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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 $100 million fortune."
What exactly does Facebook _do_ ?
They deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to!
I actually mostly read TFA. This guy sounds like an asshole, but at least he does a decent job admitting it. For those of you too impatient to slog through it, he basically says "I was a product manager but I wasn't very good at product managing" and "I used the brand more than I added to it" (w.r.t holding parties at the office, self-aggrandizing on his blog about working at FB). Not to mention going behind people's backs, like all of Marketing, on a new feature.
Short version: I was a liability, and they fired me for it. At least I learned something.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
The person may be an ******, but that does not mean the article is worthless. It is a lesson to take with you.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
Facebook took the old adage from the late 90s: Attract eyes and ears then you'll make money somehow.
Nowadays there are ad networks that you can cash easy with this, but back in Google's time, it was like the underpants gnomes equation.
The irony is Classmates.com was first on the scene for meeting your fellow highschoolers, but they charged you for the privilege!
This teaches us one thing: Don't put any barriers in your website for adoption, even if the barrier is a paywall to profit you in the short run.
I think this is why freemium games are coming into their own. You have more people playing, money from ads and some money from premium good sales, and if your game is good, more people will come play it than a traditional 60$ game.
God spoke to me
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?
He didn't lose the money when he got fired, I would say he lost it by not having a golden parachute.
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.
typical marketer perspective. things that cater to the masses are the most watered down boring cliche products possible. No one bothers with the niche anymore and that's too bad. That's where the interesting things hide.
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.
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.
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.
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This is why I have a Slashdot account and why I have never signed up to Facebook.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
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.