So it turns out this is breakdown #100.

Only realised this when I was updating the website and had one of those moments where 100 existential thoughts hit you at once.

Thought #1: Wild how much your life can change when you give something a solid crack 100x in a row.

Thought #2: Also wild that I’m probably only 10-20% of the way to 10,000 hours of writing these, considering its how I spend half my working week for the past 2 years.

Thought #3: Also wild that it only took 100 breakdowns to grow to 100,000 readers.

…

Thought #100: Starting this newsletter was best decision I’ve ever made.

Thank you so much for being here.

(Sending extra love to the 1322 of you who were here on launch day and are still reading!)

Here’s to the next 100.

— Tom

Get one hour back - every single day.

Imagine opening your inbox and seeing everything neatly organised, replies already written, and fresh meeting notes waiting for you.

With Drafts 2.0, Fyxer now writes smart replies using context from your threads, past conversations, and meetings.

The result? Drafts so good that you only need to quickly review and hit send.

AI has unlocked new velocity for startups - and new visibility, too.

The faster you grow, the sooner you’ll need to prove you’re secure enough to play with enterprise customers.

The tl;dr? You need compliance to sign deals.

Join Vanta for a session on how to make compliance work at your pace, without slowing momentum, stalling deals, or putting revenue at risk.

We’ll cover essential steps you can take now to prepare for your first audit in 2026 - and enter the new year ready to earn customer trust (and deals).

_{Thank you for supporting our sponsors, who keep this newsletter free.}

Move fast and break things

Chess Move

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

“Move fast and break things”

Facebook’s motto.

Originally a spiky stance - now a Silicon Valley cliche.

If you ask any venture-backed startup about their ‘values’ or ‘culture’, they’ll unconvincingly regurgitate something about speed.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s the correct input.

But too often folks miss the most important part of the motto.

What’s always fascinated me about “Move fast and break things” is the admission of the trade-off.

Speed means imperfection.

“Move fast” creates an unspoken fear.

“Move fast and break things” acknowledges and tolerates the consequences.

A while back I came across this epic blog post from early Facebook engineer Aditya Agarwal exposing a handful of specific practices that propagated their culture of breakneck product velocity.

I’m a sucker for original startup content that is so practical it becomes a manual, and I always wanted to go deeper on this topic.

Today’s piece represents a few week’s worth of scouring the internet for early facebook lore, packaged into a playbook for how to actually create a fast-moving, ownership-driven company.

A note before we jump in: The story of Facebook’s early culture is a story of extremes. Extreme speed, extreme empowerment, and extreme outcomes.

It’s not the right playbook for everyone. It has both positive and negative implications.

But I think you’ll know if this is right for you.

Breakdown

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

1.  Day 1 pacesetting

From the moment you logged in, the clock started.

Facebook had an internal guideline called “The 45 Minute Rule” that said: new employees should start working on something productive within their first 45 minutes.

45 minutes in = Start something productive

End of Day 1 = Dev environment set up.

End of Day 2 = Shipped a change to live users.

To scale this philosophy from a hacker house to 1000’s of developers, Facebook created an infamous onboarding program called ‘Bootcamp’.

For 6 weeks, every engineer (from fresh college grads to incoming directors who wouldn’t even be writing code themselves):

• Rotated across projects and teams of their choosing

• Fixed real bugs

• Shipped small features

• Got granted access to the entirety of Facebook’s codebase, with the trust that they could dive in and contribute anywhere.

A senior Bootcamp mentor would review their commits before they went live, but the message was clear: you (a) own your impact, and (b) are empowered to have impact immediately.

Instead of assigning you to a team at hiring, Facebook let you choose your home at the end of Bootcamp. This forced you to explore the surface area of the product, meet people across the org, and self-assess where you can have the highest impact.

Early engineer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth (now CTO), who started the Bootcamp, explained “When I started Bootcamp… I didn’t teach the culture as it was. I taught the culture as I wished it were.” 

The idealised hacker culture Boz taught “became the culture. It was self-fulfilling.”

2. You are what you celebrate

Facebook hard-wired speed into its cultural source code by rewarding it consistently: post-mortems, performance reviews, and hackathons were all designed to celebrate taking initiative.

The company fostered a “blameless post-mortem” culture where even serious screw-ups were treated matter-of-factly rather than with finger-pointing, which “encouraged engineers to learn from their mistakes and to take risks”.

As long as you owned the recovery and fix, breaking something big could even boost your reputation internally as someone willing to take action. Instead of condemnation, you got a nod of respect for pushing the envelope.

They had an internal saying that “Code wins arguments” - ideas were best proven by building rather than debating.

Performance reviews focused on impact, not intellectual jockeying.

Doing things to make everyone faster was explicitly rewarded. Prolific shippers progressed the fastest.

The first Facebook Hackathon took place in 2007 when engineer Pedram Keyani emailed colleagues asking if anyone wanted to stay late and hack; dozens showed up, and they coded until dawn. “The next day, Mark [Zuckerberg] approached [Keyani] saying how awesome it was,” and from then on they organised a hackathon every 6–8 weeks.

If you attended a Hackathon, you weren’t allowed to “work on the same thing that your day job is,” forcing people to step out of their usual comfort zones and experiment. And if it was your first time at a hackathon, participation was mandatory – no spectators allowed.

Many of Facebook’s signature features began as hackathon projects:

• Facebook Messenger was created in 2008 by a couple of engineers after an all-night hackathon and launched to users the next day.

• Same story with the “Like” button.

• In late 2010, a team of two engineers, one intern, and a designer built a prototype of Timeline in a single hackathon - a small team continued to push it forward, and today its one of the most popular (and profitable) products of all time.

If the idea was good, the demo would speak for itself. The ultimate manifestation of “Code wins arguments.”

3. Don’t focus on the break, focus on the fix

Moving fast was a requirement

and moving fast meant breaking things

but broken things need fixing fast

so moving fast meant fixing fast too

Facebook was one of several pioneers who brought the concept of “Chaos Engineering” to mainstream development practices. First crystalised at Netflix in 2011, Chaos Engineering is the discipline of intentionally breaking systems to prove they’re resilient.

In the following years, Facebook was one of the first tech companies to run aggressive failure injection and large-scale disaster drills to test their own ability to bounce back from unexpected outages.

Facebook also popularised the concept of ‘feature flags’ - separating deploy from release to safely ship, test, and progressively roll out features to selected users.

In 2014, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had “changed our internal motto from:

‘Move fast and break things’ → ‘Move fast with stable infrastructure.’”

Part tongue-in-cheek, part acknowledgement that building systems with billions of users required a different engineering philosophy to building college student profiles.

Rabbit Hole

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

The legendary 2009 engineering blog post that created Facebook’s new hire Bootcamp ↗

[3 minute read]

Come for the nostalgia of peak Facebook. Stay for the shocking ratio: 1.2 million users per engineer.

Written by Boz when the company headcount was crossing ‘Dunbar's number’ (~150, the maximum number of stable social relationships a human can maintain), this is the blueprint that defined how Facebook thought about:

• Throwing new hires into production on day one

• Letting engineers choose their own teams

• Preventing organisational silos before they form

Noah Kagan, ‘What I Learned Working For Mark Zuckerberg’ ↗

[5 minute read]

Noah Kagan was employee number #30 at Facebook. He got fired 9 months later, and went on to build AppSumo, a software marketplace doing $100m per year.

Here are 10 things he learned from his time at early Facebook.

“We shipped several updates to the site every day. In comparison, companies like Microsoft would take months to write out product details, discuss them in a lot of meetings, and finally build them.”

The Little Red Book ↗

[10 minute read]

First distributed when the company reached 1 billion users in late 2012, the Little Red Book contains Facebook’s distilled philosophy.

This is the full 148-page scan that defined a generation of startups figuring out how to scale startup culture.

Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways we can help you:

1. StrategyHub

Our flagship course on how to use free internet data to make better strategic decisions. Contains 5 years of strategy expertise, proven methods, and actionable tactics to accelerate your career with modern-day strategy skills.

2. Partnerships

We have a growing audience of 100,000+ strategists from top companies like Google, Meta, Atlassian, Stripe, and Netflix. Apply to feature your business in front of Strategy Breakdowns readers.

3. Tech stack

One of the most common questions we get asked is: “What tools do you use to run Strategy Breakdowns?” So, we’ve open-sourced our tech stack to give you an inside-look at exactly what tools we’re using to power each corner of this operation.