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How Noah Kagan Got Fired From Facebook and Lost $100 Million
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."
I actually mostly read TFA. This guy sounds like an asshole, but at least he does a decent job admitting it. For those of you too impatient to slog through it, he basically says "I was a product manager but I wasn't very good at product managing" and "I used the brand more than I added to it" (w.r.t holding parties at the office, self-aggrandizing on his blog about working at FB). Not to mention going behind people's backs, like all of Marketing, on a new feature.
Short version: I was a liability, and they fired me for it. At least I learned something.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
The person may be an ******, but that does not mean the article is worthless. It is a lesson to take with you.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
The single best take-home message in the post is nothing new, but have you truly internalized it? You are replaceable, and firing you would hurt you much more than the company. I work in research and it's even worse: whenever somebody leaves, nobody even bothers to carry on the work they'd been doing. What does that mean?
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.
Here is another of his sites which has more of his experience: http://noahkagan.com/
I'll echo some of the same sentiments others are posting here in that I don't know what he really did at FB but given the information on the site above, here are some highlights:
Internship at MS in 2003 for ~3 months during the summer before his Senior year; the experience definitely looks like he took a few liberties describing his responsibility.
Bachelor's in business administration and economics from UC Berkeley in 2004
Moved on to Intel from 2004-2005; again his experience looks a bit exaggerated. I don't doubt there is truth to it but in my opinion, the way it reads gives the reader the impression his responsibilities were much more than they actually were.
Moved on to Facebook in October 2005 until he was fired in June 2006. For those keeping tabs, that is less than 1 year of experience at FB. Furthermore, the experience he lists has a lot of what I would consider technical in nature yet he does not have a Comp Sci or related degree. Given the liberties I feel he has taken with his other experience, I don't think this one would be any different. If he helped market facebook during its infancy then he should be marketing that (hah) a lot more than "his" experience with these technical items.
At the end of the day, he joined Facebook with about 1 year of actual work experience under his belt and he got fired from Facebook after having worked there less than 1 year. Did he lose out on $100M other than what he feels he would have eventually worked up to had he been there until the IPO? Not a chance.