Tech

Adam D'Angelo: What I Learned Working For Facebook

By Alyson Shontell
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Philip N via Fickr

Adam D'Angelo was an early Facebook employee and the company's first CTO. He's one of "6 people in the world with good ideas," according to Mark Zuckerberg.

A few years ago, D'Angelo left Facebook and started a new company, Quora. Quora's mission is to make access to knowledge easy through a reputation-based Q&A site.

Gigaom's Om Malik recently interviewed D'Angelo. D'Angelo revealed a few lessons learned from his Facebook days.

  • Execution is more important than an idea. "Facebook too wasn’t a new idea but I think we took the idea and we focused on execution, focused on quality and getting to scale," D'Angelo told Malik. "Similarly for Quora, we want to get to be 100 times bigger than we are today."
  • Get comfortable giving up control. "At Facebook [and at Quora] I went from coding to management," he says. "You have to get comfortable giving up control, and you find people who do things better than you do. Quora now does better with the team we have built."
  • But most of all: "Focus on the long term, and always do what’s right to grow the company and not make short-term decisions. And outlast everyone one."

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Alyson Shontell Business Insider
Alyson Shontell
Alyson is the Editor-in-Chief and CCO at Fortune.  She was previously a co Editor-in-Chief overseeing Business Insider's tech and business coverage.She joined Business Insider in July 2008 as the company's sixth employee. She started as a sales planner before joining the editorial team in 2010, where she became a startup reporter and was first to cover some of today's largest tech companies, including Pinterest, Tinder, Instagram, Uber and Snap. Alyson rose to become a senior correspondent, then Executive Editor.She was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider in 2016, at which point she became the youngest and only woman to run a global business publication. Under her leadership, the business division has grown to hundreds of  millions of monthly readers.Alyson was a host of  Insider's conferences and launched a podcast, "Success! How I Did It," where she interviewed influencers ranging from Sheryl Sandberg to Steve Ballmer about their career paths (subscribe on iTunes here).She has appeared on ABC, Good Morning America, Al Jazeera, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and CBC, and she has interviewed media personalities such as Megyn Kelly, technology leaders like Fred Wilson, political leaders like John Brennan, and sports star LeBron James. She is a judge for the prestigious Gerald Loeb Awards in business journalism, and has been named one of Min's Rising Stars in Media, as well as Folio's 2017 Top Women in Media.She graduated from Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications, where she majored in psychology and advertising.You can read some of her investigative articles here:— Leaked videos reveal the true founding story of Snapchat— The founder who dumped Jared Kushner: Inside the phone call that left the White House star in a fit of rage— The downfall of billion-dollar startup, Fab— How a startup that raised the largest seed round in Silicon Valley history blew itself up before it even launched— The dark side of Facebook, where people lie, cheat, and make millions— A profile of Uber's controversial CEO, Travis Kalanick— The mystery of Jody Sherman, a founder who was driven to suicide and left behind a shocking business disasterDisclosure: Alyson owns bitcoin and Snap. She is also an investor in The Spun, a sports-media startup founded by her husband.
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