Later this month will mark ten years since I spoke at Facebook.
In October 2016, Facebook flew me out to their headquarters in Menlo Park to close out their Design Lecture Series for the year. I gave a talk called “Black Design Matters,” about how I started Revision Path, about diversity in design, and about some of the ways a company like Facebook could help.
I also brought my recording equipment with me, and the day before the lecture, I recorded a series of interviews with some of Facebook’s Black designers on campus.
At the time, this felt huge. Part of that was because of where both Revision Path and I were in 2016. The podcast was a little over three years old, and it was growing fast. I acquired another website, started a Slack community and began hosting AMAs, launched a job board, began publishing long-form editorial work with a small crew of interns and freelance writers, launched a Patreon, and debuted a line of merch. All of these were different experiments of me scrambling to build a sustainable platform dedicated to showcasing Black designers on a shoestring budget, and the Facebook had now become a major supporter of that work.
But that trip meant so much to me was because of what happened the year before.
In 2015, I did a solo talk at SXSW called “Where Are the Black Designers?” Since SXSW didn’t let me know I was accepted until January 2015, pretty much all the hotels were already booked, and I had to now come up with at least $2,000 to get to the event in Austin, TX. My studio had just lost our biggest client, so I was damn near broke and definitely didn’t have that kinda money laying around for a last minute conference acceptance when I was still trying to make payroll. I started a GoFundMe to raise the funds, and AIGA even chipped in to cover half of the cost. The campaign was a success, and I booked the cheapest plane ticket I could afford because the roach-infested Airbnb I stayed in was almost $500 a night (and the neighbors knew it was an Airbnb and kept leaving threatening notes during my stay).
Even after all that effort, the actual session was sparsely attended. I remember maybe 15 or 20 people being in a room that could hold a couple hundred. Some people wandered in to charge their phones. Some were asleep. It would have been very easy to look at that room and think nobody cared.
But one of the people who heard me speak worked at Facebook, a product design manager named Tory Hargro.
Tory, along with an invitation to Facebook’s house at SXSW that year, eventually led to Facebook financially supporting Revision Path. And now a year and a half later, I was standing inside MPK 20 giving a lecture about Black design.
Side note: When I first got on campus, Tory gave me a walking tour around part of MPK 20. At one point, we walked into the building where Instagram was based. There were a few cubicles just inside the lobby—I think they called them “stages”— and Tory asked for my phone so he could take some pictures of me in one of the stages to post on Instagram.
Me: “I’m not on Instagram.”
* record scratch *
Shortly thereafter, Revision Path joined Instagram. 😂
At the time, Facebook felt like validation. Ten years later, my feelings about Facebook (now Meta) are much more complicated, and some of that started right after that design lecture series.
The following year, Revision Path partnered with Facebook Design on an event in Atlanta. I thought of it as our first live podcast event, but Facebook saw it differently. For them, it was a recruiting event.
I wanted to invite some friends, some former guests, and people from the local design community so they could see the podcast in action…but Facebook controlled the guest list. People had to submit resumes and Facebook decided who they wanted in the room based on whether those attendees might be potential hires. The event had Revision Path's name on it, but it wasn't a Revision Path event. It was a Facebook event.
I never did another one with them.
And then, of course, Facebook itself changed (or perhaps our understanding of Facebook changed). The Cambridge Analytica data scandal happened. The public conversation around the company became very different. Questions about privacy, misinformation, political influence, moderation, and the enormous power of social platforms became impossible to separate from the company itself.
That also meant I had to think differently about what it meant for Revision Path to have accepted Facebook's money during that time.
I've been asked about that directly over the years. I don't think the useful response is to pretend I knew in 2016 everything we would learn later. I also don't think it's useful to pretend that their support didn't matter, because it absolutely did.
That's what makes remembering this complicated.
I mean, I’m grateful for what Facebook's support made possible for Revision Path, but I’m not turning that gratitude into an endorsement of everything Facebook became or everything the company did. That would be stupid.
However, I can also recognize that there was a difference between Facebook supporting Revision Path and Facebook using Revision Path to accomplish Facebook's own goals around DEI. I didn't understand that distinction as clearly in 2016 as I would later.
Over the years, the relationship between Revision Path and Facebook continued to break down until we fully parted ways about a year into me working at Glitch. Now there wasn’t an official reason for the split, but I’d imagine supporting a podcast produced by a company whose CEO was regularly talking shit about Mark Zuckerberg helped keep that relationship healthy.
But I don't want to erase what Facebook’s support meant to me at that time.
I remember the day I got the invite to speak at Facebook and record some podcast episodes. I remember getting on that plane because it was my first time flying first class. I remember that the hotel I stayed in had a robot that delivered my room service. I remember the black car Facebook sent to drive me an hour over to Menlo Park, walking around this enormous campus and thinking about how far Revision Path had come.
And yeah, I remember that nearly empty room at SXSW. That is probably the part that stays with me the most ten years later.
You don’t always know which room matters. You can prepare, raise the funds, travel across the country, stand in front of hundreds of empty chairs, give the talk, and then wonder whether any of that shit made a difference. In my case, I was lucky Tory was the one person in that room who was listening.
I couldn’t have known at SXSW where my talk would lead. I couldn’t have known where that relationship with Facebook would eventually lead either.
Ten years later, I think I’m okay with holding both of those thoughts at once.
Revision Path has ended. It ran for 550 episodes over 11 years and earned a permanent place in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, but in the end, I didn’t have the financial support to keep it going. Facebook’s money helped keep the show alive for a while. It was never what made the show matter.
I’m grateful that someone was listening. And I’m grateful that, eventually, I learned I didn’t need Facebook to prove that the work mattered.