When I joined Instagram, I wasn’t running it. I was the head of product. I had come from running News Feed at Facebook for a number of years. And I told everybody I was going to be a sponge, and I wasn’t going to push for any change for a couple months while I ramped up and tried to better understand Instagram, the product, the employee base, and the values.
But the one place where I almost immediately broke my promise was on safety and integrity. I was pretty interested in the details, having spent the last couple of years being responsible for fake news on Facebook and a bunch of other gnarly safety problems.
I found for the most part that [Instagram was] just running our own stuff, and our team was tiny. And so I made the team pivot and essentially [integrate] the technology and work with the engineers who worked on safety across the rest of the company. I actually lost a bunch of people because of that. Not because they disagreed that it was a better way to keep people safe on Instagram over the long run, but it just wasn’t why they signed up to be on the team. So it was pretty painful for six months on that front. And I lost some credibility with some of the people.
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