Mark Zuckerberg gave his former startup engineer a piece of advice at 2am about chess

“The energy was buzzing early on Facebook,” the tech entrepreneur recalls now wealth. “There were so many people just trying to build and deliver cool stuff.”

“Honestly, it almost felt like it was college,” she adds. “People were literally sleeping in the office… I felt like everyone I was there with was just friends hanging out. Everyone was working very hard. But it felt like the dorm room.”

A few years later, Novati left Facebook (now Meta) to join the Nextdoor platform as the second iOS engineer on staff. The 33-year-old helped build it from the ground up before founding her own firm, Formation, in 2019.

The job placement company offers various packages and subscription programs to help engineers secure their job or increase their earning potential. For a fee (between $2,500 and $20,000), job seekers can access unlimited resume reviews, negotiation coaching, mentoring, mock interviews, exam practice and more.

As Facebook’s de facto inclusion leader in the engineering department, she says she was inspired to start Formation and help break down barriers to entry.

“On Facebook and Nextdoor, I was probably one of 15 people who were women, and that ratio just didn’t feel right.”

Now, more than 1,300 job seekers have sought Formation’s help to get a seat at the table — on average, they’ve gotten a $127,286 pay raise in the process, according to the company.

But, Novati says, Formation’s success today is partly due to a chess lesson from its former boss, Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg’s advice on chess

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

“That was the vibe of the company at the time,” says Novati, adding that it was the first time he was able to ask the million-dollar question: How is the social network going to make any money?

“Facebook was growing users at a rate that no one had seen before,” she adds. “But he couldn’t make any money.”

Of course, today Facebook – or Meta – is a $1.3 trillion social media giant with Instagram and WhatsApp under its wing. However, until 2012, the year Facebook went public, its mobile app didn’t actually make money.

It contained no advertisements and the move to embed them was considered risky.

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

The “aggressive” strategy lifted Facebook from “no meaningful revenue” to $153 million in mobile ads. Atlantic reported at the time.

“His response to me was that if you can find a way to capture people’s valuable attention, you can always figure out how to turn that into money later,” Novati recalls.

“What he’s really focused on building is figuring out how to deliver value to people,” she adds. “Later, you can always convert that value to dollars.”

This is why Novati has always been extremely focused on promoting how Formation adds value to the lives of engineers instead of worrying about the client list or enrollment rates.

“We look at increasing compensation as our number one value,” she explains.

“College in the US costs on average about $100,000 for 4 years. The average compensation for passers versus non-passers is about 20km. So people are paying $100,000 for $20,000 worth – we’re the flip here, we’re helping people make $127,000 more and we’re charging $10-15,000.”

“It’s pretty crazy that people are making over $100,000 more as a result of going through a program,” she boasts.

So far, Zuckerberg’s ethos has been on the money.

According to Novati, Formation has raised more than $8.5 million in funding and is working with Netflix, Google, Twitch, Dropbox, Adobe and her old employer Meta, among others.

“There is still much more to be done to better capture the value we create,” concludes Novati.

But for now, her focus remains “on getting people into these top jobs and significantly improving their career trajectories.”

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