She Planned One Year at Facebook to Learn Management. She Stayed Seven.
Lin Qiao had the tech, the product, and the co-founders list in 2015, but waited because she did not yet know how to lead people.
20VC with Harry Stebbings · The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10X & Usage Will Explode 100X | Lin QiaoBy 2015, Lin Qiao, the founder and chief executive of Fireworks AI, an artificial intelligence infrastructure company, was ready to start a company. She knew the technology, she knew what product to build, she had a business proposal, and she had a list of people she wanted to start a company with.
Then she paused because she did not feel ready to lead the people needed to build a company.
She decided to go to a place where she could learn the most about people before she tried to lead them herself. That place, she decided, was Facebook, then a rising star in Silicon Valley. She secretly planned to spend a year or two learning and then leave to start her own business. She stayed for seven years, and she started Fireworks when she was 48.
Qiao had come to the United States in 2000 as a first-generation immigrant and earned a doctorate in distributed systems, the part of computer science concerned with software spread across many computers, with a focus on databases. She had worked in a research lab covering nearly all sides of handling data, then moved to LinkedIn to build systems and products meant to drive real impact.
By 2015, that technical training felt complete. The missing part was human. “It’s not just about product. It’s not just about tech. It’s actually about people,” she said.
So the plan to use Facebook as a brief school for management stretched. One or two years became seven. When she finally left to found her own technology business, something she said she had always wanted, she did so at 48, an age she said she had not thought deeply about.
She had waited to start until she felt ready to build with people, not just with technology.
Questions people ask
Why did she pick Facebook specifically to learn about people?
In the mid-2010s, Facebook was growing extremely fast and was widely seen as a training ground for management, with structured onboarding, performance reviews, and team leadership practices. For an engineer who wanted to watch strong people managers up close, it offered scale, pace, and plenty of examples to learn from.
Is 48 unusually late to start a successful tech company?
It is later than the stereotype, but not later than the data. Studies of successful startups in the United States repeatedly find the average founder age at founding is in the 40s, and enterprise and infrastructure companies especially reward deep technical and management experience.
What is Fireworks AI?
Fireworks AI is an AI infrastructure company that helps businesses run and customize AI models efficiently. Instead of building one giant general model, it focuses on tuning smaller, open models on a company’s own private data, and optimizing them to run quickly and cheaply.