Interview With Facebook's Joe Hewitt, iPhone God
The Facebook iPhone application was a one-man job. Joe Hewitt joined Facebook when the company he co-founded with Blake Ross, Parakey, was acquired last month. He quickly got to work on the company's iPhone app, which was released just a month after he joined the company.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two threads converge here. In June, coverage of Facebook's app feeding frenzy showed the platform opening up and developers piling in; by mid-August Facebook had its own iPhone experience live. What this interview adds is that the company's most visible mobile front-end was built and shipped by one engineer.
That engineer, Joe Hewitt, arrived only weeks earlier through Facebook's acquisition of Parakey, the company he co-founded with Firefox's Blake Ross. An acquisition made last month has already produced a shipped product — a fast turnaround that speaks to both Hewitt's productivity and what Facebook bought Parakey for.
First-order effects
- Facebook gets a polished, widely covered iPhone client at essentially zero incremental headcount, with Hewitt owning the codebase end-to-end rather than spreading it across a team.
Second-order effects
- Other major consumer web properties now have a benchmark to match: if a single recent hire can ship an iPhone experience in a month, their own slow or absent iPhone efforts become conspicuous to users and press alike.
Third-order effects
- The acqui-hire pattern — buying small teams primarily for talent rather than product — gets a proof point with measurable output inside weeks, encouraging more consumer web companies to acquire individuals ahead of the mobile wave rather than build internally.
The trend: Consumer web companies are racing to plant flagships on Apple's new device, and small talent-driven acquisitions are proving the fastest way to get there.