Peter Rojas: Product leadership at Meta, and founding Engadget and Gizmodo

welcome to another product wisdom podcast today a legend is with us Peter roas we've been talking about kusco Machu Pichu and Peru Peter is originally from there he my my family is my father was born there I was born in the US but I have dual citizenship right yeah from there is kind of subjective T I'm from Ireland and France and England but I was born Montreal

he is working at meta currently interim product lead personal communication messenger and he has quite the colorful background I mean it's not his first stint so founder giz Moto founder at end Gadget and editor in Chef so we're gonna talk about that today joystick rcrd I don't know about that one you'll tell me record record label was a music startup that I worked on for a few

years and the one the one thing I did that didn't work out in and we're we're going to cover that today because we're going to do two round out of this this is going to be the first one about Peter background the second one will be a bit more about product GD GT which is another interesting one then he went at AOL beta Works Ventures which I certainly know and finally meta to this day working with Zak not directly but yeah probably know the guy I really love Zach by the way what he's on to nowadays with the MMA the running the 5K under 20 minutes that was impressive love the Guy Peter can you introduce yourself tell us a bit more about your background yeah well and again thank you for having me on

and I you did a pretty good job I think running down a lot of the things that I've done over the past 20 years or so so I don't necessarily have like a succinct way to describe exactly like what I've done but I'd say that I've had been lucky enough to have a career where I started off actually as a journalist and and blogger and and kind of morphed into a Founder almost an accidental founder to be honest did never saw myself on that path but when you know I couldn't find a job and no one would hire me I I ended up sort of taking matters into my own hands and and and then have been really fortunate to have been able to like build a bunch of stuff which people have loved but

ultimately the thing that has really powered me over the past 25 years now or so of my career is being just really excited about where technology is taking us and and how it is enabling new ways for us to live or and right and how for for me looking at what's coming next what are the next wave of Technologies and what new forms of life work play uh what kinds of new kinds of behaviors are they going to unlock and so really trying to dig in and understand like what's coming around the corner and what new kinds of experiences products whatever you want to call them it's going to enable that's really been at the heart of my career whether that's been as a journalist as a blogger as a Founder as a VC as

a builder it's always been that common threat of being excited about trying to figure out what's coming next and how can it enable us to do things that we didn't do before so you've probably been another podcast discussing about your past so I don't want necessarily to discuss about Gizmodo and and Gadget two legendary magazines that I religiously read pretty much every we week back in in

these days you've also founded a couple of startups and yeah invested in fascinating startups like hugging faces recently through beta Works what brought you at at meta it's like from Co and founder to corporate quote unquote like that is quite surprising to me yeah it it it wasn't a move that I had expected to make and and there's sort of an expression that you know VC is

a one-way door right that once you start doing uh VC that you tend not to go back to doing going back to being a Founder going back to being an operator and it's one reason why I encourage people not to be a VC at the beginning of their career that it's really the time to take a risk and and work at a startup or be a startup founder because you have really have that opportunity when you're young and when you get to be older and have a kid kids and mortgages and responsibilities and things like that it's a little harder to feel comfortable with the level of risk that you need to take not that there aren't amazing older Founders right and and and obviously there's data that suggests that older Founders are more successful

than younger ones but I think that it becomes it tends to be easier when you're younger to do those things and and I'm glad I did those things when I was younger the opportunity with meta was actually not with messenger where I am right now but was to lead to be head of product for the new product experimentation group and that was an organization it was a

top level product organization at meta and we were charged with essentially incubating entirely new zero to1 Standalone products with the goal of getting to hundreds of millions if not billions of users over the course of like several years and so given that I had run a similar kind of experimental product group at AOL called Alpha the fact that I had been a VC at beta Works which

beta works that started as a studio morphed into a venture fund but also still ran an accelerator and I had run accelerators I'd been a Founder myself and so I think the opportunity to really focus in on the part of all of being a VC that I love most which was working with Founders and helping them craft and bring their ideas to life that I loved I didn't love uh trying to raise money as a from LPS which is I hate to say it but unless you are a very Junior partner at a very big fund you spend a lot of time raising money yourself and I was beta Works was a our first fund was 50 million the second one is about the same and three partners and so the we raised the money

right and you end up spending it was easily a third of my time going out and talking to LPS and and spending time with them and trying to convince them to write checks and as much as I enjoyed having those conversations and spending time with LPS obviously like the thing that really animates me is the product stuff and like helping people build and so the opportunity with

meta was let's go and you can go and focus in on the part that you love and not have to worry about the rest of it and so that was like attractive and obviously they made it worth my while and and and so I I I really treasure the year and a half that I had leading NP and and helping us and got to work with amazing Founders really proud of the work that we did it's very Bittersweet that we weren't able to continue it given the company's focus on efficiency this year but I'm glad that I'm able to do some of this work at messenger and on top top of my other duties um but I also think it's really healthy to be able to adapt and understand the needs of bigger organizations and

and bigger teams and so I'm enjoying the the challenge of learning how to scale my skill set to a product with almost two billion monthly users and how crazy is that two billion users from journalist to founder Toco slco to VC and now to product it's like a four nice Seasons I think you'd be in the in the hotter one right now because product is is where

the world is headed right now me I started in sales and every day I'm becoming more product leads product lead growth is the the team right now I think you're you're on the right seat and your experience is just fascinating but it it's also like if Zuck would be making a bet on you there like is okay he's been a VC he's been a Founder can he operate in a team how how hard has it been for you to be this sort of pirate with like ultimate Liberty and now working in a corporations with rules and leading a team that you don't necessarily get to recruits yeah it's definitely it it's a transition right and I think that the role at NP was unlike being a product leader at the rest of the company right

it was it was it was more like being a VC than the work I do now so I had a little bit of a transition where I was able to get used to some of the parts of meta but being siloed and and being maybe shielded from a lot of the typical processes that that we have here and so it's definitely been a little bit of a an adjustment and and learning how do you have to communicate differently how do you reconcile not just you know coordinating with teams across messenger but there's something I'm working on right now which unfortunately I can't share much about but involves coordinating with Facebook a team on Facebook book and so these are Big complex organizations they're very well-run and meta has really great people I mean it's it's

very rare to you meet someone here that isn't you know wouldn't be a superstar any place else right right and so the bar is very high and so I've been fortunate that like part of what I I I can bring to the table is look I haven't been a product manager for 10 years years right and I meet people here who've been who've been 10 12 years sometimes here and those people are phenomenal I mean just in terms of their ability to execute and run a process and and manage large teams they are just worldclass I mean I I I I I definitely am in awe of of of their their expertise and their ability to to perform at that level for me it's what I the strength that I bring to the table is

well how do we how do we continue to be Innovative and not get stuck in the process at a place like this how do we think about not just incrementalism right which is important and and frankly um this is how the business works is how can we incre incrementally increase our metrics and revenue and things like that quarter over quarter year over year but how do we

think about like the taking bigger swings different risks how do we calibrate risk environment like that so I I I I kind of recognize that as much as part of my job is to be on the product leadership at me at messenger and help run the org and and and manage the sets of product processes that we have that I have something unique or at least rare here right and that and that I think that bringing that to the table is also really important just in the way that like other product leaders here bring some other things to the table super important because big ORS they tend to stagnate and the worst nightmare of the CEO of a company especially when the COO is its founder which is very very unique in zck case is

to see people being or getting lost in Sops basically and and not producing anything not taking any risks because they they've been taught or that's a culture in the company and hopefully it's not in meta DNA I I don't think it is and yes you have amazing talent probably one of the best talent in the world so I think that is definitely a weapon of some sort

meta has kind of suffered with their bets on VR now they're going all in with AI what do you think about that bet and how will that be a core focus of yours in your division so this is something I probably can't share anything about there let's put this right there are things that you probably have maybe read in the news about work that is being done

that some which relates to messenger um there's nothing that I can comment on right now unfortunately but I would say that there maybe news soon that will be related to that and regarding the product itself I'm a daily user of messenger it's an amazing product let's face it you can instant message folks there's the gifts there's the calls that are super cool you can have this huge

Emoji as your face yeah it's really entertaining to say the least and a bunch of people use it as a de facto tool to communicate with their family that has especially accelerated throughout covid iMessage has a large market share there there's the old Skype I think Skype is like losing a lot of market share and there's newcomers like Discord how do you keep up these guys yeah

I mean I think that it's a it's a it's a challenge right I think that there are people have a lot of options for messaging right not just there's obviously iMessage there's also if you're Android you have an SMS app on your phone a lot of that's converting to RCs for default so that you'll get a rich or more iMessage like experience obviously there's signal there's telegram

even within meta there's WhatsApp so which hasn't is another option for people and one of the things that like I have found personally is that people tend to use a mix of of applications there usually isn't one thing that every that very few people have just one messaging app which they use they usually have like a number of them and even if it's to say I use

let's just speak hypothetically right I use iMessage on my phone because it's there but I'm I'm on Discord because I play games and like that's how I connect with my squad right for one example and I think that like again I have to be really careful about what what I can say publicly about messenger strategy I just want to make sure I don't say something I'm not

supposed to say but you can imagine that having a messaging product which is integrated into these big existing platforms like Facebook and Instagram and Instagram Direct is um is actually part of my org so it's the same infrastructure right and so one of the things that we think a lot about is how can we make the experience of messaging someone that's in your network better right that

like that that we can make it richer more expressive something that is more enjoyable there's less friction and so I think that like the fact that we have so much competition is one reason why we you have to fight so hard to be something that people choose to use and that they that they get they get value from even recognizing right that people are probably going to

mix and match different messaging products into their lives in in different ways and that's okay that's not it just even if people use Instagram that doesn't mean that they don't use Tik Tok or YouTube or other other products right that's just the reality of this stuff and I think ultimately for for the kind of product work that that we're doing being able to constantly challenge ourselves to

create the best experience we can is the bar that we set and and one of the things I love about the people I get to work with here is that there's a real there isn't there's a constant sense of like how can we do more how can we be better how can we raise the bar so to speak there's not like a there's no there's nobody who's complacent here so pet Peter is not allowed to talk yeah too much about the product but let let me give you a couple of hints here and I'm I'm not an Insider but I I get good hints generally speaking well you just have to look at what's happening with chat GPT right now to probably see the next announcements here it will be something along these lines Zuck

has been obsessed with having an AI assistant since five 10 years or so I remember that was one of his life goals so I'm probably expecting that from you and your team Peter and yeah just a small parenthesis here for folks Peter is the guy behind the DMs like straight up that's so I think that would be the headline of of the video here I I I it is a big complex organization and I play I play my part but like I I want to make like there are a lot of people that go into making that experience work yeah yeah just for the headlines um I have two questions that might be relevant here that you may be able to to speak about I'm pretty sure so how does it feel to be responsible

to two billion folks to know that the product you're working on will be deployed to two billion people yeah I mean it's it's a it's it can be a little bit intimidating at times because you realize that like so many people rely on messenger they they they they want to pick up their phone and have it just work right and so they don't want to have their

just at a baseline right like they they if it's frustrating or it crashes or whatever and so we obviously talk a lot about how can we improve just the the basic making sure like the basics are met like that's something that is a priority right like quality reliability we're uh we also take really seriously the fact that it's a product used all around the world right and

that different markets different users have different needs right like someone in India might use messenger very differently than someone in the US and might fit into their life there are countries where messenger is basically the predominant messaging product and there are other areas where it's it's not right and I think that recognizing that we are serving a global audience and that we have to NE you can't

necessarily just extrapolate from your own experience right being in the US most of us and our and we use Messenger on like the the always on the the best phones right and things like that and that like that is an experience that everybody has right like a lot of people have maybe a a $100 Android phone that they got that's already three four years old right and

so we have to think about like kind of the challenge of I think stepping outside yourself is a really core part of building a product right you have to be able to develop this empathy for the user and the empathy and when you have as many users as we do you have to figure out how to you know have empathy for billions of users so to speak like and really challenge yourself and so we have amazing user research teams that are constantly sort of like talking to users like trying to understand what they like what they don't like how they use things looking for future opportunities amazing like data science teams that are looking at the analytics and like patterns of usage and trying to figure out like why is something here different than this

other place and so as much as we use like data and research to inform I think if you lack that ability to sort of step outside of yourself a little bit and and and realize that not everybody's going to be the same as you not everyone's going to have the same perspective or background and and that you have to approach it with a lot of humility and empathy and it's not easy because it's one thing to say have empathy but you have to it's like a muscle you have to like you have to exercise it a lot and and I have to remind myself all the time about this one of the examples I love from my Beta Works days is we were there was a startup that we were looking at for investment I

don't think we invested in them ultimately but one of the things that the founder told us was they were building a it was like an app for helping kids with their homework and we were looking at it I was like I I I kind of curious about some of the design decisions you made and he said a lot of our users they're they're like they're teenagers they got a hand me- down phone the battery sucks so they're running the device with the screen brightness almost all the way down so they can keep the battery alive and so we had to design the app with like that in mind not someone with the screw brightness all the way someone with the brightness all the way down and so he's like look you have the fanciest iPhone

I mean like you're you're a VC like you get the new iPhone every year these are people who are like they have like a six-year-old phone and they might have and so I think that like trying to be mindful of that stuff it's hard because there's so many blind spots and so one of the things like I constant try to do as someone who builds things and someone who's like just or as a BC is like what are my blind spots what are the things I'm not thinking about and and I hate it when I I mean I hate it when I there's something I don't catch but one of the things that like when I was doing NP we had an office in Nigeria and we were building apps for for West Africa which

I loved that we were doing that we were building some really cool stuff and I met with one of the researchers he was in San Francisco for to do meetings and he said how can I like do my job better for you and I said here's what I want you to do I want you to surprise me like I already know like I read I read the same news sites like all that stuff like I know in Tech is big in Africa like I know that stuff I want you to surprise me with what people are doing like show me something that I don't know about how people are using mobile apps in Nigeria like that kind of stuff like I I just love to be surprised and and it's it's tough because like it

means that there's something I missed but there's like something really joyful in like being like wow like I missed this like as much as I I spend time every single day reading learning trying to keep up with things I'm sure you're the same and when I miss something important it like you have that initial like oh like how did I miss this but then like when you

realize it that there was something like special that like you didn't catch and you're now aware of it it's like a gift in a way yeah it's like a an AA moment so really love your your perspective there and especially in your case you've been like hyper successful so sometimes coming down and I I haven't I don't consider myself to be successful yet but I consider myself

to be on some type of cloud and it's important to come down of there and live people's life one of my side project this year here in Waka Mexico is to interview people in the streets make mini documentaries like the humans of New York I believe it was gone oh yeah yeah I I I read it yeah yeah that that was pretty cool and just to discover their lives and follow them around maybe give them a couple of pesos at the end and just know about their life so I can understand it better that's super important have one last question for you and by the way I remember the days of like Facebook spling out the the messenger app and like the commotion that that caused like everyone was was angry and talking about that

Facebook was under the spotlight not for the good reasons with the privacy and the the Cambridge stuff yeah I think that zck is doing way better now well at least from my standpoint me I've always been behind him because I'm a Founder too and a CEO but how do you deal with the privacy concerns most folks are having more and more in the AI age nowadays yeah

so here's what I'll say and this is something that was I was really happy to see when I joined meta is that user privacy is taken very very seriously and I can say I think I can share this but like one of the biggest actually challenges for us building new things at NP was that we were often doing things that other parts of the company hadn't already

encountered with respect to like user data and things like that and so there was a lot of process it slowed us down actually a lot but the the fact that like the company was very careful and set up the processes to like protect user privacy to make sure data was safeguarded to make sure that like stuff is like when we shut down NP like we had to make sure that we deleted all user data fully compliant like all this stuff and it's taken very very seriously right I think there's a I say there's a broader question around Ai and user data that is not just a meta question right I think there's like there's a question around um llms being trained on publicly available data whether how that how that should work and I actually

went through I'm trying I think it was the chat GP I think it was GPT uh three 3.5 where they showed try remember which one it was where listed what had been in like sites had been indexed right and so I checked to see like Eng Gadget and Gizmodo both in like the top 100 I think there or definitely like high up and kind of realizing like well everything I wrote and I wrote I think I wrote for for for in gadget I must have written well let's put this way in the first 15 months of an Gadget I wrote 5,000 posts holy moly yeah so I was very very busy sometimes as many as like 2530 a day because I a I was a founder and I wanted to be I wanted to win

right and so I was very very I worked all I work constantly not I don't workot now but like it's you know when you're a Founder it's always different but so the point is all that writing is now in in an llm somewhere right it's it's in just it's now the vector space of an llm right you're part of it Peter's part of it I'm part of it but so is most other things that were posted publicly right and I think there's a question around you know would I have thought differently about a lot of things writing in gadget if I thought hey in 15 20 years or whatever it's going to be part of this like AI I I don't know how I would feel about it right I don't I don't know how

I would think about it you know so I think there's like a legitimate concern of like if I'm an artist should I be able to opt out I'm being trained on the other hand it's and this is something that I think is because my background is actually critical theory of a masters in English all language every thought that we have that is expressed in language is using

words that we learned from someone else right right so there's no like you know every word that you write every word on this screen right now is like a word that like I guess maybe except for like podp which you maybe made up but I'm saying yeah but like they're but like these are words all words is like all our all our everything we write everything we

say is a remix so to speak right of the the the language and culture that we've absorbed and I don't mean that to trivialize or dismiss the risks of AI but I think that like you know in context a lot of this stuff is it one of the things I love about technology is that it brings our value two values that we have into conflict right on one hand with AI it's like we do want to be able to uh work off of the say let's say like the the knowledge and cultural heritage right and be able to to you wouldn't want to say to an artist you can't be inspired by any other work from the past you can't say that to a musician you can't say that to a writer you couldn't say

to a writer you can't use words that other people have said in the past you you wouldn't be able to express yourself so but on the other hand like we do we don't want to take away the agency of people to [Music] want you give them something back because they work for it we still live in a capitalist world but I am not for copyrights and trademarks because yeah we were built on the back of giants talking about the giant meta is one well I owned various Facebook ads agency seven years ago so I was very much building on on zuck's back yeah and yeah I mean I think that like look I mean I think that like Society is a set of systems right and we have the at the base infrastructure right and

on top of it's like it's it's layers right and I think that one of the the things that is complex about and that technology new technologies do is it it brings something it brings values into conflict right I think and I think and and this happens like all the time right like just simply the internet created a free spee platform for everyone right but on the other

hand free speech can be used to harass it can be used to misinform it threaten like there are all sorts of things and so we have this conflict we have this value on one hand free speech this other value right of like we don't want people to be unsafe right and it just accelerates the whole thing it's like it's just like this spear right that we invented

or standing on our leg while we could walk faster and Hunt faster get what we want faster so it just expands everything and the the question is like is is our society ready for that are we psychologically ready for that acceleration when a lot of people can't even keep up yeah and what it means is that like I think as a society I wish we had bigger conversations about what we value and what we want right I think that like when we talk about Ai and we talk about the risks dangers of AI I wish the conversation we were having was what kind of world do we want to have let's just let's have that conversation let's talk about what kind of world do we want to have and can AI help us get there

and if it can how can we maybe mitigate some of the things we don't want right let's talk about like climate change right like we want to have we don't want the we don't want global warming right we want to have a clean environment for our children and I think I have three kids and I think a lot about the world that we leave them right and I think having that conversation rather than have getting we sometimes get stuck I think in the like we get stuck inide of this level of like the tech does X or the tech does y rather than well what do we want and how does technology get us there basic basic psych psychological mechanism and biochemistry it's like cortisol being injected I think people are still at the level

of not knowing how to talk and debate things and and B not to that Charles is more right than Peter but can Charles learn from Peter can Peter learn from Charles I think that's how people should view these conversations and if we if we don't teach people how to talk that way talk productively I call it that way and not like be in that fight or flight

I think that would be the change because people need to realize we're all on the same boat we're kind of this Society on the same boat and yeah if I'm going to put my tents there on this boat well let's hope that I don't put it in the way of everyone else and that people are part of this ecosystem this Society since forever and I think yeah we need to make conc concessions here because I don't necessarily want the same world as you do but we live on the same planet for now um and importantly make it win-win right yeah because I think there's like a set of things that we can agree on like I always sort of make the joke of of people say I'm a I'm a I hate socialism like this

is an example right and like I'm as capitalist as you I'm was a vure capitalist right like I found right and I say well are you against schools like Public Schools they're like no no no no no I love Public Schools I'm like well are you against having a standing army to protect us they're like no of course not I love the military Pro defense and I'm like well at the end of the day the conversation is about what do we want to have as a society that we that we all agree are things that we should want and so to me the conversation is more around what are the things that we think so everyone in societ should have access to and what are the things that that are not right and I know

we're in a wake way off topic now but like to me those are more interesting conversations right and so like that to me that's the more interesting conversation about tech which is to say what do we want what what what things do we collectively want as a society because like we don't talk about that enough but that's the purpose of having a government right and that's the

purpose of having an economy the purpose of an economy is to help enable people to have the things that they need and that they want right that's it what I mean yeah things that you need live and things that you want and super important convo and it's directly related to what you do like Zuck is often talking about these high level things in his C BR like

in fa8 when you listen to some of his speech and you guys are literally at at that level You're Building really important stuff that can change society that can make or break it yeah and the purpose of of Facebook right and now the other products that we have here it's to bring people together right it's to give people like it's really it's a mission if you look

up the the mission of the company it's right basically give people the tools to be closer to each other right that's where the VR stuff comes in as well right and the metaverse stuff and the the the challenge is that bringing people closer together there are some downsides to that right and so again to me the question is well what do we want because we the technology

can bring us together but we want to make sure that like that the outcomes of that are positive and so the company does a lot of work and I think one of the things that we're seeing from like Twitter for example is that moderating content at scale is very very hard um and that like I don't think that like as imperfect as we are right and I think we all know that there's it could be perfect it's not perfect that it is a very hard very thankless job and one that is impossible to do perfectly because humans are imperfect and there's no and language is imperfect and and so I think again to me I'd rather the question be what do we care the mo what do we care about what do we want the

technology to help us do and have that conversation because that is like a healthier richer way to approach this stuff and it's and again just in the same way that like I look at product as a human- centered empathetic process that is also the same process that it puts people and their needs first at the center of that rather than sort of again as much as I

love technology what did I say at the beginning of the conversation I cared about technology because of the way that it changed our lives right not just because it's cool I mean I think it's cool too but like it's not just about the tech it's about how is it going to change how we live how is it going to change how we understand ourselves how's it going

to change how we relate to one another yeah those are the big profound questions that I care about and I think about every day yeah it's like reduce pain increase pleasure and pro possibly stimulate growth and we have a lot of data you have a lot of data but even that data is hard to make sense of sometimes and that's when conversation can also compliment that Peter

was a pleasure having you I selfishly want round two with you because that that was just like the beginning of the nice convo but where can people find out more about you um so I haven't updated it in a while but my personal website is just rj. and that's probably the the easiest way I should probably do an update post about like how to follow me on RADS and Mastadon the most these days all right thank you rj.

cool I'm Charles Cormier your host that was a product wisdom podcast with Peter roas today roas in English thank you so much p