Ep. 185 Aaron Russell is Director, Edge Network Infrastructure at Meta. He’s been with the tech giant for nearly a decade. Aaron has initiated and led critical Internet infrastructure projects connecting the unconnected people in the emerging markets, especially in Africa. Aaron is a creative; a former contributor for Huffington Post, a filmmaker, and a diversity and inclusion champion at Meta.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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ticket now. I'm Will Lucas and this is Black Tech,
Green Money. Anne Russell is Director of Edge Network Infrastructure
APT META. He's been with the tech giant for nearly
a decade. He's initiated and led critical inn and infrastructure
projects connecting unconnected people in the emerging markets, especially in Africa.
(01:06):
He's a creative former contributed to Huffington Post, the filmmaker,
and a diversity and inclusion champion at Meta. So for
the people who aren't super you know, familiar with your background.
You were not like a technical person growing up, like
and so you've got you found your way to engineering
roles and you know, really technical roles at Meta. I
(01:27):
mean probably Facebook then, but Meta without a technical background,
how does that happen?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
It was a journey, an exhausting one and one filled
with you know, lots of uh, you know, concerns early
on of whether I was making kind of the right
decisions and imposter syndrome which many people feel from going
from a non technical background to very technical work. I
started my career early in investment banking after college, like
(01:58):
many people kind of when I was in college at
wake Forest University, you know, private equity and venture capital
and investment banking and sounded very sexy, right. I wanted
to be an investment banker. I watched all the movies
kind of growing up, and I was like, this is
the career for me. For two years of doing it
and working eighty hours a week, and private equity groups
not investing, and you know, working in a bunch of
(02:20):
pitch stacks which weren't going anywhere and making very little money.
At the time, It's like, I think, I maybe want
to do something a little bit differently. So I had
an opportunity to join a tech company that was literally
two blocks down the street walking distance from the investment bank,
who was looking for people of my background who worked
on acquisitions and business valuation, did M and A work
(02:41):
to help them think about consolidating other companies within their
tech industry. It was a media company content delivery network
that worked with you know, Google and YouTube and others
at the time to cast all their video content. So
I decided to kind of make the leap of faith.
I actually had a friend working there at the time,
which make the transition easy. And for the first six
months or so it was work you know on you know,
(03:02):
acquisitions and doing M and A work, and then the
company went through a major rework It was a bit
during the recession and laid off much of the senior
kind of executive staff. So you know, two or three
layers between me and the CEO at the time were
just cut overnight, so you know, of course I'm nervous,
I'm scared. And then the CEO comes to me and
(03:22):
asks me to change my role within a company. They
needed help with the supply chain and expanding the company
from having a US presence to a global international presence,
and asking me for help to start negotiating the supply chain,
working with our network engineering team and becoming a bit
more technical so that I could expand the network. So
the time, I had no idea what that involved, but
(03:43):
I quickly found myself, you know, after kind of finishing
in the NBA at Arizona State, going back to night
school as soon as I finished my MBA and trying
to do the Cisco Certified Network Associates kind of an
entry level network engineering kind of one on one program
while asking the netw work engineers in my company a
million questions kind of day and night. So was learning
from the bootstrap, so massive and posular syndrome. I had
(04:07):
no idea what I was doing at the time, but
luckily I was surrounded by by people who were just
gracious in answering questions and wanting to kind of mentor
me early in their career, so fast forward kind of
four years of doing that became very technical and kind
of network engineering, and then Facebook happened to find me
kind of twenty fourteen looking for someone of my background
(04:28):
who had worked in kind of finance before but was
also technical from a network engineering perspective to help them
build and expand their entire network. So kind of fratuitous
at the time that I had kind of the finance
kind of hat and had kind of a technical background
that I could kind of combine those skills into something
that Meta was looking for to help them actually expand
their global network today, which is one of the biggest
(04:48):
in the world.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
So for people who you know, kind of count themselves
out of roles because they feel like they may not
be experienced, so they may not have exactly what the
listing is looking for. I mean, you're a test them
into you know, you should probably take the take the
shot if it's interesting.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Absolutely, Absolutely, it's interesting because I believe studies show that
this happens to women actually more than men. Men tend
to be a bit more overconfident and applying for roles
that they may not necessarily be qualified for on paper,
whereas sometimes women from what studies show will look at
some of the qualifications and say hey, I meet maybe
three out of five and not all five, and then
(05:27):
talk themselves out of applying. And one of the things
that I've always encouraged people to do in their career
is like, look, if you meet two out of five,
three out of five, doesn't matter. Go through the interview loop.
If you get accepted, have the conversation, because there may
be something that they're looking for that you may have
no idea. You may impress them in that conversation. You
may be a non conditional thinker from a nonconventional kind
(05:50):
of background, original thinker, I mean, and that might be
something that's unique and original, creative that may take that
role to a new level that they hadn't even anticipated.
And that happens so often. That's why it's so important
to put your best foot forth, apply to these roles,
and take the leap of faith. I think it's so
important that you don't talk yourself out of opportunities and
(06:12):
blocking and blessing.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
By doing that telling yourself no, yeah, you know. So
for people who come up technical, you know, I remember
when I was learning front end, it was like, you know,
one one day you had to learn you know, Ruby
on rails. The next day you had to learn Python,
the next day you had to learn this other language.
And it was like it was like a never ending
cycle of different things coming out that you should probably
(06:37):
know characteristically because you, I mean, you work at one
of the biggest companies in the world and you're seeing
the future, you're building the future. What kind of characteristics
should a person who wants to be in leadership in
the technology space be developing?
Speaker 3 (06:58):
I think a few things that Mark talked about this
recently on the Acquired Chase kind of podcasts at the
Chase Inner kind of a couple of weeks ago, and
if people haven't watched it, I think it's available on Spotify.
But one of the things I find interesting in kind
of Silicon Valley and kind of Mark mension is that
you know, if you're wanting to be in the technical
(07:21):
leadership role at many of the larger kind of tech,
larger kind of companies in Silicon Valley, you need to
be technical, right. So historically kind of in Silicon Value
would find that many of the CEOs and people in
kind of VP leadership of major tech companies weren't actually
technical that might have one technical founder and one kind
(07:41):
of VP event, but many of the folks weren't technical,
and sometimes those companies just don't survive longer term. And
you look at just how rapid innovation is happening and
the technology trends. You have to have technical people that
can help you navigate those trends. Read the tea leaves,
kind of see the future and learn how to take
the company from kind of A to Z. So, you know,
(08:03):
if you're wanting to work in kind of a technical
kind of engineering role, you've got to be a sponge, right.
You've got to soak up knowledge. You have to ask questions.
You have to take advantage of tools and resources that
are free sometimes paid. Understand what the Amazons and Googles,
the metas, the open a eyes, the anthropics of the
world are focused on. Understand kind of road maps, listen
(08:25):
to kind of their podcasts. Meet with people. I still
encourage people kind of early in their career to do
informational interviews with people, Like it's so easy sometimes just
to go on LinkedIn, find a person, hopefully you know
a person of color, a brother or sister who is
just willing to just talk to you and kind of
give you information and if you ask stup questions, usually
people were impressed by that and willing to kind of
(08:46):
help you. I can't tell you the number of times
I've done this. When people reach out to me, you
know LinkedIn wanting to know them more about meta my
role in particular, I'll give them the time of day.
You know, it's close mouths. Don't reach out, ask those
questions right understand kind the challenges that they're facing the
day to day. What are the things that they're working
on now in terms of kind of road maps and
where they're winning the future. What kind of technologies are
(09:08):
they exploring. For me, as a person that builds global infrastructure,
my industry is changing kind of rapidly. I'm always happy
to talk about those things. So you have to ask questions,
you have to read, you have to stay current with
kind of technology trends because the space is moving so rapidly.
So I think that's the words of encouragement that I
would have for folks.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
To that point of the space is moving so quickly.
The I love talking about small business owners entrepreneurs and
giving them value from these conversations because not everybody's going
to be building technology, but a lot will be using technology,
employing technology to scale. And so for AI, which we're
having a big global conversation about AI, and to your point,
(09:48):
it's moving rapidly. What is potentially overlooked for those small
business owners and entrepreneurs? What are we not paying enough
attention to that could be valuable to us?
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Yeah? I think, you know, technology is the great equalizer. Right,
So when you think about kind of rewind, I don't know,
ten twelve years ago, however long ago kind of Uber
or Lyft or that look, remember being kind of traveling
or being kind of in New York and trying to
hell a taxi. I can't tell you the number of
times as a black man, I got passed over for
(10:21):
you know, a white kind of counterpart, right because they
didn't know about me, They didn't know who it was.
You couldn't kind of see the background, and just assuming
some stereotype about me. Right, So I'm standing there looking
crazy on the street, trying to wave down a taxi
and can't get one. Right, But all of a sudden,
you know, Uber and kind of Lyft and others called
you know, come along and you can get transportation at
(10:41):
an access that kind of your fingertips, right, So it's
just kind of one example. So when you think about
as like a small business owner or kind of creator,
like AI is one of those technologies that can be
the great equalizer, especially if you're a small business. I
talked about this recently and kind of another kind of
panel conversation, but one of the things that we're doing
that is launching something called AI Studio, which is available
(11:04):
now for kind of creators, even kind of small businesses.
And if you're a creator, leveraging the AI to be
able to create an AI extension and the agent of
yourself that can communicate with your fan base globally, that
can push merchandise for you, that can push ticket sales,
that can reply to common stories and kind of dms
and help you scale yourself. It's really powerful. Right. Don't
(11:26):
leave money on the table because you don't speak eight languages, right, Like,
leverage the AI to do those things. If you're a
small business, you know, and you're a startup, you know,
your capital and your balance sheet is going to be
pretty limited. Right. So just as everyone has a social
media page and an email address and kind of a website,
you know, think about the future as having kind of
(11:47):
these AI agents that can help you scale your businesses,
that can communicate with customers kind of globally, that can
offer discounts, help you with customer return, help you predict
kind of the creative for ads, help you figure out
who your actual audience is better than you can confirm. Right.
So there's just so many opportunities as a small business
owner or as a creator to leverage these tools. So
(12:10):
I think people really have to be early adopters and
explore some of these things. One of the announcements we
just launched yesterday at the Connect conference was LAMA three
point two and update to kind of LAMA three point one,
which is our long language model. An exciting thing about
that is multimodial. So I use this at work all
the time. You have an internal tool called Metamate which
uses our long language model, and I used to spend
(12:31):
hours sometimes working on presentations and putting together kind of
charts and graphs and writing meeting notes. I uploaded kind
of a Google doc with all my reading, our meeting
notes and a bunch of other data to our internal
long language model. I say, hey, summarize all this data
put into kind of four or five action items. Also
summarize some of the data into a chart table with
(12:53):
xyz kind of columns and these petters and something that
can export into kind of a broader prison within thirty
seconds that I rendered all of it Normally it took
me hours to do right. So it's about being more efficient.
How can I scale myself? How can I get time
back in my day to do other things right? As
an executive, I don't want to spend four hours in
Excel right, our PowerPoint right. I want to use tools
(13:16):
that can make me more efficient so I can spend
my time thinking about strategy, where the business needs to
go in the future, and scaling myself. That's where my
time needs to be spent. So it's just one example.
There's just so many use cases for AI that create
just efficiencies for you and allow you to scale yourself,
and I think people should really explore those.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
No. I love that. It was this quote I found
from you as this is a couple of years ago
where you said connecting the world is really one of
the fundamental challenges of our generation. And that's an idea
we really embrace. Embrace. We work with partners to develop
innovative technologies around the world that help some of the
biggest connectivity challenges in solving them. And together we're bringing
(13:54):
more people online, faster online, to a faster internet. And
so I think about again, to those people who don't
work at the biggest companies in the world, but are building,
hopefully one day the biggest companies, what can we learn
from you and your role in a company like this
that you guys get laser focused on a mission, laser
(14:15):
focused on solving big problems that we can ask small
business owners entrepreneurs learn from, like, how do we learn
scale at our stages from a meta Yeah, I.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
Think you know, as a you know, business owner or
someone who's kind of building products, I think you always
have to be thinking about the idea of how do
things scale in the future. And it is a hard
thing to think about in terms of kind of the
trade off that you have to make when you're building
a new product or kind of launching the business. How
am I going to uniquely create and deliver value to
(14:51):
people at scale? Right? Because you don't want to build
businesses or products that can't scale or kind of reach
kind of multiple people, because then you're kind of boxed
in into kind of a I'll give you a good example.
I have worked on a number of things that I
felt at Meta. I was it proudly right. It was
a learning experience for me. I was building kind of
a startup inside of Meta kind of six years ago,
(15:12):
a connectivity program that had some traction early on in
terms of building Internet exchanges and emerging markets, and I
couldn't find partners to scale because the business model didn't
make sense. So I had to kind of go back
to the table and think about, how do I kind
of create a business model that other carriers can kind
of get behind. This can to make them revenue but
(15:33):
also be call suffortable for people to adopt a technology
and use it. So when I figured out kind of
the business model that scale, which was kind of debt
financing for some of these companies that allowed them to
have these longer term kind of loans with affordable kind
of interest rates, or they could kind of take risk
and make revenue and take bets and risk in these
(15:53):
emerging markets where they otherwise wouldn't make revenue. The business
model just made sense for them, right. So when I
started to think about how do these things kind of
scale a long term what's a commercial model to do that.
I started to get traction pretty quickly and became one
of Marvel's valuable kind of connectivity programs at Meta at
the time, connecting tens of millions of people and South
(16:14):
are in Africa and parts of kind of Latin America,
providing people with more affordable internet and a better quality
of experience. So you have to be thinking about long term.
It's how, you know, across kind of the the product
or kind of the business or whatever the project or
whatever it is that you're working on. How are these
things king to scale longer term? You know, how do
I kind of get value to as many people as possible?
(16:35):
And how can I do that in a repeatable, sustainable way.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
I like that. So I'm sure you get asked by
a lot of people, Hey will you mentor me, Hey
will you be the person out? You know, I can
call and email and et cetera. And while that's you know,
that's what it is. And I'm sure you've had mentors
in your career. How have you found, first of all,
who are your mentors and how have you found those
(17:00):
mentorship relationships best developed? Because I'm sure it's not like, hey,
will you be my mentor, and it's just beautiful from exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
I mean, I like to make that joke sometimes when
I'm talking to people, because you know, I do get
that question a lot, you know, every time I open
LinkedIn or somehow someone gets kind of my EMAO address
asking me to kind of be their mentor. I'm like,
it's kind of like asking someone to be your friend
and you've never met before, even my friend. It doesn't
really work that way. It has to happen organically, right, So,
(17:30):
I think when you're networking in general, like one principle
that I stand by is almost kind of like the
comment I made earlier, is how do I create value
for someone else? Like take yourself out of the equation
and figure out how do you add value for other people.
When you can do that, typically those relationships develop kind
of organically. When I first hearded that meta as an example,
(17:51):
you know, I wanted to have impact. I was eager
like everyone else. But when I was kind of networking
and building senior level kind of relationships and relationships was
kind of uh know, cross functional members across the organization.
I'm thinking about, how do I make their jobs easier,
more efficient? What do I do kind of uniquely just
kind of add value to this situation or this kind
of program. How can I help them and make their
lives easier. When you can do that for people, whether
(18:14):
it's at work, you know, networking, kind of meeting new people,
trying to get business from someone, think about how do
you add value to them first? And that's the best
way to develop a relationship organically, especially if it's someone
that you want to be a mentor or someone do
you think that can kind of guide you longer terms
like what value are you bringing to them? Try to
think about things selflessly and think about how do you
(18:37):
add value for other people? Was Typically people are going
to you know, people good hearts at least will want
to help you kind of in return, right, and has
to be organic, right. You can't go in with the
intention of getting something and being in transaction from other people.
Think about how do you help them? And typically that
comes back to you. I've found that to be something
that's worked through me, work for me throughout my career
in terms of mentors. Inside of Meta, I have a
(19:00):
couple of people Alvin Bowles, who runs kind of are
at team in North America. One of the senior VPS
has been someone instrumental in my career. E mail. You know,
one of our top black executives inside of Meta has
always been kind of a mentor for me. Outside of
Meta kind of depends on this the spaces I operate.
I do a lot of stuff on the creative side too,
(19:20):
and kind of film production. Terrence J. Has always been
a mentor for me, kind of on the production side. Yeah,
you know a few people like that. I think I'm
always finding new people my career that I can kind
of learn from. It's one of the things that I value.
Stain and hungry, figuring out how to evolve myself over time,
and just being eager to learn. I think if you
(19:41):
remain eager to learn, you naturally just find people in
different spaces that end up being kind of mentors for you.
You want to help you.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Yeah, No, there are people who have personal interests like
I'm glad you gave me an alleyup on the video production.
There's people who don't work at the biggest companies in
the world and have have the stressful schedules, and they
try to find space for their interests, their hobbies, the
things that just bring them joy and fill them up.
How are you managing that? Because I mean you talk
(20:10):
about the level of stress in work that you may have.
You know, when your impact reaches hundreds of millions of people,
how do you manage that those personal interests in the work.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yeah, yeah, I get this question a lot too, And
I won't give you a toxic answer like I'll sleep
when I'm dead and I work twenty four second. You
can't do that, right, you know, as we get older,
health as well. Take care of yourself. The fact, take
care of yourself, that's a fact, right. I try to
be very intentional about my time, and I've gotten better
at this as i age. But you know, I have
(20:46):
a pretty set routine in terms of where I spend
my time and energy. So I'm one of those early risers,
kind of like my dad was when he was younger.
At five am, I'm kind of at the gym. I'm
working out, have a set amount of time for that,
eating brakfasts. After that, from kind of seven am to
usually kind of five thirty six, six thirty pm, I'm working.
(21:06):
I'm focused, I'm locking them being president at work. After that,
when I come home, you know, kind of relax of it.
You know, I usually allocate a couple hours of meet
for kind of the creative right when I can kind
of sit back, you know, being kind of my environment
where I'm relaxed and kind of do some creative thinking.
I'm either working, I'm writing, you know, film projects, I'm
(21:26):
working on something with my brothers now and spending kind
of a few hours doing that, and then spending some
time reading too. Reading's important too. You want to stay ahead.
So I try to be intentional about the time I
have during the week and especially on weekends. You can
do so much and fit so much in your day
if you're intentional about it, but you have to put
the energy there. And I think for sometimes, I think
for people. Sometimes I can just be exhausting and trying
(21:47):
to balance that schedule. But when you care about something
intensely and you're passionate about it, you will put the
time and energy into it to ensure that that manifests
into something that you can you leverage to turn into
something big. Right. One of my first feature films last
year was Fear, a horror movie that got released in
(22:10):
kind of theaters in January twenty twenty three that I
was the EPM. It was one of the first times
that I had an opportunity to release a feature film,
you know, working with just amazing kind of talent, you know,
Deon Taylor, director, people like Terrence j Ti, Joseph Acora.
And it was kind of intimidating for me to be
an EP on a project of kind of that scale, right,
(22:31):
And it was a time commitment too, to be invested
just shot over kind of multiple weeks and kind of
the pandemic. I was trying to balance work a time
where you know, people were freaking out about health, trying
to focus on their jobs and not kind of get
laid off too, and that to just be very intention
about kind of managing my time and putting in kind
of the energy and carving out kind of that mental
space for something I was passionate about that I knew
(22:54):
that have the potential to be something big, right, So
you have to kind of make those trade offs and
ask yourself, what do you want in a sacrifice. Or
you're willing to sacrifice a couple more hours of sleep
to get up and go to gym and be healthier,
are you willing to spend thirty forty forty five more
minutes a day after reading, so that you can educate
yourself on kind of new spaces. I learn a lot, right,
It's like the ten thousand hour rule. People forget just
(23:16):
you know how valuable it is when you make that
time commitment, those sacrifices. It just helps you propel yourself
and get ahead.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
How do you think about showing up as an authentic
black man? Like, because when people see technology folks, and
particularly the technology folks in Silicon Valley, we I don't
want to say historically, but we tend to think of
you know, you kind of have to assimilate into the dress,
the way of being in et cetera. And you know, yeah,
(23:46):
code switching, all of that. So I mean when I
see you walk into a room and you got a
blue sky in shirt on it, like you like you're
a real black man, you know what I mean? So
I wonder how you think about how do you how
you show up in the world.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Yeah, you know what, I wasn't always that way. I
think it's interesting enough. When I first started at Meta
early in my career, I was always worried about that
because you know, I wanted to make the best impression.
I was one of very few black people kind of
on the broader kind of engineering teams. And I was
really cognizant about how I show up because I was
(24:20):
worried about opening the door for the next person of
color and the next brother sister who wants to work there.
I was like, if I felt and we may not
go hire any more black people. Right. That was kind
of the mental anguage that I was working with at
the time. That's a lot to put on someone's shoulders,
especially early in their career in the twenties, right. But
you know, I was always thinking about the next generation.
But one of the models at Facebook was, you know,
bringing your authentic self to work, And I was like,
(24:43):
what does that really mean for me as a black man?
Everyone else? Right, I was like, it's not even a
black farmer shop. So when I got comfortable, especially I
started as I started landing impact and just developing kind
of credibility, I was like, you know what, Like I
don't need to walk into a room and code switch
(25:04):
or pretend to be someone else. I was like, you
know what, Like, I'm gonna let people see my Facebook,
my Instagram, my everyday life. I'm going to be neat Right.
So I had this realization kind of a year or
two after Meta, especially as I started, you know, getting
involved in some of the DEI programs too. It was like,
how am I going to attract people to want to
work at META if I'm code switching and I'm being
(25:25):
two different people, Like, that's not authentic, right, I wouldn't
want to work with me? Like, who want to work
with someone like that? Right? So I remember kind of
going back to the pandemic when we had a juneteen
celebration the first time that kind of Meta and I
held this broader panel with Juy McKesson and you know,
Eva Chand who's our m VP of kind of fashion.
And I was like, you know what, I'm wearing my chain.
(25:47):
I'm in front of the whole company. I'm gonna do myself.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Is serious, serious.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
And people loved it. Right, So I'm wearing this shame. Well,
I can overmind. You gotta be yourself like and I
think we need to show up authentically. People respond to that.
They respect you, they appreciate it, and they admire it. Right,
So I really try to be myself. I'm the same
person in any room I walk in, whether I'm in
the executive meetia at work or if I'm you know,
(26:15):
going to my church or I'm on this podcast, right,
I'm the same person. You're gonna get the same errand
and no matter what situation, I value that and I
think I encourage people to do that now.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
I think what's important that you said that I don't
want to get overlooked is you had to be good
at your job too, and.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
So it's important too. That's important too. You have to
do that too. You want to you want to be credible, right.
You can't just come in the door, you know, be
an extra and then not doing anything right. You gotta
you know, you gotta let your work speak for you too.
I have to speak louder than words, So you know,
that's always important.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
We had this great conversation that I'd love to rehash
here because I don't think we went to a deep
point invest fast stage. But we talked about the impaired
to get back into the office and how and what
that means, particularly for black people who want to, you know,
achieve greater heights in their career and if you can
make can you kind of set the stage for that
and make a case for whatever you believe is the
(27:13):
best mode of thinking, method of operation for employees.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Yeah, yeah, I know I'm going to get a lot
of flat for this too, like a bit of an
unpopular answer, but I'll preface it with this. I am
a big believer in the hybrid work model. You have
meta for the people that didn't go remote. We're in
the office three days a week. I value being in
the office because I have a global team and oftentimes
(27:40):
I'm put into meetings as a drop of a whim, right,
I may need to help someone solve something that was
like time critical tough to kind of do that in zoom,
you know, the hallway kind of water cooler conversation sometimes
is so much easier, easier to have things out very
quickly versus waiting two or three weeks to do the
same thing multiple kind of zoom calls. So that proximity
(28:02):
to kind of others and just that environment of being
able to kind of create culture and influence culture by
being in the office is something that's really special to
me because I enjoy like the camaraderie of being with
colleagues kind of friends in the office and being in
a war room together, especially when times are challenging. You're
(28:23):
working a hard problems like that's motivating to see, like,
you know, my colleague kind of next to me, you know,
sweating it out to you know, on a whiteboard, trying
to figure these things out and rallying together. Like I
love that. I think it's even more important for people
who are younger in their career, Like you know, if
you're two or three years in your career at a company,
I wouldn't encourage you to work remote, like I think
(28:46):
you need to be able to see people face to face.
I think you need to go understand the culture. It's
hard to do that over zoom. You can't really understand
culture of Zoom. You need to be kind of in
the office around people to understand kind of the culture
of norms, understanding people's idiosyncrasies, understand the way why they
are the way they are. You can only do that
by interacting with them more frequently. And I think you're
(29:07):
a younger person in your career, very hard to find
mentors over soon. Just people just aren't going to have
the time for that, right. I mean some may, but
it's just tough to do that. So being in the
office may allow you to have that approximately to someone
who can kind of help you in your career, who
can you'll come to your desk or kind of your
station or conference room and help you kind of navigate
(29:27):
things and can kind of coach you a little bit.
And it's easier to get that guidance when they're in
the office. So I think that's important, especially for you know,
black men and kind of black women early in your career.
Having kind of those mentors in person is something that's
really invaluable kind of early in your career. Down With
that being said, can people still be successful working remotely
(29:48):
kind of five days a week. Yes, we all did
it in the pandemic, so it's possible. You know, I didn't.
My work productivity didn't change at all. You know, I
think that early on, like the first kind of couple
weeks of you know, the pandemic, everyone was kind of
struggling to get adjusted. But after a time it became
kind of a normal rhythm for me. So you people
can be productive remote, but I think early in your career,
(30:10):
I would encourage you to be in the office.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
You know, there seems to be a surgence of particularly
tech workers, but I'm sure in every industry we have this,
particularly tech workers who are doing like these day in
their life Instagram day in the life, real, yes, day
in life, you know YouTube posts. Can you talk about
the perspective of your perspective on this and how companies
(30:34):
can be handling this?
Speaker 3 (30:35):
Well, yeah, you know, I think each company thinks about
these things differently. I've heard of you know, people unfortunately
either being kind of you know, fired or kind of
you're released for the company. For some of these videos,
I don't have a lot of context, so I can't
kind of speak on it with confidence, but I think
(30:55):
I've seen this flash across kind of my Instagram map.
But for me personally, I did one of these day
in a live videos a couple of years ago at
a Meta. It's my first kind of Instagram reel. It's
on my Instagram page and it was kind of just
a day and on life for me, coming into the office,
kind of meeting with people, kind of grabbing lunch. And
I did that more just is a way to kind
of show other people who are interested in kind of
(31:17):
working at Meta and what's it like to be, you know,
airing at work in a day in my life, as
you know, someone who works in kind of network engineerings
and kind of meetings with multiple different people and engaging
with kind of building kind of community out that it'll
be cool for people to see because it's a common
question that I get. Now. It's not something I do
every day, you know. I love Instagram reels when I'm
(31:37):
not doing a day in a life like you know,
every week. Right, It's not something that distracts me. It's
a creator economy today, right. I think Instagram, you know,
other apps to have built kind of this creator economy.
It allows people to show off their creativity and monetize
it and make it living from it. We have people
who are creators at Meta who are amazing creators, right,
(31:59):
and they make videos all the time. The key here
is that it doesn't distract them from impact and their
daily work and their daily job too. They're able to
kind of balance both. So you know, from my perspective,
you know, as long as it isn't something that's distracting
you from being able to do the job that you
were hired for, I see no issue with it. People
you know, can live your full lives and pursue their
(32:22):
passions and other areas outside of kind of their quote
unquote kind of nine to five. As long as it's
not taking away from what you were haired to do.
I'll see no problem with it. I love it. I
love seeing those other.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Videos, particularly to that creator economy sentiment, like there was
a big push for young people to be technologists, engineers, designers,
and et cetera. And it seems like now there's a
larger conversation. Although there are some people who still want
to do that, there's a growing conversation about this creator
(32:51):
economy and being able to be you know, full time YouTube,
full time Instagram, full time, et cetera. Talk about how
we can use these things to build wealth.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think whether it's Instagram or other
kind of you know, competitor kind of applications which I
want name here, I think there's you know, a good
opportunity to leverage social media to build wealth where there's
kind of residual income on the side, something you know, small,
or just to be a part of kind of your
(33:25):
primary income by leveraging kind of multiple social media applications.
And you know, I have good friends and you know
people that I know that do it quite well and
have been able to kind of master this. I think
if you're someone who's interested in pursuing a career as
a creator. I think there are just so many outlets
to get paid on Instagram or kind of other kind
(33:46):
of applications or kind of Facebook, you know, bonuses being
kind of available in partnerships, you know, brand partnerships and
others that if you're really strategic about it and you
build kind of a broader presence. This is why it's
so important to leverage of the AI tools that I
talk about that can really help you kind of scale yourself.
There is an economy that allows you to be paid
(34:06):
for this if you're good at it, right, and I
think if you want to take those things seriously, I
think it's really useful to look at kind of the
tools and resources available that teach you kind of the
cheat codes that help you scale yourself pretty quickly and
kind of create kind of this broader audience following because
you can get paid to do those things. You can
get paid quite well. There's a number of people that
(34:27):
I'm very close with who do this constantly, right, and
it's something that they enjoy because they get to be
themselves and from the camera. It can be something you
find something you know, if you're creator that that's relatable
to audiences based on you being kind of authentic. Right
if you know, I'm someone who likes reading books and
I have a book club for example, you know, finding
(34:47):
kind of your niche and kind of your audience and
doing what you do that's kind of original that speaks
to other people who like books. Right, how do I
kind of create unique content it's going to speak to
kind of people or other kind of book enthusiasts. Right,
if I'm a runner, Like there's have a good friend
who owns a you know, who started kind of a
runk club here kind of in a Bay area. She's
built up this great following kind of in the Bay
(35:09):
area and to use kind of Instagram to help her
scale that. I mean, I think every week there's seven
to eight hundred people kind of in the Berkeley kind
of Oakland kind of area that attend kind of runk
club and it started kind of on Instagram. Now she's
a popular creator. Right, There's those things like being your
authentic self and figuring out, you know, what do I
do that's interesting to other people who here are somewhat
(35:29):
similar passion and how can I get kind of that
content in front of them that's unique? You know, original
and authentic coming from myself to connect with kind of
those you know, those those followers and kind of those
readers are people who are using social media who want
to connect with you in similar interests and understanding how
to use the algorithm to your advantage.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
And then when it was kind of the the hidden
sauce behind kind of algorithm, when you find, uh, you know,
I think we do a good job of kind of
connecting people with you know, similar interests or passions a
kind of groups too.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
So if you're consistent, you know, whether there it's reals
or kind of Instagram stories are kind of using kind
of app I think, you know, people tend to find
and kind of connect those audiences. So, going back to
what I said earlier in the conversation, figure out how
to use AI to your advantage.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
To be able to do that, you can I'm gonna
get asked this question what kind of around the mountain?
But I want to set the context for it. So
I've been in boardrooms and corporate rooms, corporate spaces where
you get in and you realize these people ain't that smart.
They like and we have like you have this idea
of what it's like to be in the boardroom, and
(36:32):
then you get there, you're like, this is what these
are the people that's on this board, Like how is how? How? How?
And so I'm not saying so. The reason I bring
that up is because not to say that the people
that you work with are not smart, because they obviously
are smart. But the reason I position it that way
is because sometimes we walk into the room believing that
(36:52):
I'm going to be so far behind and I'm I'm
gonna I can't say anything because if I say, some
of them sound stupid, no matter, and you already discind
your perspective. And so how I want to ask you
about your first times being in leadership meetings? What was
that like? How did you get over it to where
you first put up your hand, you first interjected, and
you were like, not as whack, we should go over here?
(37:14):
Because how how did you get the courage to be
like I gotta something, I got something to say?
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Yeah, yeah, I love this question. Well, I think I
think earlier in my career, the first time I got
the opportunity to attend some of the senior leadership meetings,
I was intimidated, right, I was afraid to say anything
and the first time I did speak up, I was stuttering. Yeah,
I was embarrassed, right, And it happens. It happens to
(37:41):
the best of us. Yeah. So fortunately, you know, I
had senior leaders around me who cared enough about my
career and knowing how talented I was and seeing something
to me, he wanted to be able to kind of
pull me aside and give me constructive feedback. You have
to be open to constructive feedback, right. I think a
(38:01):
lot of people in their career they take it as
an attack or the defense mechanisms kind of go up
if someone tries to edify you, and you've got to
keep an open mind, like when people are willing to
kind of pull you aside and kind of coach you
and say, hey, you know, like your little nervous in there,
you know, going forward, maybe think about doing X, Y
Z or try to do this right, be open to
those things and learn. And you know, I kept content,
(38:23):
open mind out, but listen to people kind of ask
questions and over time, as I did that in parallel
while building confidence in my career and building cility credibility
as we kind of talked about before, that built up
enough confidence to be able to kind of speak up
and have a you know, a fault and kind of
position on something and kind of say that with confidence.
And I think people respond to confidence too. If from waffling,
(38:45):
I'm stuttering, I'm trying to pitch an idea, people don't
even think I believe in it, right, But if I
can say something but authority and confidence, knowing that I'm
a subject matter expert, that I truly believe this, and
I have strong convictions and I have the data to
support that, I can speak openly about that. Right. And
as you do that repeatedly, you know, people you build
a reputation of being kind of credible and your thought
leader in certain spaces. They give you confidence to be
(39:07):
able to speak up. Right. You notice, I'll just kind
of lean forward and that was very intentional with the worst,
but like you have to think it out of your
your body language and kind of demeanor too, so that
confidence comes over time.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Aar Aar Russell, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Man lovely, thank you so much. I appreciate it well.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
Always a pleasure, absolutely absolutely. Black Tech Green Money is
a production of Blavity Afro Tech on the Black Effect
podcast Networking Night Hire Immedia and it's produced by Morgan
Debonne and me Well Lucas, with the additional production support
by Kate McDonald, Sarah and Jada McGee. Special thank you
to Michael Davis and Love Beach. Learn more about My
Guessing Other Technish Up is an innovator's afrotech dot com.
(39:45):
The video version of this episode will drop to Black
Tech Green Money on YouTube, so tap in enjoy your
Black Tech Green Money share with somebody. Go get your money.
Peace and love,
Afro Tech Conference is back, bringing together over twenty thousand
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Join us to learn from the innovators and leaders who
(00:21):
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In addition to focusing on the latest and AI and data,
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(00:44):
ticket now. I'm Will Lucas and this is Black Tech,
Green Money. Anne Russell is Director of Edge Network Infrastructure
APT META. He's been with the tech giant for nearly
a decade. He's initiated and led critical inn and infrastructure
projects connecting unconnected people in the emerging markets, especially in Africa.
(01:06):
He's a creative former contributed to Huffington Post, the filmmaker,
and a diversity and inclusion champion at Meta. So for
the people who aren't super you know, familiar with your background.
You were not like a technical person growing up, like
and so you've got you found your way to engineering
roles and you know, really technical roles at Meta. I
(01:27):
mean probably Facebook then, but Meta without a technical background,
how does that happen?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
It was a journey, an exhausting one and one filled
with you know, lots of uh, you know, concerns early
on of whether I was making kind of the right
decisions and imposter syndrome which many people feel from going
from a non technical background to very technical work. I
started my career early in investment banking after college, like
(01:58):
many people kind of when I was in college at
wake Forest University, you know, private equity and venture capital
and investment banking and sounded very sexy, right. I wanted
to be an investment banker. I watched all the movies
kind of growing up, and I was like, this is
the career for me. For two years of doing it
and working eighty hours a week, and private equity groups
not investing, and you know, working in a bunch of
(02:20):
pitch stacks which weren't going anywhere and making very little money.
At the time, It's like, I think, I maybe want
to do something a little bit differently. So I had
an opportunity to join a tech company that was literally
two blocks down the street walking distance from the investment bank,
who was looking for people of my background who worked
on acquisitions and business valuation, did M and A work
(02:41):
to help them think about consolidating other companies within their
tech industry. It was a media company content delivery network
that worked with you know, Google and YouTube and others
at the time to cast all their video content. So
I decided to kind of make the leap of faith.
I actually had a friend working there at the time,
which make the transition easy. And for the first six
months or so it was work you know on you know,
(03:02):
acquisitions and doing M and A work, and then the
company went through a major rework It was a bit
during the recession and laid off much of the senior
kind of executive staff. So you know, two or three
layers between me and the CEO at the time were
just cut overnight, so you know, of course I'm nervous,
I'm scared. And then the CEO comes to me and
(03:22):
asks me to change my role within a company. They
needed help with the supply chain and expanding the company
from having a US presence to a global international presence,
and asking me for help to start negotiating the supply chain,
working with our network engineering team and becoming a bit
more technical so that I could expand the network. So
the time, I had no idea what that involved, but
(03:43):
I quickly found myself, you know, after kind of finishing
in the NBA at Arizona State, going back to night
school as soon as I finished my MBA and trying
to do the Cisco Certified Network Associates kind of an
entry level network engineering kind of one on one program
while asking the netw work engineers in my company a
million questions kind of day and night. So was learning
from the bootstrap, so massive and posular syndrome. I had
(04:07):
no idea what I was doing at the time, but
luckily I was surrounded by by people who were just
gracious in answering questions and wanting to kind of mentor
me early in their career, so fast forward kind of
four years of doing that became very technical and kind
of network engineering, and then Facebook happened to find me
kind of twenty fourteen looking for someone of my background
(04:28):
who had worked in kind of finance before but was
also technical from a network engineering perspective to help them
build and expand their entire network. So kind of fratuitous
at the time that I had kind of the finance
kind of hat and had kind of a technical background
that I could kind of combine those skills into something
that Meta was looking for to help them actually expand
their global network today, which is one of the biggest
(04:48):
in the world.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
So for people who you know, kind of count themselves
out of roles because they feel like they may not
be experienced, so they may not have exactly what the
listing is looking for. I mean, you're a test them
into you know, you should probably take the take the
shot if it's interesting.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Absolutely, Absolutely, it's interesting because I believe studies show that
this happens to women actually more than men. Men tend
to be a bit more overconfident and applying for roles
that they may not necessarily be qualified for on paper,
whereas sometimes women from what studies show will look at
some of the qualifications and say hey, I meet maybe
three out of five and not all five, and then
(05:27):
talk themselves out of applying. And one of the things
that I've always encouraged people to do in their career
is like, look, if you meet two out of five,
three out of five, doesn't matter. Go through the interview loop.
If you get accepted, have the conversation, because there may
be something that they're looking for that you may have
no idea. You may impress them in that conversation. You
may be a non conditional thinker from a nonconventional kind
(05:50):
of background, original thinker, I mean, and that might be
something that's unique and original, creative that may take that
role to a new level that they hadn't even anticipated.
And that happens so often. That's why it's so important
to put your best foot forth, apply to these roles,
and take the leap of faith. I think it's so
important that you don't talk yourself out of opportunities and
(06:12):
blocking and blessing.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
By doing that telling yourself no, yeah, you know. So
for people who come up technical, you know, I remember
when I was learning front end, it was like, you know,
one one day you had to learn you know, Ruby
on rails. The next day you had to learn Python,
the next day you had to learn this other language.
And it was like it was like a never ending
cycle of different things coming out that you should probably
(06:37):
know characteristically because you, I mean, you work at one
of the biggest companies in the world and you're seeing
the future, you're building the future. What kind of characteristics
should a person who wants to be in leadership in
the technology space be developing?
Speaker 3 (06:58):
I think a few things that Mark talked about this
recently on the Acquired Chase kind of podcasts at the
Chase Inner kind of a couple of weeks ago, and
if people haven't watched it, I think it's available on Spotify.
But one of the things I find interesting in kind
of Silicon Valley and kind of Mark mension is that
you know, if you're wanting to be in the technical
(07:21):
leadership role at many of the larger kind of tech,
larger kind of companies in Silicon Valley, you need to
be technical, right. So historically kind of in Silicon Value
would find that many of the CEOs and people in
kind of VP leadership of major tech companies weren't actually
technical that might have one technical founder and one kind
(07:41):
of VP event, but many of the folks weren't technical,
and sometimes those companies just don't survive longer term. And
you look at just how rapid innovation is happening and
the technology trends. You have to have technical people that
can help you navigate those trends. Read the tea leaves,
kind of see the future and learn how to take
the company from kind of A to Z. So, you know,
(08:03):
if you're wanting to work in kind of a technical
kind of engineering role, you've got to be a sponge, right.
You've got to soak up knowledge. You have to ask questions.
You have to take advantage of tools and resources that
are free sometimes paid. Understand what the Amazons and Googles,
the metas, the open a eyes, the anthropics of the
world are focused on. Understand kind of road maps, listen
(08:25):
to kind of their podcasts. Meet with people. I still
encourage people kind of early in their career to do
informational interviews with people, Like it's so easy sometimes just
to go on LinkedIn, find a person, hopefully you know
a person of color, a brother or sister who is
just willing to just talk to you and kind of
give you information and if you ask stup questions, usually
people were impressed by that and willing to kind of
(08:46):
help you. I can't tell you the number of times
I've done this. When people reach out to me, you
know LinkedIn wanting to know them more about meta my
role in particular, I'll give them the time of day.
You know, it's close mouths. Don't reach out, ask those
questions right understand kind the challenges that they're facing the
day to day. What are the things that they're working
on now in terms of kind of road maps and
where they're winning the future. What kind of technologies are
(09:08):
they exploring. For me, as a person that builds global infrastructure,
my industry is changing kind of rapidly. I'm always happy
to talk about those things. So you have to ask questions,
you have to read, you have to stay current with
kind of technology trends because the space is moving so rapidly.
So I think that's the words of encouragement that I
would have for folks.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
To that point of the space is moving so quickly.
The I love talking about small business owners entrepreneurs and
giving them value from these conversations because not everybody's going
to be building technology, but a lot will be using technology,
employing technology to scale. And so for AI, which we're
having a big global conversation about AI, and to your point,
(09:48):
it's moving rapidly. What is potentially overlooked for those small
business owners and entrepreneurs? What are we not paying enough
attention to that could be valuable to us?
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Yeah? I think, you know, technology is the great equalizer. Right,
So when you think about kind of rewind, I don't know,
ten twelve years ago, however long ago kind of Uber
or Lyft or that look, remember being kind of traveling
or being kind of in New York and trying to
hell a taxi. I can't tell you the number of
times as a black man, I got passed over for
(10:21):
you know, a white kind of counterpart, right because they
didn't know about me, They didn't know who it was.
You couldn't kind of see the background, and just assuming
some stereotype about me. Right, So I'm standing there looking
crazy on the street, trying to wave down a taxi
and can't get one. Right, But all of a sudden,
you know, Uber and kind of Lyft and others called
you know, come along and you can get transportation at
(10:41):
an access that kind of your fingertips, right, So it's
just kind of one example. So when you think about
as like a small business owner or kind of creator,
like AI is one of those technologies that can be
the great equalizer, especially if you're a small business. I
talked about this recently and kind of another kind of
panel conversation, but one of the things that we're doing
that is launching something called AI Studio, which is available
(11:04):
now for kind of creators, even kind of small businesses.
And if you're a creator, leveraging the AI to be
able to create an AI extension and the agent of
yourself that can communicate with your fan base globally, that
can push merchandise for you, that can push ticket sales,
that can reply to common stories and kind of dms
and help you scale yourself. It's really powerful. Right. Don't
(11:26):
leave money on the table because you don't speak eight languages, right, Like,
leverage the AI to do those things. If you're a
small business, you know, and you're a startup, you know,
your capital and your balance sheet is going to be
pretty limited. Right. So just as everyone has a social
media page and an email address and kind of a website,
you know, think about the future as having kind of
(11:47):
these AI agents that can help you scale your businesses,
that can communicate with customers kind of globally, that can
offer discounts, help you with customer return, help you predict
kind of the creative for ads, help you figure out
who your actual audience is better than you can confirm. Right.
So there's just so many opportunities as a small business
owner or as a creator to leverage these tools. So
(12:10):
I think people really have to be early adopters and
explore some of these things. One of the announcements we
just launched yesterday at the Connect conference was LAMA three
point two and update to kind of LAMA three point one,
which is our long language model. An exciting thing about
that is multimodial. So I use this at work all
the time. You have an internal tool called Metamate which
uses our long language model, and I used to spend
(12:31):
hours sometimes working on presentations and putting together kind of
charts and graphs and writing meeting notes. I uploaded kind
of a Google doc with all my reading, our meeting
notes and a bunch of other data to our internal
long language model. I say, hey, summarize all this data
put into kind of four or five action items. Also
summarize some of the data into a chart table with
(12:53):
xyz kind of columns and these petters and something that
can export into kind of a broader prison within thirty
seconds that I rendered all of it Normally it took
me hours to do right. So it's about being more efficient.
How can I scale myself? How can I get time
back in my day to do other things right? As
an executive, I don't want to spend four hours in
Excel right, our PowerPoint right. I want to use tools
(13:16):
that can make me more efficient so I can spend
my time thinking about strategy, where the business needs to
go in the future, and scaling myself. That's where my
time needs to be spent. So it's just one example.
There's just so many use cases for AI that create
just efficiencies for you and allow you to scale yourself,
and I think people should really explore those.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
No. I love that. It was this quote I found
from you as this is a couple of years ago
where you said connecting the world is really one of
the fundamental challenges of our generation. And that's an idea
we really embrace. Embrace. We work with partners to develop
innovative technologies around the world that help some of the
biggest connectivity challenges in solving them. And together we're bringing
(13:54):
more people online, faster online, to a faster internet. And
so I think about again, to those people who don't
work at the biggest companies in the world, but are building,
hopefully one day the biggest companies, what can we learn
from you and your role in a company like this
that you guys get laser focused on a mission, laser
(14:15):
focused on solving big problems that we can ask small
business owners entrepreneurs learn from, like, how do we learn
scale at our stages from a meta Yeah, I.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
Think you know, as a you know, business owner or
someone who's kind of building products, I think you always
have to be thinking about the idea of how do
things scale in the future. And it is a hard
thing to think about in terms of kind of the
trade off that you have to make when you're building
a new product or kind of launching the business. How
am I going to uniquely create and deliver value to
(14:51):
people at scale? Right? Because you don't want to build
businesses or products that can't scale or kind of reach
kind of multiple people, because then you're kind of boxed
in into kind of a I'll give you a good example.
I have worked on a number of things that I
felt at Meta. I was it proudly right. It was
a learning experience for me. I was building kind of
a startup inside of Meta kind of six years ago,
(15:12):
a connectivity program that had some traction early on in
terms of building Internet exchanges and emerging markets, and I
couldn't find partners to scale because the business model didn't
make sense. So I had to kind of go back
to the table and think about, how do I kind
of create a business model that other carriers can kind
of get behind. This can to make them revenue but
(15:33):
also be call suffortable for people to adopt a technology
and use it. So when I figured out kind of
the business model that scale, which was kind of debt
financing for some of these companies that allowed them to
have these longer term kind of loans with affordable kind
of interest rates, or they could kind of take risk
and make revenue and take bets and risk in these
(15:53):
emerging markets where they otherwise wouldn't make revenue. The business
model just made sense for them, right. So when I
started to think about how do these things kind of
scale a long term what's a commercial model to do that.
I started to get traction pretty quickly and became one
of Marvel's valuable kind of connectivity programs at Meta at
the time, connecting tens of millions of people and South
(16:14):
are in Africa and parts of kind of Latin America,
providing people with more affordable internet and a better quality
of experience. So you have to be thinking about long term.
It's how, you know, across kind of the the product
or kind of the business or whatever the project or
whatever it is that you're working on. How are these
things king to scale longer term? You know, how do
I kind of get value to as many people as possible?
(16:35):
And how can I do that in a repeatable, sustainable way.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
I like that. So I'm sure you get asked by
a lot of people, Hey will you mentor me, Hey
will you be the person out? You know, I can
call and email and et cetera. And while that's you know,
that's what it is. And I'm sure you've had mentors
in your career. How have you found, first of all,
who are your mentors and how have you found those
(17:00):
mentorship relationships best developed? Because I'm sure it's not like, hey,
will you be my mentor, and it's just beautiful from exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
I mean, I like to make that joke sometimes when
I'm talking to people, because you know, I do get
that question a lot, you know, every time I open
LinkedIn or somehow someone gets kind of my EMAO address
asking me to kind of be their mentor. I'm like,
it's kind of like asking someone to be your friend
and you've never met before, even my friend. It doesn't
really work that way. It has to happen organically, right, So,
(17:30):
I think when you're networking in general, like one principle
that I stand by is almost kind of like the
comment I made earlier, is how do I create value
for someone else? Like take yourself out of the equation
and figure out how do you add value for other people.
When you can do that, typically those relationships develop kind
of organically. When I first hearded that meta as an example,
(17:51):
you know, I wanted to have impact. I was eager
like everyone else. But when I was kind of networking
and building senior level kind of relationships and relationships was
kind of uh know, cross functional members across the organization.
I'm thinking about, how do I make their jobs easier,
more efficient? What do I do kind of uniquely just
kind of add value to this situation or this kind
of program. How can I help them and make their
lives easier. When you can do that for people, whether
(18:14):
it's at work, you know, networking, kind of meeting new people,
trying to get business from someone, think about how do
you add value to them first? And that's the best
way to develop a relationship organically, especially if it's someone
that you want to be a mentor or someone do
you think that can kind of guide you longer terms
like what value are you bringing to them? Try to
think about things selflessly and think about how do you
(18:37):
add value for other people? Was Typically people are going
to you know, people good hearts at least will want
to help you kind of in return, right, and has
to be organic, right. You can't go in with the
intention of getting something and being in transaction from other people.
Think about how do you help them? And typically that
comes back to you. I've found that to be something
that's worked through me, work for me throughout my career
in terms of mentors. Inside of Meta, I have a
(19:00):
couple of people Alvin Bowles, who runs kind of are
at team in North America. One of the senior VPS
has been someone instrumental in my career. E mail. You know,
one of our top black executives inside of Meta has
always been kind of a mentor for me. Outside of
Meta kind of depends on this the spaces I operate.
I do a lot of stuff on the creative side too,
(19:20):
and kind of film production. Terrence J. Has always been
a mentor for me, kind of on the production side. Yeah,
you know a few people like that. I think I'm
always finding new people my career that I can kind
of learn from. It's one of the things that I value.
Stain and hungry, figuring out how to evolve myself over time,
and just being eager to learn. I think if you
(19:41):
remain eager to learn, you naturally just find people in
different spaces that end up being kind of mentors for you.
You want to help you.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Yeah, No, there are people who have personal interests like
I'm glad you gave me an alleyup on the video production.
There's people who don't work at the biggest companies in
the world and have have the stressful schedules, and they
try to find space for their interests, their hobbies, the
things that just bring them joy and fill them up.
How are you managing that? Because I mean you talk
(20:10):
about the level of stress in work that you may have.
You know, when your impact reaches hundreds of millions of people,
how do you manage that those personal interests in the work.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yeah, yeah, I get this question a lot too, And
I won't give you a toxic answer like I'll sleep
when I'm dead and I work twenty four second. You
can't do that, right, you know, as we get older,
health as well. Take care of yourself. The fact, take
care of yourself, that's a fact, right. I try to
be very intentional about my time, and I've gotten better
at this as i age. But you know, I have
(20:46):
a pretty set routine in terms of where I spend
my time and energy. So I'm one of those early risers,
kind of like my dad was when he was younger.
At five am, I'm kind of at the gym. I'm
working out, have a set amount of time for that,
eating brakfasts. After that, from kind of seven am to
usually kind of five thirty six, six thirty pm, I'm working.
(21:06):
I'm focused, I'm locking them being president at work. After that,
when I come home, you know, kind of relax of it.
You know, I usually allocate a couple hours of meet
for kind of the creative right when I can kind
of sit back, you know, being kind of my environment
where I'm relaxed and kind of do some creative thinking.
I'm either working, I'm writing, you know, film projects, I'm
(21:26):
working on something with my brothers now and spending kind
of a few hours doing that, and then spending some
time reading too. Reading's important too. You want to stay ahead.
So I try to be intentional about the time I
have during the week and especially on weekends. You can
do so much and fit so much in your day
if you're intentional about it, but you have to put
the energy there. And I think for sometimes, I think
for people. Sometimes I can just be exhausting and trying
(21:47):
to balance that schedule. But when you care about something
intensely and you're passionate about it, you will put the
time and energy into it to ensure that that manifests
into something that you can you leverage to turn into
something big. Right. One of my first feature films last
year was Fear, a horror movie that got released in
(22:10):
kind of theaters in January twenty twenty three that I
was the EPM. It was one of the first times
that I had an opportunity to release a feature film,
you know, working with just amazing kind of talent, you know,
Deon Taylor, director, people like Terrence j Ti, Joseph Acora.
And it was kind of intimidating for me to be
an EP on a project of kind of that scale, right,
(22:31):
And it was a time commitment too, to be invested
just shot over kind of multiple weeks and kind of
the pandemic. I was trying to balance work a time
where you know, people were freaking out about health, trying
to focus on their jobs and not kind of get
laid off too, and that to just be very intention
about kind of managing my time and putting in kind
of the energy and carving out kind of that mental
space for something I was passionate about that I knew
(22:54):
that have the potential to be something big, right, So
you have to kind of make those trade offs and
ask yourself, what do you want in a sacrifice. Or
you're willing to sacrifice a couple more hours of sleep
to get up and go to gym and be healthier,
are you willing to spend thirty forty forty five more
minutes a day after reading, so that you can educate
yourself on kind of new spaces. I learn a lot, right,
It's like the ten thousand hour rule. People forget just
(23:16):
you know how valuable it is when you make that
time commitment, those sacrifices. It just helps you propel yourself
and get ahead.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
How do you think about showing up as an authentic
black man? Like, because when people see technology folks, and
particularly the technology folks in Silicon Valley, we I don't
want to say historically, but we tend to think of
you know, you kind of have to assimilate into the dress,
the way of being in et cetera. And you know, yeah,
(23:46):
code switching, all of that. So I mean when I
see you walk into a room and you got a
blue sky in shirt on it, like you like you're
a real black man, you know what I mean? So
I wonder how you think about how do you how
you show up in the world.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Yeah, you know what, I wasn't always that way. I
think it's interesting enough. When I first started at Meta
early in my career, I was always worried about that
because you know, I wanted to make the best impression.
I was one of very few black people kind of
on the broader kind of engineering teams. And I was
really cognizant about how I show up because I was
(24:20):
worried about opening the door for the next person of
color and the next brother sister who wants to work there.
I was like, if I felt and we may not
go hire any more black people. Right. That was kind
of the mental anguage that I was working with at
the time. That's a lot to put on someone's shoulders,
especially early in their career in the twenties, right. But
you know, I was always thinking about the next generation.
But one of the models at Facebook was, you know,
bringing your authentic self to work, And I was like,
(24:43):
what does that really mean for me as a black man?
Everyone else? Right, I was like, it's not even a
black farmer shop. So when I got comfortable, especially I
started as I started landing impact and just developing kind
of credibility, I was like, you know what, Like I
don't need to walk into a room and code switch
(25:04):
or pretend to be someone else. I was like, you
know what, Like, I'm gonna let people see my Facebook,
my Instagram, my everyday life. I'm going to be neat Right.
So I had this realization kind of a year or
two after Meta, especially as I started, you know, getting
involved in some of the DEI programs too. It was like,
how am I going to attract people to want to
work at META if I'm code switching and I'm being
(25:25):
two different people, Like, that's not authentic, right, I wouldn't
want to work with me? Like, who want to work
with someone like that? Right? So I remember kind of
going back to the pandemic when we had a juneteen
celebration the first time that kind of Meta and I
held this broader panel with Juy McKesson and you know,
Eva Chand who's our m VP of kind of fashion.
And I was like, you know what, I'm wearing my chain.
(25:47):
I'm in front of the whole company. I'm gonna do myself.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Is serious, serious.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
And people loved it. Right, So I'm wearing this shame. Well,
I can overmind. You gotta be yourself like and I
think we need to show up authentically. People respond to that.
They respect you, they appreciate it, and they admire it. Right,
So I really try to be myself. I'm the same
person in any room I walk in, whether I'm in
the executive meetia at work or if I'm you know,
(26:15):
going to my church or I'm on this podcast, right,
I'm the same person. You're gonna get the same errand
and no matter what situation, I value that and I
think I encourage people to do that now.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
I think what's important that you said that I don't
want to get overlooked is you had to be good
at your job too, and.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
So it's important too. That's important too. You have to
do that too. You want to you want to be credible, right.
You can't just come in the door, you know, be
an extra and then not doing anything right. You gotta
you know, you gotta let your work speak for you too.
I have to speak louder than words, So you know,
that's always important.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
We had this great conversation that I'd love to rehash
here because I don't think we went to a deep
point invest fast stage. But we talked about the impaired
to get back into the office and how and what
that means, particularly for black people who want to, you know,
achieve greater heights in their career and if you can
make can you kind of set the stage for that
and make a case for whatever you believe is the
(27:13):
best mode of thinking, method of operation for employees.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Yeah, yeah, I know I'm going to get a lot
of flat for this too, like a bit of an
unpopular answer, but I'll preface it with this. I am
a big believer in the hybrid work model. You have
meta for the people that didn't go remote. We're in
the office three days a week. I value being in
the office because I have a global team and oftentimes
(27:40):
I'm put into meetings as a drop of a whim, right,
I may need to help someone solve something that was
like time critical tough to kind of do that in zoom,
you know, the hallway kind of water cooler conversation sometimes
is so much easier, easier to have things out very
quickly versus waiting two or three weeks to do the
same thing multiple kind of zoom calls. So that proximity
(28:02):
to kind of others and just that environment of being
able to kind of create culture and influence culture by
being in the office is something that's really special to
me because I enjoy like the camaraderie of being with
colleagues kind of friends in the office and being in
a war room together, especially when times are challenging. You're
(28:23):
working a hard problems like that's motivating to see, like,
you know, my colleague kind of next to me, you know,
sweating it out to you know, on a whiteboard, trying
to figure these things out and rallying together. Like I
love that. I think it's even more important for people
who are younger in their career, Like you know, if
you're two or three years in your career at a company,
I wouldn't encourage you to work remote, like I think
(28:46):
you need to be able to see people face to face.
I think you need to go understand the culture. It's
hard to do that over zoom. You can't really understand
culture of Zoom. You need to be kind of in
the office around people to understand kind of the culture
of norms, understanding people's idiosyncrasies, understand the way why they
are the way they are. You can only do that
by interacting with them more frequently. And I think you're
(29:07):
a younger person in your career, very hard to find
mentors over soon. Just people just aren't going to have
the time for that, right. I mean some may, but
it's just tough to do that. So being in the
office may allow you to have that approximately to someone
who can kind of help you in your career, who
can you'll come to your desk or kind of your
station or conference room and help you kind of navigate
(29:27):
things and can kind of coach you a little bit.
And it's easier to get that guidance when they're in
the office. So I think that's important, especially for you know,
black men and kind of black women early in your career.
Having kind of those mentors in person is something that's
really invaluable kind of early in your career. Down With
that being said, can people still be successful working remotely
(29:48):
kind of five days a week. Yes, we all did
it in the pandemic, so it's possible. You know, I didn't.
My work productivity didn't change at all. You know, I
think that early on, like the first kind of couple
weeks of you know, the pandemic, everyone was kind of
struggling to get adjusted. But after a time it became
kind of a normal rhythm for me. So you people
can be productive remote, but I think early in your career,
(30:10):
I would encourage you to be in the office.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
You know, there seems to be a surgence of particularly
tech workers, but I'm sure in every industry we have this,
particularly tech workers who are doing like these day in
their life Instagram day in the life, real, yes, day
in life, you know YouTube posts. Can you talk about
the perspective of your perspective on this and how companies
(30:34):
can be handling this?
Speaker 3 (30:35):
Well, yeah, you know, I think each company thinks about
these things differently. I've heard of you know, people unfortunately
either being kind of you know, fired or kind of
you're released for the company. For some of these videos,
I don't have a lot of context, so I can't
kind of speak on it with confidence, but I think
(30:55):
I've seen this flash across kind of my Instagram map.
But for me personally, I did one of these day
in a live videos a couple of years ago at
a Meta. It's my first kind of Instagram reel. It's
on my Instagram page and it was kind of just
a day and on life for me, coming into the office,
kind of meeting with people, kind of grabbing lunch. And
I did that more just is a way to kind
of show other people who are interested in kind of
(31:17):
working at Meta and what's it like to be, you know,
airing at work in a day in my life, as
you know, someone who works in kind of network engineerings
and kind of meetings with multiple different people and engaging
with kind of building kind of community out that it'll
be cool for people to see because it's a common
question that I get. Now. It's not something I do
every day, you know. I love Instagram reels when I'm
(31:37):
not doing a day in a life like you know,
every week. Right, It's not something that distracts me. It's
a creator economy today, right. I think Instagram, you know,
other apps to have built kind of this creator economy.
It allows people to show off their creativity and monetize
it and make it living from it. We have people
who are creators at Meta who are amazing creators, right,
(31:59):
and they make videos all the time. The key here
is that it doesn't distract them from impact and their
daily work and their daily job too. They're able to
kind of balance both. So you know, from my perspective,
you know, as long as it isn't something that's distracting
you from being able to do the job that you
were hired for, I see no issue with it. People
you know, can live your full lives and pursue their
(32:22):
passions and other areas outside of kind of their quote
unquote kind of nine to five. As long as it's
not taking away from what you were haired to do.
I'll see no problem with it. I love it. I
love seeing those other.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Videos, particularly to that creator economy sentiment, like there was
a big push for young people to be technologists, engineers, designers,
and et cetera. And it seems like now there's a
larger conversation. Although there are some people who still want
to do that, there's a growing conversation about this creator
(32:51):
economy and being able to be you know, full time YouTube,
full time Instagram, full time, et cetera. Talk about how
we can use these things to build wealth.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think whether it's Instagram or other
kind of you know, competitor kind of applications which I
want name here, I think there's you know, a good
opportunity to leverage social media to build wealth where there's
kind of residual income on the side, something you know, small,
or just to be a part of kind of your
(33:25):
primary income by leveraging kind of multiple social media applications.
And you know, I have good friends and you know
people that I know that do it quite well and
have been able to kind of master this. I think
if you're someone who's interested in pursuing a career as
a creator. I think there are just so many outlets
to get paid on Instagram or kind of other kind
(33:46):
of applications or kind of Facebook, you know, bonuses being
kind of available in partnerships, you know, brand partnerships and
others that if you're really strategic about it and you
build kind of a broader presence. This is why it's
so important to leverage of the AI tools that I
talk about that can really help you kind of scale yourself.
There is an economy that allows you to be paid
(34:06):
for this if you're good at it, right, and I
think if you want to take those things seriously, I
think it's really useful to look at kind of the
tools and resources available that teach you kind of the
cheat codes that help you scale yourself pretty quickly and
kind of create kind of this broader audience following because
you can get paid to do those things. You can
get paid quite well. There's a number of people that
(34:27):
I'm very close with who do this constantly, right, and
it's something that they enjoy because they get to be
themselves and from the camera. It can be something you
find something you know, if you're creator that that's relatable
to audiences based on you being kind of authentic. Right
if you know, I'm someone who likes reading books and
I have a book club for example, you know, finding
(34:47):
kind of your niche and kind of your audience and
doing what you do that's kind of original that speaks
to other people who like books. Right, how do I
kind of create unique content it's going to speak to
kind of people or other kind of book enthusiasts. Right,
if I'm a runner, Like there's have a good friend
who owns a you know, who started kind of a
runk club here kind of in a Bay area. She's
built up this great following kind of in the Bay
(35:09):
area and to use kind of Instagram to help her
scale that. I mean, I think every week there's seven
to eight hundred people kind of in the Berkeley kind
of Oakland kind of area that attend kind of runk
club and it started kind of on Instagram. Now she's
a popular creator. Right, There's those things like being your
authentic self and figuring out, you know, what do I
do that's interesting to other people who here are somewhat
(35:29):
similar passion and how can I get kind of that
content in front of them that's unique? You know, original
and authentic coming from myself to connect with kind of
those you know, those those followers and kind of those
readers are people who are using social media who want
to connect with you in similar interests and understanding how
to use the algorithm to your advantage.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
And then when it was kind of the the hidden
sauce behind kind of algorithm, when you find, uh, you know,
I think we do a good job of kind of
connecting people with you know, similar interests or passions a
kind of groups too.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
So if you're consistent, you know, whether there it's reals
or kind of Instagram stories are kind of using kind
of app I think, you know, people tend to find
and kind of connect those audiences. So, going back to
what I said earlier in the conversation, figure out how
to use AI to your advantage.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
To be able to do that, you can I'm gonna
get asked this question what kind of around the mountain?
But I want to set the context for it. So
I've been in boardrooms and corporate rooms, corporate spaces where
you get in and you realize these people ain't that smart.
They like and we have like you have this idea
of what it's like to be in the boardroom, and
(36:32):
then you get there, you're like, this is what these
are the people that's on this board, Like how is how? How? How?
And so I'm not saying so. The reason I bring
that up is because not to say that the people
that you work with are not smart, because they obviously
are smart. But the reason I position it that way
is because sometimes we walk into the room believing that
(36:52):
I'm going to be so far behind and I'm I'm
gonna I can't say anything because if I say, some
of them sound stupid, no matter, and you already discind
your perspective. And so how I want to ask you
about your first times being in leadership meetings? What was
that like? How did you get over it to where
you first put up your hand, you first interjected, and
you were like, not as whack, we should go over here?
(37:14):
Because how how did you get the courage to be
like I gotta something, I got something to say?
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Yeah, yeah, I love this question. Well, I think I
think earlier in my career, the first time I got
the opportunity to attend some of the senior leadership meetings,
I was intimidated, right, I was afraid to say anything
and the first time I did speak up, I was stuttering. Yeah,
I was embarrassed, right, And it happens. It happens to
(37:41):
the best of us. Yeah. So fortunately, you know, I
had senior leaders around me who cared enough about my
career and knowing how talented I was and seeing something
to me, he wanted to be able to kind of
pull me aside and give me constructive feedback. You have
to be open to constructive feedback, right. I think a
(38:01):
lot of people in their career they take it as
an attack or the defense mechanisms kind of go up
if someone tries to edify you, and you've got to
keep an open mind, like when people are willing to
kind of pull you aside and kind of coach you
and say, hey, you know, like your little nervous in there,
you know, going forward, maybe think about doing X, Y
Z or try to do this right, be open to
those things and learn. And you know, I kept content,
(38:23):
open mind out, but listen to people kind of ask
questions and over time, as I did that in parallel
while building confidence in my career and building cility credibility
as we kind of talked about before, that built up
enough confidence to be able to kind of speak up
and have a you know, a fault and kind of
position on something and kind of say that with confidence.
And I think people respond to confidence too. If from waffling,
(38:45):
I'm stuttering, I'm trying to pitch an idea, people don't
even think I believe in it, right, But if I
can say something but authority and confidence, knowing that I'm
a subject matter expert, that I truly believe this, and
I have strong convictions and I have the data to
support that, I can speak openly about that. Right. And
as you do that repeatedly, you know, people you build
a reputation of being kind of credible and your thought
leader in certain spaces. They give you confidence to be
(39:07):
able to speak up. Right. You notice, I'll just kind
of lean forward and that was very intentional with the worst,
but like you have to think it out of your
your body language and kind of demeanor too, so that
confidence comes over time.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Aar Aar Russell, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Man lovely, thank you so much. I appreciate it well.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
Always a pleasure, absolutely absolutely. Black Tech Green Money is
a production of Blavity Afro Tech on the Black Effect
podcast Networking Night Hire Immedia and it's produced by Morgan
Debonne and me Well Lucas, with the additional production support
by Kate McDonald, Sarah and Jada McGee. Special thank you
to Michael Davis and Love Beach. Learn more about My
Guessing Other Technish Up is an innovator's afrotech dot com.
(39:45):
The video version of this episode will drop to Black
Tech Green Money on YouTube, so tap in enjoy your
Black Tech Green Money share with somebody. Go get your money.
Peace and love,
Host
Will Lucas
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