With regards to team management, are the challenges similar to what you faced when you ran Teehan+Lax versus what you’re facing now at Facebook?

I think it’s different. What came in the top of the funnel at Teehan+Lax, at least in terms of the talent, were usually from the same walk of life. They came from similar companies to Teehan+Lax. There wasn’t and still isn’t the type of atmosphere in Toronto that there is down here in the Bay Area. You get wildly different types of designers here and that is a big difference. The designers that would come to Teehan+Lax typically had been working at other ad or design agencies previously. As different as I like to think that Teehan+Lax was, to a certain extent, our working style was not unfamiliar to people who were coming in the door there.

Earlier on in your career, what was the turning point where you knew you wanted to start an agency rather than go work for another company?

It happened twice actually. When I first started, I was working for an Internet company that was doing web hosting, domain purchasing and web design. Web design was the fad. It was the mid-'90s so it was the super early days. What happened was I worked there for a while and then the company went bankrupt. There were great people working there and I found myself without a job. I decided to take a stab at doing my own thing, which I did. That was in the late 90’s. I did that for about two years and then one of our clients, a big digital agency called Modem Media, came along and I ended up taking a job with them. I enjoyed that. Making money again was nice, working on larger clients, and not having to worry about some of the things you worry about when you own your own business. Focusing on the work as a young designer was a refreshing change and something I think I needed.

That was great, but then it happened again, the dot-com bubble burst and I didn’t have a job anymore. I had been working with Jon [Lax] at Modem Media and we decided to start our thing. We found ourselves in a similar place where we looked around and didn’t see anything that interested us job wise, so we started our own company instead. We just fell into it. We figured we’d do it for six months or a year or however long the initial contracts we had would last and then we’d go get what we call “real jobs”. It wasn’t until we signed leases for photocopiers with 3-year commitments that we realized we were in it for the long-haul. It was one of the those silly things. Obviously we were subletting a space and we had bought equipment and we even had one staff member too, so it wasn’t like we weren’t committed. Even still, it felt like we could get out without too much damage. It wasn’t until we rented this Xerox copier that made it feel like something long term. The lease was on a 3-year term and we had to sign it. It was like $10,000 or $12,000, it wasn’t an insane amount of money, but back then it was this real commitment because getting out of that lease would be a big pain in the ass. This is one of the small things. Obviously, hiring employees was a big deal as well.