An ex-Facebook employee has revealed the unique advice that Mark Zuckerberg gave her at 2am.
The pearls of wisdom has helped the now tech entrepreneur to build a business that is worth millions of dollars.
Sophie Novati took on her first role in 2011 as an engineering intern at Facebook before heading off a few years later to join Nextdoor.
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She was the firm’s second iOS engineer hire and she helped to build the platform before moving on to found her own company.
Speaking to Fortune about her time at Facebook, Novati said: “The energy was buzzing at early Facebook. There were so many people just trying to build and ship cool stuff.
“It honestly almost felt like it was college. People were literally sleeping at the office… It felt like everyone that I was there with were just all buddies and hanging out. Everyone was working very hard. But it felt like the dorm room.”
The 33-year-old went on to create Formation, an engineering fellowship that helps underrepresented engineers break into top tier companies, in 2019.
But long before that, she revealed that she received some crucial advice from tech mogul Zuckerberg during a late-night game of chess.
She recalled asking him how the social media platform was going to make any money, adding: “Facebook was growing users at a pace that no one’s seen before, but it couldn’t make any money.”
She continued: “His response to me was, if you can figure out a way to capture people’s valuable attention, you can always figure out how to turn that into money later.
“What he was really focused on building is figuring out how to deliver value to people. Later on, you can always turn that value into dollars.”
Novati has taken that advice with her into her own business.
She said: “We look at increase in compensation as our number one metric.
“College in the U.S. costs on average around $100k for 4 years. The average compensation for people who go through versus those who do not is about $20km. So people are paying $100k for $20k value—we are the flip here, we’re helping people make $127k more and we’re charging $10-15k.
“It’s pretty crazy that people are making over $100k more as a result of going through a program.”
The entrepreneur has said that her attention remains firmly on “getting people into these top jobs and significantly improving the trajectories of their career”.