Mark Zuckerberg Gave His Startup Advice at 2 AM About Chess

“The energy was electric from the early days of Facebook,” the now-tech entrepreneur recalls. Luck. “There are a lot of people just trying to build and ship interesting things.”

“Honestly, it almost felt like I was in college,” she added. “People were actually sleeping in the office… It felt like everyone there was just friends and hanging out. Everyone was working really hard. But it felt like I was in a dorm room.”

A few years later, Novati left Facebook (now Meta) to join the social media platform Nextdoor as its second iOS engineer. The 33-year-old helped build the platform from the ground up before launching her own company, Formation, in 2019.

The job placement company offers a variety of subscription packages and programs to help engineers secure jobs or increase their earning potential. For a fee (ranging from $2,500 to $20,000), job seekers can access unlimited resume reviews, negotiation coaching, mentoring, mock interviews, test prep, and more.

As Facebook’s lead on inclusivity in engineering, she said she was inspired to found Formation and help remove barriers to entry.

“At Facebook and Nextdoor, I’m probably one in 15 people who is a woman, and that ratio just doesn’t seem right.”

Today, more than 1,300 job seekers have turned to Formation for help in landing a position at the company — and, according to the company, they’ve received an average salary increase of $127,286 in the process.

But, Novati says, Formation’s success today is partly due to late-night chess lessons from her former boss, Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg’s advice on chess

It was 2 a.m. one night in 2011 when Zuckerberg was “socializing with all the interns,” including playing a few games of chess with Novati (who claims she won).

“That was the vibe of the company at the time,” Novati said, 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 money?

“Facebook is growing users at a rate that no one has ever seen before,” she added. “But it can’t make money.”

Of course, today, Facebook—or Meta—is a $1.3 trillion social media giant with Instagram and WhatsApp under its belt. But until 2012The year Facebook went public, their mobile app wasn’t actually making money.

It has no ads and putting ads in is considered quite risky.

Ultimately, the company was able to turn likes and shares into profit by turning users into products.

The “aggressive” strategy took Facebook from “no meaningful revenue” to $153 million from mobile advertising, Atlantic reported at the time.

“His answer to me was, if you can figure out how to capture people’s precious attention, you can always figure out how to turn that into money later,” Novati recalls.

“What he really focused on building was figuring out how to bring value to people,” she added. “You can always turn that value into dollars later.”

That’s why Novati has always focused on promoting how Formation brings value to engineers’ lives instead of worrying about customer lists or sign-up rates.

“We look at salary growth as the number one metric,” she explains.

“College in the United States costs, on average, about $100,000 for four years. The average compensation for people who go to college versus people who don’t go to college is about 20 miles. So people are paying $100,000 for $20,000 worth of value—we’re the invertor here, we’re helping people make an extra $127,000 and we charge $10-15,000.”

“It’s crazy that people make over $100,000 after being on a show,” she bragged.

So far, Zuckerberg’s ethics have been spot on.

According to Novati, Formation has raised more than $8.5 million in funding and is working with companies like Netflix, GoogleConvulsion, Dropbox, Adobe and her former boss Meta and many others.

“There is still more we can do to better capture the value we are creating,” Novati concludes.

But for now, she’s focused on “getting people into these top jobs and dramatically improving their career trajectory.”