Are You Operating Efficiently?

Do you have an advisory board either for your company or yourself? And if so, why is that important? And what qualities do you look for in selecting advisory board members?

What I look for is somebody who's going to bring some unique something to the table. And I think it's really important to have a very balanced advisory board. So do you have a number of people who can advise you on the best way to set up your company, the best way to look at growth? At the same time, you want people to challenge your teams on, hey, are you operating efficiently? Hey, I've seen this before, this is how we solve that problem. How are you thinking about it? But for yourself, you should also have a group of people you trust. Who are the people you call if you had to make a decision, a difficult decision, say leaving a company? When I was leaving Facebook, it was so hard to make a decision to leave a place I loved.

What were you asking them when you were thinking about leaving Facebook? What did you ask your advisors?

I asked them, what do you think about this opportunity, but also do you think chapter here is done? Because I had been at the company for 11 years and I had built a lot of really cool products and marketplace at that point, I knew that it had gotten to a billion people, but it had not been announced yet. And so I felt like I had finished that chapter. Often your advisory board, doesn't tell you what to do, they asked the questions so that you decide what to do. And so the greatest advisors actually help you look more deeply within yourself and help you answer the question for yourself rather than giving you advice.

So what kind of questions did they ask you?

Well, one person asked me, what else can you accomplish at Facebook that you haven't already done? And that was a really good question because I loved what I was doing there. And the next chapter would look very similar to the previous chapter. Another person asked, have you reached a place where you're doing more than you're learning, because if that's true, you wake up in the morning and you're doing, and you're not learning, you should think about how you re accelerate learning. And I think that…

That’s a good way of looking at it.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think those questions really helps me introspect in a different way. They weren't saying, hey, you should take this job because of this. Instead they were asking, what are you looking for? And how do these opportunities actually change the way you look at yourself and what you're going to be doing for the next several years?