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Ben Horowitz tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg firing his executive team for the second time

January 05, 2026

“The very first conversation I had with Zuck was I think in 2007,” a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz begins. “At that time, Facebook traffic had flattened and the executive staff that he had was trying to run a coup to force him to sell it to Yahoo. So they were leaking all this stuff to Valleywag and Valleywag was calling for Zuck to be fired and that whole stupidness.”

A young Mark Zuckerberg asked Ben a question:

“If I fired my executive team for the second time, would the board be nervous?”

Ben replied:

“Well, that’s not even the question Mark because if you’re asking that question you know you have to do it. You can’t succeed with them so whether or not you can succeed without them is still at least a question mark. But let’s talk about why they’re doing this. Why has traffic been flat?”

Mark explained that after doubling the size of the engineering team from 400 engineers to 800, a lot of the new engineers were directly querying the database rather than using the API layer which broke the system and was resulting in performance issues (e.g. it taking 10 seconds to log into the app).

“Well how do you train these guys?” Ben asked.

“Train these guys?” Mark replied confused.

Ben explained:

“Zuck, when you’re 10 people there’s no knowledge in the company. Everyone who comes on just jumps in and starts working. But when you get to 800 people, you have a lot of knowledge that’s in your company about how the product works and how you check in code. You actually have to teach people that.”

Mark would go on to create Facebook’s world-class 2-month bootcamp that every engineer who joins the company has to go through.

“He’s a phenomenal student of management,” Ben remarks. “And the [leaders] who don’t truly understand people don’t turn out to be good CEOs. They don’t get to that level. You can make fun of Larry Page or Elon or Zuck, but they are very smart about people. All three of them.”