When Sophie Novati got her first job as an engineering intern at Facebook in 2011, the social media giant was in the “move fast and break things” era.
“The energy was flowing at the beginning of Facebook,” the current tech entrepreneur recalls. luck“There were a lot of people trying to build and ship cool things.”
“It really felt like college,” she adds. “People were literally sleeping in the office… I felt like everyone I was with was just friends hanging out. Everyone was working hard. But it was like a dorm room.”
A few years later, Novati left Facebook (now Meta) to join Nextdoor as the company’s second iOS engineer. The 33-year-old helped build the company from the ground up before founding her own company, Formation, in 2019.
The recruitment company offers various subscription packages and programs to help engineers secure work or increase their earning potential. For a fee (ranging from $2,500 to $20,000), job seekers can get unlimited resume reviews, negotiation coaching, mentoring, mock interviews, exam practice, and more.
She says that as the person responsible for actual inclusion in Facebook’s engineering department, she was inspired to start Formation and help remove barriers to entry.
“On Facebook and Nextdoor, I was probably one of 15 people who were women, and that ratio didn’t seem right at all.”
Now, more than 1,300 job seekers have turned to Formation for a seat at the table — and on average, they’ve gotten a $127,286 pay raise in the process, according to the company.
But Novati says Formation’s success today is partly due to a late-night chess lesson with her former boss, Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg’s advice on chess
It was 2 a.m. one night in 2011 when Zuckerberg was “hanging out with all the interns,” including playing two games of chess with Novati (which she claims she won).
“That was the atmosphere in the company at the time,” Novati says, adding that it was the first time she was able to ask him the million-dollar question: How was the social network going to make any money?
“Facebook was growing at a rate no one had ever seen before, but it couldn’t make any money,” she adds.
Of course, today, Facebook or Meta is a $1.3 trillion social media giant that runs Instagram and WhatsApp. However, Until 2012In the year that Facebook went public, its mobile app made no real profit.
It did not include ads, and the move to integrate them was considered risky.
Ultimately, the company was able to turn likes and shares into revenue, by converting its users to the product.
The “aggressive” strategy has taken Facebook from “no meaningful revenue” to $153 million in mobile advertising, Atlantic Ocean It was reported at the time.
“His response to me was that if you can find a way to get people’s valuable attention, you can always figure out how to turn that into money later,” Novati recalls.
“His focus was primarily on finding a way to deliver value to people,” she adds. “And later, you can always turn that value into dollars.”
That’s why Novati has always focused on promoting how Formation adds value to engineers’ lives rather than worrying about its client list or enrollment rates.
“We look at compensation increases as our number one metric,” she explains.
“The average cost of college in the US is about $100,000 for four years. The average compensation for people who go to college compared to those who don’t is about $20,000. So people are paying $100,000 for $20,000 – and here we are in a different position, we are helping people earn an additional $127,000 and charging $10,000 to $15,000.”
“It’s crazy that people can make over $100,000 on a program,” she says proudly.
So far, Zuckerberg’s ethics have been sound.
According to Novati, Formation has raised over $8.5 million in funding and is working with the likes of Netflix, Google, Twitch, Dropbox, Adobe, her old employer Meta, and more.
“There is still a lot we can do to make the best use of the value we create,” Novati concludes.
But for now, her focus is on “helping people get into these top jobs and dramatically improving their career paths.”
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