Approaching Four Years: Reflections on the Meta Journey
Three and a half years building VPS at Meta - from inception to platform. Considering what's next.
July 2024 will mark four years at Meta. VPS is now a platform serving millions. Time for honest reflection.
What We Built
VPS in 2023:
- Integrated in Quest 3 and Quest Pro
- 5,000+ mapped locations globally
- Millions of daily queries
- 100+ active developer partners
- Team of 75
From concept to critical infrastructure in four years.
Career Evolution
2020: Individual contributor, proving the concept 2021: First-line manager, shipping MVP 2022: Senior manager, scaling team and system 2023: Director-level scope, strategy and partnerships
The role changed more than the technology.
What I'm Proud Of
The system works: Real users rely on VPS daily for real experiences.
The team I built: Strong leaders, strong culture, sustainable pace.
Privacy-first architecture: Proved you can build spatial AI without surveillance.
Synthetic data impact: Extended Magic Leap learnings to Meta scale.
What Remains Unfinished
Indoor: Still not cracked. The holy grail remains elusive.
Universal coverage: Most places still unmapped. Long tail is very long.
True real-time: Latency good but not invisible. More work needed.
Economic viability: Mapping costs still too high for long-term sustainability.
The Learning Curve
Honest assessment: my learning rate has slowed.
Years 1-2: Steep learning - new domain, new company, new scale Years 3-4: Incremental learning - optimization, polish, politics
I'm better at what I do, but doing similar things.
Thinking About What's Next
Questions I'm asking:
- Is there more I can uniquely contribute here?
- What would I regret not trying?
- Where could my experience have maximum impact?
Not decided, but thinking seriously.
The AI Moment
We're in an inflection point for AI:
- LLMs changing everything
- Multi-agent systems emerging
- AI-native products possible
My perception/spatial expertise is valuable, but the frontier is moving. Want to be at the frontier, not optimizing behind it.
Gratitude
Regardless of what's next:
- Meta gave me resources to build at scale
- The team taught me leadership
- The problems stretched me technically
Four years well spent, whatever comes next.