Two famous maxims attributed to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg perfectly sum up the culture of continual innovation at the world’s largest online social network: “Move fast and break things,” and “Done is better than perfect.” Lest anyone forget them, these mantras are plastered around the walls of the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters (alongside liberal amounts of graffiti, employees’ own posters, and conference room names with themes that include ’80s pop bands and “mashups of video games and condiments” ― typical example: Guitartar Hero).

One of Zuckerberg’s trusted lieutenants charged with ensuring this highly dynamic and innovative philosophy continues to figure strongly within Facebook’s working culture is Mike Schroepfer, the company’s 36-year-old vice president of engineering, whose stellar Silicon Valley résumé includes pioneering work as head of engineering at application provisioning start-up CenterRun, as a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems, and as the head of development of Mozilla’s hugely successful Firefox web browser.

To give an idea of how Facebook’s cultural imperative works in practice at one of the world’s most agile and innovative companies, Schroepfer explains that when new recruits join the 600-strong team of engineers, “we expect them to make a change to the live production website within their first week of employment. And that, I think, sets the tone for them: we expect them to do some interesting things and move fast.”

Lightning innovation

Another example he throws out is Facebook’s infamous all-night “Hackathons,” in which employees gather to work up new ideas for the website, either individually or in teams, fueled by pizza and boundless enthusiasm. “There’s only one rule,” explains Schroepfer. “You can’t work on whatever you work on during your day job. The goal is to try something new, to explore an idea and see where you can get.”

On the Friday following the all-nighter, the “hackers” who feel they have achieved something worthwhile give a three-minute “lightning demo” to their peers and management to show what they’ve created. “And you’d be shocked at how good some of these demos are,” says Schroepfer. Innovative functions such as Facebook Chat, friend tagging and video, among others, all had their first iterations created at Hackathons, he says.

The main aim, he explains, is to create an “escape velocity” for each idea. “If you think about any project you’ve ever been on, the hardest part is getting started ― going from ‘I need to do this thing’ to ‘I have accomplished the first three or four tasks and now I can see what’s left on the horizon,’” he says. “a paper always begins this way, for example. The first draft is the hardest part. And so the Hackathon really is about how you create a concentrated, intense environment where you can get over that first hurdle.”

Of course, not every project or line of code produced at Hackathons ― or, indeed, during the engineers’ regular day jobs ― is perfect. But that’s OK with Schroepfer, Zuckerberg and the rest of the management team. Everyone at Facebook has permission to fail. “We try really hard to make sure that well intentioned mistakes are OK,” says Schroepfer. “We’ve had summer interns temporarily take down the website because they made a mistake (and we have a lot more tests and protections now so that doesn’t happen again) but at the end of the day it didn’t matter all that much as they were trying to do the right thing."

He contrasts Facebook’s attitude to failure with that in other businesses. “In many companies you build a procedure where you yell at the person for a while. You say, ‘You screwed something up.’ But in our case it’s like: ‘What were we trying to do and why?’”

This is done through an “incident review” session every Friday. “We get the whole team together and we talk through anything that went wrong in the week and ask: How can we do this better? Because that’s what’s important. We’re all going to make mistakes, so let’s build up a system and an environment that helps us learn from it.”

Entrepreneurial thinking

As head of engineering, Schroepfer sees his role as essentially very simple: hire the best engineers available and maintain a culture that allows them to be as inventive as possible. “It’s my job to find the right people and then make sure that we have the environment set up so that they can be creative and expressive. It’s all about empowerment. You hire these really smart people and you get them to a place where they can spend their time building things ― and it doesn’t take weeks to get their new idea out.”

His hiring policy is indicative of Facebook’s Silicon Valley location: he goes for entrepreneurial thinkers, to ensure the maintenance of the company’s dynamic “anything is possible” start-up culture. “Many members of our management team are former entrepreneurs, and many of the engineers are current or former entrepreneurs, or want to be entrepreneurs. If an engineer leaves us and they go to start a company, I don’t think of that as a failure. I’m actually happy, because it’s like we hired the right person in the first place. We very rarely have an engineer leave us just to join some other company.”

This entrepreneurial spirit is, of course, another driver of Facebook’s phenomenal track record of innovation in everything it touches, from software to online business models to data center design. But, Schroepfer believes, the motivation is not just about the money. “Being an entrepreneur is about creation and about design. You have an idea, you have an ability to create this thing, and you’re not going to care what everyone else is doing, you’re going to go for it. And that can be true on your own, or it can be true in an organization where you drive the creation of something that is used by half a billion people on the planet.”

Leveraging massive scale

And as Facebook has soared past that half-billion active users mark, now having more than 750 million (who share, on average, four billion pieces of content every day), scaling up what is effectively the world’s biggest cloud app has been a challenge that has required some major changes since Schroepfer joined the company in 2008. “The way people wrote software here two or three years ago is very different than the way they write it now because there is a much better foundation of technologies,” he explains. “Everything is replicated across our data centers and I don’t have to worry about where it’s stored or how it’s backed up or any of these details ― that’s just taken care of by the platform.”

The aim of this, he affirms, is to allow engineers at all levels to “just plug in and do stuff.” And the giant scale of the Facebook operation has been an important factor in removing roadblocks to innovation ― in contrast to what frequently happens in other businesses as they grow from agile start-up to unwieldy corporate giant.

“We’ve built entire software stacks designed to make it fast and efficient for us to store and serve photos because we get so many of them ― nearly a billion photos were uploaded over New Year, for example,” says Schroepfer.

“And then we used that same system to store attachments when we were rolling out our Messages system. So if you want to send a big attachment like a PowerPoint presentation, for example ― which is a classic painpoint in enterprise email ― you can use our messaging system because it’s got a very high megabyte limit and it’s very efficient for us to store it. And all that was built on the same technology we had previously built to handle photos and videos. But if we’d had to build that system from scratch, it would have taken us a year or two longer to implement.”

In short, such technological agility is allowing the company’s engineers to move faster and break more things than ever. And as Facebook prepares to take on such new challenges as location-based services, video chat (thanks to a new partnership with Skype) and “social” commerce ― combined with a probable stock market launch early in 2012 ― its status as a constantly game-changing Internet giant looks assured.

Photography: Eric Millette

Further reading

Facebook’s Mike Schroepfer discusses the social network’s massive influence on the enterprise.