 of your biggest ambition your biggest personal goal a journey you wish you had embarked on now take a minute and think about what it would take to achieve that ambition to achieve your goal are there barriers in your way how would you have done things differently if you were not afraid most of the barriers that I faced I internal and today I want to talk about a few experiences that speak to these internal fears so when you think of Facebook today these are the pictures that come to mind but when I first started working at Facebook in 2005 I was the first female engineer you might find this really impossible to believe but we found it extremely difficult to recruit people we were a college only website and only college students used us everyone thought we were a fad a trend that would soon disappear and why wouldn't they if you look at the list we had a 21 year old CEO the company was basically run by recent college grads of college dropouts for all of us including the CEO it was a very first job and if you came to our office we were about Chinese restaurant which is probably why it smelled most times and all the walls were covered in graffiti it was like living in college we all lived in the same neighborhood on the same block we would try to work in our pajamas most days we'd work until 4 a.m. in the morning and slept through most mornings but we were working in something we truly believed in something we loved to use something we were absolutely passionate about but there was always this element of fear and an element of uncertainty it was right around this time that we built Facebook photos and was a hugely successful launch and we decided to build newsfeed so if you think back to 2005 to use Facebook you basically had to go through one person's profile and then another's it was like flipping through a telephone directory but only much prettier put the service and the people actually let me show you what Facebook looked like in 2005 so if I wanted to find out who had married whom or which if my friend had a little baby girl a little baby boy I had to hunt for all that information I would go to one person's profile and then another and then another it was an absolute pain so we were sitting around with Mark one day and we decided that we could do much better we wanted to deliver a newspaper a newspaper that told you personal stories from your high school friends your college friends cousins that lived in the next city over and from people at work we wanted to deliver 10 million personalized newspapers every single day it was absolutely amazing so we launched news feed in the dead of the night I wrote this blog post aptly titled Facebook gets a facelift and we bought bottles of champagne and started celebrating we watched these crazy log scroll by it was an absolute rush to see so many people using your product and we decided to get some sleep after weeks of no sleep and we went home feeling really happy and really proud but we had no idea what was in store for us the next morning we walk to hundreds of outraged users groups have formed in the middle of the night groups like I hate Facebook and Ruchi's the devil news reporters were camped outside our offices and people even started demonstrating outside the Facebook building but amidst all the chaos and all the noise we noticed something unusual even though people said they hated it engagement had doubled there were twice as many page views than there ever were before the very people who hated it were able to spread the message spread the word because of Facebook news feed for the first time ever their personal stories were being seen by all their friends on the Facebook homepage so if you fast forward approximately four years from then on January 25th 90,000 people agreed to turn up for a day of revolution in Egypt and they organized using Facebook never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that a product that I had built would impact the world in such a profound way so as I look back to the early days of Facebook news feed I realized that it took courage to stand by our vision if over 10% of your customer base threatens to boycott your product most other companies would have backed down or roll back the product but we didn't we straight true to our vision because we believed in it and we didn't just do it once we did it over and over again which is why Facebook was able to build so many beautiful things we were three engineers who had recently graduated and had never before built a distributed system in our lives no one told us we couldn't do it not only did we build one of the largest distributed systems ever we literally delivered 10 million personalized newspapers every single day and we didn't do this once time and time again we threw our engineers into impossible situation we had one person built search whereas down the road at Google there were hundreds building web search if we didn't know the ceiling of our potential we didn't know how many engineers it would take to solve the problem how we didn't even know if the problem could be solved but it wasn't about the number of engineers and it wasn't about experience and it wasn't about genius it was about not being afraid to learn it was about having a vision and taking that first step and going for it so this was a lesson that I was soon going to learn in my personal life as well so to give you a little bit of background about myself I studied electrical computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and like most other people I decided to do math modeling in a derivatives trading firm in a bank in New York City but when I flew to New York City I freaked out I did not want to work on Wall Street like all my other friends were doing so I packed my bags and on a whim flew out to California and soon after I joined Facebook everything sounds great so far right but here's the catch I had promised my parents that after a year of working I would come back home to get married so when that time approached I took a sabbatical from Facebook and quite literally came to India to get married it was an extremely rational decision I was 25 years old and in another year I would be on the shelf it was time to find a nice handsome intelligent rich Indian boy and settle down and I was a big fan of arranged marriages it appealed to the engineer and me they're practical and they had a higher probability of succeeding so I came to India I took pictures of myself I wrote this fabulous bio which was quite different from my resume and I went on all these dates that my parents set me up on some dates were fabulous others were absolute disasters and some were hilarious so I would get to know these guys on these dates but if I truly wanted to get to know these guys I would look them up on Facebook Facebook was a goldmine of information back in 2005 so I wanted to know about the guy I would look at who his friends were check out his pictures figure out who his interests were and that's how I would truly to get to know him so after a while about doing this I decided that this was not the life I wanted for myself I was following the silly plan in life I wanted to continue building at products at Facebook and I wanted to continue having an impact and I came back to Facebook and I built one of the products that I'm most proud of Facebook Connect and not only that that is where I found my husband and we've gotten married over new years in 2010 and it was the best day of my life I was afraid of the unknown I was afraid of not following life's milestones married at 25 26 and kids at 30 I was afraid of having to struggle financially and I was doing what was expected of me as a girl and as a woman I was making all these crazy decisions when I wasn't even in a relationship and I didn't even have children and I've seen so many women go through similar experiences where they leave that next opportunity at the table or they take a backseat at work because they're thinking of having children or they're thinking of getting married since I've decided to not leave before I have to to not make compromises before I have decisions to make to not be afraid of the unknown because that's where the most exciting opportunities lie to raise my hand and actually ask for these opportunities so this year I made the most unconventional decision of my life I quit Facebook everyone thought I was crazy my friends were saying are you insane we had over 700 million users and quite frankly we on track to being one of the most successful companies to IPO and I was working on these things that was impacting millions of users so why did I leave I left because my passion was being replaced by complacency I wasn't inspired anymore and I didn't want to live out someone else's definition of success so here I am and may of this year I started my own company code and the first thing I did was find the right set of people to work with we had an idea we saw an opportunity and we went for it but as many of you in the audience already know this it's really hard to start your own company every day every single day is like a roller coaster and the hardest battle is fighting your own psychology after working on a product that impacted 700 million users and starting from scratch and I'm afraid of failing I'm afraid of how people will perceive my work and I live in this world of self-doubt and sometimes that fear is even debilitating but then after a sleepless night I'm so excited to get into work at Cove we're building something great we're solving a problem that we're passionate about I'm working with people I deeply respect and we're trying to create something of value but for Cove to succeed I had to come to grips with the reality that I could fail and is that really that bad an outcome for me letting my fear preventing me from even trying is far worse so I've taken that crucial step and I've started on this journey and next year I hope to tell you the story of Cove