Hey there. Orianna here from Fortune.
When Martin Ott joined Facebook to lead its Northern and Central Europe operations as managing director in 2012, the company was pre-IPO, pivoting from desktop to mobile phones, and had just a few thousand employees globally.
He’s one of the few leaders who witnessed Meta’s evolution firsthand from its scrappy early days under a twentysomething Mark Zuckerberg to one of the world’s most powerful platforms.
But the biggest lesson he took away from that period wasn’t about scale or speed—or grinding all hours of the day to make it. Ott credits Zuckerberg with teaching him the opposite: to focus on making the biggest impact you can during working hours.
“One of the things I’m also passing on is, there’s only so many hours in a day,” Ott, who’s now CEO of Taxfix, the Berlin-based tax app valued at more than $1 billion, recently told me in Fortune.
“Ask yourself, what is the real one thing you could do today to really have impact, make a difference? Ask yourself, do you need to be in that meeting or not?”
It’s a refreshing stance, when so many tech leaders say the only way to make it is by always being on.
Lucy Guo, the cofounder of Scale AI and the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire, wakes up at 5:30 a.m. and ends her day at midnight. She previously told me that people who crave balance are in the wrong job.
Meanwhile, Twilio’s CEO Khozema Shipchandler previously told me that the only gap he allows himself “to not think about work is six to eight hours on Saturdays.”
And then there’s Reid Hoffman, the visionary behind LinkedIn, who, with the exception of dinner with family, admitted that he even expects his employees to constantly be working.
But Ott insists that a successful career (sans burnout) only comes if you view it as a marathon, not a sprint. “It is making sure that you’re not about 24/7 constant on, but being deliberate.”
To put his lesson from Zuckerberg into practice, the CEO has one strict rule for meetings and emails: keep them within working hours. “I don’t pull people out of their free time, which they need to recharge, because it is a marathon,” he added.
—Orianna Rosa Royle
Success Associate Editor, Fortune
Got a career tip or dilemma? Get in touch: orianna.royle@fortune.com. You can also find me on Linkedin: @oriannarosa.
