Mark Zuckerberg once gave a Facebook engineer startup advice at 2 a.m. while ‘hanging out with all the interns’—she quit and raised millions after

When Sophie Novati landed her first job as an engineering intern at Facebook in 2011, the social media giant was firmly in its “move fast and break things” era. “The energy was buzzing early Facebook,” the now-tech entrepreneur recalls to Fortune. “There were so many people just trying to build and ship cool stuff.” “It honestly almost felt like it was college,” she adds. “People were literally sleeping at the office… It felt like everyone that I was there with were just all buddies and hanging out. Everyone was working very hard. But it felt like the dorm room.” A few years later, Novati left Facebook (now Meta) to join the platform Nextdoor as its second iOS engineer hire. The millennial helped build it from the ground up before founding her own firm, Formation, in 2019. The job placement company offers various subscription packages and programs to help engineers secure work or increase their earning potential. For a fee, job seekers can get access to resume reviews, negotiation coaching, mentoring, mock interviews, exam drills and more. Within just five years, Formation had raised over $8.5 million in funding and was working with the likes of Netflix, Google, Twitch, Dropbox, Adobe to place thousands of workers into roles. And, Novati says, Formation’s success today is partly due to a late-night chess lesson from her former boss, Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg’s late-night advice over chess It was 2 a.m. one night in 2011 when Zuckerberg was “hanging out with all the interns,” including playing a couple of chess matches with Novati (who claims she won). “That was the vibe of the company at the time,” Novati says, adding it was the first time she was able to ask him the million-dollar question: How’s the social network going to make any money? “Facebook was growing users at a pace that no one’s seen before,” she adds. “But it couldn’t make any money.” Of course, today, Facebook—or Meta—is a $1.55 trillion social media giant with Instagram and W