Host: I have a feeling WhatsApp was not exactly a standard startup.

Jean Lee: So, we didn't have code reviews, but the only time I got my code reviewed was the first time I made a commit.

Host: And you said that Jan said no a lot.

Jean Lee: 99% of the time he would say no. All the cool features were missing in my mind, but that was by design because we really wanted to prioritize again the quality of a grandma in a remote town being able to use our app at any given time.

Host: Scrum agile with a capital A TDD. Did you use any of these at WhatsApp?

Jean Lee: I'm surprised to hear they thought they were shipping faster because of it. We didn't use any of it.

Host: So, you were break even.

Jean Lee: Yeah, that $1 was enough to pay for the server cost, the salaries, and the SMS code every year.

Host: Gene Lee was number 19 at WhatsApp. She joined when hardly anyone in the US had heard of it, saw it grow to 450 million users, and was sitting at her desk with noise cancelling headphones on when news broke that Facebook bought them for $19 billion. In today's conversation, we discuss how WhatsApp built natively eight different platforms with a team of 30 engineers. Why the founders said no to almost every feature request for years. How WhatsApp's team operated with no code reviews, no stand-ups, no sprint planning, and many more. If you want to understand how a tiny team with almost no process built one of the most successful products in history and what today's AI native startups can still learn from them, this episode is for you. Gan, welcome to the podcast. It is amazing to to meet you. You have quite the story early engineer at at WhatsApp. But before we get into WhatsApp, how did you get into tech?

Jean Lee: I've always been a small town girl. My dad was an OG hipster. He was really into brewing beer. So, he decided to get a PhD in beer.

Host: In beer?

Jean Lee: Yeah. In brewing. In brewing. Yeah. So, I moved to San Francisco in 1999 and that's when I got really exposed to all the different tech roles. Like, growing up, I didn't really even think about engineering as a job. Um, of course I use computers and I thought it was really cool to be able to use Yahoo and search things online, but beyond that, uh, my first exposure to Silicon Valley and tech came from living here. I got to meet a lot of people who work in tech. I dabbled around with coding when I was a teenager, but not too seriously. But I did think it was really cool that you can just write a few lines and it will just do things for you over and over and over. It was almost magical. I I love the feeling of creating something that that actually runs um and debugging something and fixing it and it runs again. That that was really joyous and I didn't really get into like super into coding until I went to college. But one of the reasons why I decided I wanted to go into coding was I talked to different people. So I thought maybe I want to be a designer, maybe I want to be an architect, maybe I want to be an engineer. And I talked to different adults who work in the in the industry. After talking to a lot of adults, I realized people who are in tech were the only ones who were really excited about their jobs. So in Silicon Valley, when you ask people like tell me about your work, people are often very hopeful for the future and very proud of what they're building. Compared to many other adults that I spoke with, they were not so encouraging. They're like, "Oh, don't become an architect. Don't become a designer." So that that was one of the influences um for me early on. I studied computer science at USC. Um, one of my first internships, actual like coding internships was at a small company. It was a threeperson startup started by one of the new grads from USC. And you'll probably uh understand it was a video sharing website, but it was not like YouTube, but there were so many versions of YouTube back in the days before what YouTube was dominant, right? So you probably remember dozens of these like video sharing platforms everywhere and one of the issues of having so many options is that you have to be visiting 12 different sites to search for new things. So we had a website where you can aggregate all the different types of videos from different sources which is actually kind of funny because lately I've been seeing a lot of AI platforms where you can just switch between the models very similar to that.

Host: Yeah. How did you get into IBM?

Jean Lee: I really loved working for a small um threeperson startup because I got to work with engineers um we had engineers overseas in China so I got to work with them. I got to also do a little bit of coding myself, but I was coming up with the design docs like the the features list and I was calling a lot of the shots and I could also directly see the impact of my code immediately on the website and I thought that type of ownership and speed and the visibility was really exciting that I get to see the impact of my work immediately. But one thing I wish I had was a little bit more mentorship because we were all new grads and in college um I felt like we were just shooting things to see which sticks. Um and I thought maybe for my first job out of school I would like a little bit more mentorship and training and I started looking at more bigger companies more traditional companies and that's how I ended up at at the time it was literally the biggest company in the US.

Host: At what point did you decide that you wanted to leave or try out something else or did you even decide or something just came up?

Jean Lee: One of the reasons why I wanted to go to a more traditional company with more structure was so that I could get more mentorship and training and IBM was excellent for that. There were so many veterans. They had so much experience and they were willing to share with me because they were 20 30 years ahead of me, right? But one thing I really missed was the small team environment. It was just so big. There was a lot of meetings, a lot of process and I I missed seeing the impact of my work. I couldn't quite understand how my work was contributing to the overall company. So then I decided to take some time off and explore and have some fun.

Host: Yeah. And what what happened from there? How did you eventually get to WhatsApp? That was years later right?

Jean Lee: Yeah. So I took some time off to try out different like classes. I took a lot of classes. I did a little bit of nowadays you call it the gig work but I did all kinds of work. So whatever I needed to you know make a living um while taking all these classes and exploring and really finding out what like what kind of environment or what kind of career do I envision for myself and after I took those time off I decided that I want to go back to Silicon Valley but this time I do want to work for a startup but maybe with people who are a little bit more experienced maybe not new grads and maybe not a threeperson startup but a little bit more stable startup where I can possibly get both the the autonomy and the the impact of the work but also a little bit more mentoring because I was still in my 20s.

Host: Okay. So, how did you find this startup which of course happened to be WhatsApp in 2012? What was the interview like?

Jean Lee: WhatsApp was still early. They started in 2009 and they did still have a lot of users but they're mostly in Europe and in India. Um they were not very known in America. I don't think we did any leak code until way way later until when we started hiring interns and new grads. Most of the interviews were talking about I I guess you can call it system design interviews. We would talk about how would you design this, how would you design that, like tell me about your past experience building this product and I recall talking to Yan about different messaging apps and being Korean, I told him a lot about Cacao Talk and how it worked. Yeah, that was my interview.

Host: Just like that, you you got an offer. I guess it's startup, right? Things move fast. How did you decide that you're going to join this relatively unknown startup? In fact, their glass door rating at the time I remember had a one star. It had one review, one star, someone saying, "Oh, I don't like working here."

Jean Lee: Oh, that's so interesting. I don't remember looking up. I must have looked up glass door, but like I was really lucky because I actually had another offer from a different company, but they were a little bit sore. One company was taking weeks to get Gene an offer letter. Another founder closed the deal in person the very next day. It was not a startup and they said, "Oh, hey, like you have my verbal offer. I am going to give you a written offer soon." But then it took them a while and meanwhile um Yan called me few days later after the interview and he said come into the office right like today or tomorrow. And then he asked me what would it take for you to take the offer right now. Love it. What did you say? I mean I wasn't looking for that much. I mean I was in my 20s. So I just told them oh like few things I would like to have then sure I'll take the offer and I saw signed the offer the following day. And I did actually hear back from the other company on the first day I started WhatsApp. They called me and I was like oh I just started a new company.

Host: So you were engineer or you were employee number 19 at WhatsApp right? And you told me something really interesting that you were the youngest person even though you were like by this time at your mid mid20s or or so.

Jean Lee: I recall there were about four of us under the age of 30. So I was not the young guest, but there were two people who were new grads and then myself and one other person who were in our late 20s. But the other like 15 or so people above 30 at a startup which is kind of unheard. Jana and Brian they they started this at like mid30s or or so after they spent like more than a decade working at Yahoo and other places. The first 10 or so engineers a lot of them came from Yahoo. Um some came from Europe. Yan used to do that. you would just look up who is the expert in this field and reach out to people and we had a lot of contractors in Europe.

Host: What was a tech stack like at WhatsApp? we're talking about eight platforms and a handful of engineers.

Jean Lee: We were actually pretty unique. I I don't think any startup ever really does this, but we had seven different stacks. iPhone and Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone, Nokia S40, S60, Kyios, and the web client, so it's actually eight. iOS is Objective C, Android was Java, Nokia was Symbian C++. And the back end was Erlang.

Host: Erlang can you tell us about Erlang because this that is one of the most exotic tech sack I've heard.

Jean Lee: There's a really great talk by one of our engineers, Rig Reed, why they started working with Erling and it was the perfect choice. And he describes it as um trying to maintain the engine of an airplane while it's flying 24/7 because if you imagine like WhatsApp is so international, we can't take a break, right? We have to continuously keep running and it's always busy. Someone's it's 8:00 a.m. somewhere in the world, right? and Erling was a really robust um language that was really good at concurrencies.

Host: The conventional wisdom has been like look if you want to support all those platforms don't be silly do crossplatform. Why did WhatsApp not do this?

Jean Lee: So, Yan used to always say, "I want a grandma in a remote countryside to be able to use our app." So, what does that mean? They may not have the newest iPhone, the shiniest phone with the biggest memory, right? In the countryside where a grandma is using it, you need the app to be lightweight. You need it to work on any kind of device, and you need the app to be simple.

Host: And then inside WhatsApp how did you get things done? what engineering processes people might have followed?

Jean Lee: WhatsApp was like the ultimate lean company. By the time we were acquired, we only had 20some engineers, so under 30 people serving 450 million monthly active users. So, we didn't have code reviews. After the first time, we didn't really have a formal code review. But I mean, people read the git commits because there's only 30 engineers. You can read other people's code and they would discuss it on the WhatsApp groups.

Host: So, everyone was trusted, all engineers that they just pushed their code to they merged it into production, pushed it to production without a manager review.

Jean Lee: Exactly. We were really big on dog fooding. So, every time we were about to do a release, we would all internally use it ourselves. Yan, his title when he messaged me see it said chief QA officer. He would try to break things as much as he can. He did say no almost as I recall 99% of the time he would say no. We launched groups shortly after I joined. We didn't have voice calls, video calls. We didn't have any of the no stories. All the cool features were missing in my mind, but that was by design because we really wanted to prioritize again the quality of a grandma in a remote town being able to use our app at any given time.

Host: It sounds like you did the opposite. It's it's like polish it and then do when you have full conviction.

Jean Lee: Yeah, we did use it internally with our families. and we used it for a very long time before we launched it with the public.

Host: 2014, Facebook announces their biggest ever acquisition, WhatsApp, for $19 billion. What do you remember of this time?

Jean Lee: I remember I was coding. I had this Spotify playlist called Let Me Think. I saw Nirage who was the head of business at the time. He's like like stop whatever you're working on right now. Come into the meeting room. And I was like what is happening? Like we never have meetings. "Turn off your phones." And I thought, "Oh my gosh, what's happening? Did we go out of business?" It can't be that we sold the company because Yan used to say he will never sell the company. He used to actually say uh selling your company is like selling your baby. And then they made the announcement WhatsApp has been acquired by Facebook for $19 billion and I realized oh that was them trying to hide their excitement. And then Zuckerberg walked in.

Host: What changed to the day-to-day once you officially became part of Facebook?

Jean Lee: The changes were very slow in the beginning. We didn't even move into the meta or at the time it was called Facebook headquarters until at least a couple years after the acquisition. So, being one of the five youngest people, I got I got leveled as a junior engineer. L3. I had to like climb climb all over again. I eventually became an engineering manager.

Host: As a manager, you were part of calibration meetings, right? What are those meetings like?

Jean Lee: The people number one biggest mistake people make is they think your manager is the one giving you a promotion. I think of myself as the lawyer representing my clients. I'm making a case for them. The people who post the most often, who have the most visibility, usually get the easiest consensus because it's just like all very natural. Whereas if you have been actively posting and telling me what type of work you have done and what type of impact that has made then I already know oh okay like when your manager tells me you're ready then I agree.

Host: If you had to give career advice to a new grad in this kind of AI native world, what would you suggest they focus on?

Jean Lee: I say foundations, you know, tools come and go, languages come and go, but foundations don't go anywhere. By having lean teams, you get several benefits. You get to remove a lot of the distractions and process and through that you get two really incredible benefits which is ownership and the the really like the freedom to build things.