The fastest way to learn is to run two competing bets | Jay Parikh (EVP CoreAI, Microsoft)

In the latest episode of Executive Function, Brett sits down with Jay Parikh, Executive Vice President of CoreAI at Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft, Jay spent over a decade as Facebook's global head of engineering, scaling the company from a few hundred engineers to billions of users, then ran the cybersecurity company Lacework as CEO through its acquisition by Fortinet. In this conversation, he breaks down the five ingredients of great engineering leadership, discusses why he'd rather run two competing bets in parallel than forecast a winner, and explains why company culture remains more important than ever for teams to get right. In today's episode, we discuss: The five ingredients that separate excellent engineering leadership from the rest How to protect your team from large shifts in public perception The mindset shift organizations need to maintain speed at scale How every layer of the organization needs to stay connected to the customer Why Jay runs "brain trusts" of senior ICs with zero managers in the room References Akamai: https://www.akamai.com/ AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ George Conrades: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgeconrades/ Mark Zuckerberg: https://x.com/finkd Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/ Paul Sagan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-sagan-59654a1/ Tom Leighton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tleighton/ Where to find Jay LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayparikh/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/jayparikh Where to find Brett LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson Where to find First Round Capital Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 00:36 How leadership changes through exponential growth 02:21 The five ingredients that define excellent engineering leadership 07:51 What actually drives culture at a company as it scales 12:05 The physics behind why everything slows down at scale 18:57 The fastest team of Jay's career, and why size mattered 22:44 Why every team should think like an FDE 26:20 Managing a team through wild swings in public perception 29:07 What's different about leading through the steepest S-curve moments 33:58 Why onboarding well means going slow to go fast 37:41 Is AI actually new, or is history just repeating? 41:35 What actually counts as a "big bet" worth taking 45:01 The concrete big bets that reshaped Facebook's entire technology stack 47:35 Why vertical integration keeps being the right call as companies scale 51:46 How being a startup CEO reshaped Jay as a leader 1:01:26 Why Jay overruled Zuckerberg's instinct to skip efficiency