Beyond Instagram with Emily White

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

Cool. Well, Emily, thank you so much for a great episode.

Emily White (0:02)

Oh, it's so fun. I don't usually do this kind of thing.

Ben Gilbert (0:06)

No, you were telling us before recording, Anthos is pretty private and you're generally pretty private, so I think it's a privilege to have you on.

Emily White (0:15)

Yeah, no, it's fun. It's fun. I actually, honestly, had heard so much great things about you guys, and you mentioned that you were doing this, and I was like, I'd be happy to do it. But I use any public speaking time normally, just really aimed at an objective.

And it also helps maintain a sense of privacy and independence.

Ben Gilbert (0:36)

Right, right.

David Rosenthal (0:37)

What was it like working for Sheryl for so many years?

Emily White (0:41)

Sheryl has been an amazing force in my life. So she and I started working together when I think I was like 22, and she is nine years older than me, so she was 31 I had joined Google about a year before on AdWords, and I think at that point, we were like three people in a corner office that no one was paying attention to, meanwhile, scrambling because 9-11 had happened and we had started. I mean, we're making up everything on the fly. What ads do we allow? What do we not allow? When she joined sort of at the very beginning of the AOL syndication discussion, which sounds so funny now, but AOL was much bigger than Google at the time, and getting our AdWords ads onto AOL was a really big deal.

She had just come off the treasury and she had spent some time at Google acting as external CFO at that point, but then when these conversations started picking up, she joined as our team leader. She was incredible. I don't have enough good things to say about her. She and I shared a cube in an office for a really long time. She was sort of the most impactful mentor that I've had.

She was willing to take bets on people, and she believed in meritocracy, and she believed in hands-on training. She gave me the gift of being able to sit next to her and talk about whatever was rolling through our desks, whether I was putting together a PowerPoint presentation on something or something big was happening at the company that wasn't normally something that would land in my world, but she wanted to get me involved, help broaden my horizons.

Every day, something pretty incredible would happen and that I would get exposure to because she was an incredibly generous person who believed in raising the next generation of leaders.

And she did that for me. She did that for the group that sort of assembled under her. She reached out and ended up doing that at Google more broadly and had developed an exceptional reputation by the time she left of being a phenomenal leader and people manager and someone who could both inspire, but also operationalize like nobody else. I mean, our team was incredibly tight, very effective and always optimizing for Google, which is really fun, too. I think the best employees are ones who can put the company over themselves and sometimes even suboptimize for themselves. And she demonstrated that value to us. So I have such fond memories of those times learning from her, both as like a mentor and a friend.

And I was devastated when she went to Facebook. I mean, absolutely devastated. And it was bizarrely. It was actually a time that Google was having a little bit of a rough spot. We had... So it was like 2007, 2008 We had obviously the financial crisis. We had laid off some employees. And I had decided not to go join Facebook at that time because I felt so much part of the company DNA. And I felt like I had to see help the company sort of get through this time. And my chapter wasn't done. And she went to Facebook and she was, you know, able to take that momentum and those skills and that network and really like operationalize and help Mark make Facebook a real company. Certainly, it's been like very, I think, challenging last several months for her.

I also think, honestly, to be that successful, you have to... I mean, you can't... My dad used to say, you're either God or you're God damn.

People are going to love you and they're going to hate you. And it's not... You can't always control it. And doesn't mean that, you know, you're totally imperfect. Doesn't mean you're totally perfect. Everyone is human and in order to get to that level, you have to have some keen wit and some sharp elbows sometimes and have strong opinions. You know what? She's always been in it. She's always worked her tail off and has built a community of people around her that she has sort of unwavering support for. And I feel so lucky to be part of that tribe.