Dean’s Speaker Series From Facebook’s First Intern to Founder: Julie Zhuo’s Leadership Journey
Mar 31, 2026
Julie Zhuo, co-founder and CEO of Sundial and former VP of Product Design at Facebook, shaped features like the News Feed and like button. She recounts rising from intern to leader, building Sundial to productize analytics with AI, and advice for early-stage founders. She also explores managing humans and AI, ethical design choices, and why reflection and operational support matter for startups.
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Say Yes To Stretch Roles
- Say yes to stretch opportunities even when you feel unprepared and like an impostor.
- Julie Zhu recounts being asked at 25 to manage half her design team at Facebook with little experience and learning by doing.
From Meta Experiment Culture To Sundial
- Use data and experiments as the backbone of product truth seeking rather than opinion.
- Julie and cofounder Chandra realized Meta's strength was experiment-driven, hypothesis testing across billions of users and productized that approach into Sundial.
Love The Problem Not The First Solution
- Fall in love with the problem, not the first solution, and validate hypotheses rapidly.
- Julie advises talking to users, observing current workarounds, and running quick experiments to vet solutions like alternatives to dashboards.
