‘Dude if I can build Facebook...’ this advice by Mark Zuckerberg changed Indian engineer’s life

Aditya Agarwal joined Facebook as a new engineer during the initial days of the company. Within a week of joining Facebook , Mark Zuckerberg’s advice and motivation changed Aditya Agarwal’s life.

According to him, Zuckerberg’s advice defined 30 seconds of his life. Agarwal met Meta founder through an acquaintance in 2005. He joined Facebook as an early engineer and during his initial days he was given a project.

The project was on building Facebook’s search engine. Zuckerberg asked him to finish this task all alone without a team. Agarwal shared this incident during the episode ‘Mark Zuckerberg on Llama, AI, & Minus One.’ The search engine project was essential for the social media platform as it would help users to find and connect with people.

Zuckerberg insisted that he finish the project despite Agarwal’s suggestions of replacing him with any developer from Google or Yahoo. On this the Meta founder said, “Dude if I can build Facebook you can build a damn search engine.”

Agarwal developed the search engine crediting his success to Meta founder’s words of motivation. Eventually, Agarwal became Facebook’s first Director of Product Engineering.

The Youtube video also explores various topics such as “Llama, AI, -1 to 0, and MMA” to how Facebook succeeded and Meta’s current phase, also features Aditya Agarwal and his wife, Ruchi Sanghvi. His wife is the former CMU colleague of Agarwal.

“This was the best event we've ever hosted at SPC, and that's a very high bar. It was a privilege to host our old boss and good friend,” Aditya Agarwal wrote on his social media handle.

“And I'll admit, hearing that one of the greatest founders of our time shares the @southpkcommons -1 to 0 philosophy made me a bit emotional,” he said.

Aditya Agarwal left Facebook in 2010 and took on various roles in various tech companies. He is currently a partner at South Park Commons, a San Francisco and New York City-based collective. The collective has around 500 members and alumni who have started companies or joined leading organisations like Google Brain, OpenAI, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.