I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

It's definitely possible! Musica.ly (which was acquired by Byte Dance and somewhat morphed into TikTok) kind of came out of nowhere while I was at Facebook and grew to tens of millions of users. That said, the large companies have too much nuanced knowledge of how to grow and sustain products and it's incredibly hard for a student without any of that knowledge to reproduce this kind of growth effect. Wordle is a recent phenomenon, but the founder worked at Reddit and had some insight into these things. I think the next big thing is going to be not "social" but something that spawns out of Web3/Metaverse/NFTs and that's why so much attention is in those areas. It's not going to be what we see today, but something new. These ideas are challenging some of the fundamental ways humans interact, so there is room for something big.