that I can just search this up. So if there's someone in your org or at your company who you really look up to and you want to hear their career story, let me know and I'll reach out to them.
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