Facebook Eats Dog Food

As the legend goes, every year the president of Kal Kan Pet Food would eat a can of the company’s dog food at the share-holders’ meeting.

“Dogfooding” means using you own products/services, so you get to understand what it is like to be your customers.

Facebook recently said it would permanently embrace remote work. “We’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale.” Mark Zuckerberg made a seismic bet and forced everyone in his company to eat their “remote work” dog food (👈🏼 38th minute of the linked video). The bet- They fumble through the primordial chaos, new solutions and processes will emerge, and Facebook will transform itself into a remote-ready behemoth. Then, they will have all the dog food everybody needs.

Too far fetched? Early 2000s, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos issued a sweeping mandate- the entire company would only communicate through “service interfaces.” Allegedly, anyone who didn’t follow would be fired. The shift was vast, complex, and caused at lot of pain.

“… Over the next few years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation …”

Eventually, all the learning culminated into AWS, the world number 1 cloud services platform which powers ~50% of the Internet.