In the latest episode of Executive Function, Brett sits down with Jay Parikh, Executive Vice President of CoreAI at Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft, Jay spent over a decade as Facebook's global head of engineering, scaling the company from a few hundred engineers to billions of users, then ran the cybersecurity company Lacework as CEO through its acquisition by Fortinet. In this conversation, he breaks down the five ingredients of great engineering leadership, discusses why he'd rather run two competing bets in parallel than forecast a winner, and explains why company culture remains more important than ever for teams to get right.
In today's episode, we discuss:
The five ingredients that separate excellent engineering leadership from the rest
How to protect your team from large shifts in public perception
The mindset shift organizations need to maintain speed at scale
How every layer of the organization needs to stay connected to the customer
Why Jay runs "brain trusts" of senior ICs with zero managers in the room
References
Akamai: https://www.akamai.com/
AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/
George Conrades: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgeconrades/
Mark Zuckerberg: https://x.com/finkd
Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/
Paul Sagan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-sagan-59654a1/
Tom Leighton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tleighton/
Where to find Jay
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayparikh/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/jayparikh
Where to find Brett
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson
Where to find First Round Capital
Website: https://firstround.com/
First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
00:36 How leadership changes through exponential growth
02:21 The five ingredients that define excellent engineering leadership
07:51 What actually drives culture at a company as it scales
12:05 The physics behind why everything slows down at scale
18:57 The fastest team of Jay's career, and why size mattered
22:44 Why every team should think like an FDE
26:20 Managing a team through wild swings in public perception
29:07 What's different about leading through the steepest S-curve moments
33:58 Why onboarding well means going slow to go fast
37:41 Is AI actually new, or is history just repeating?
41:35 What actually counts as a "big bet" worth taking
45:01 The concrete big bets that reshaped Facebook's entire technology stack
47:35 Why vertical integration keeps being the right call as companies scale
51:46 How being a startup CEO reshaped Jay as a leader
1:01:26 Why Jay overruled Zuckerberg's instinct to skip efficiency
