A 'fancy coffee' offer to a friend helped her get a temp job at Facebook — where she worked up to VP

• Ex-Meta VP of Product Ami Vora explained how she landed a temp job at Facebook.
• Vora offered to buy fancy coffee for a Facebook employee if they introduced her to the office.

Before Ami Vora became a Meta VP, she worked as a temporary employee in Facebook's PR department and slept on couches.

Vora spoke about how she got her first job at Facebook on an episode of "Lenny's Podcast" published Sunday. The ex-Meta exec ended up becoming VP of product at Facebook, and VP of product and design at WhatsApp.

But when she first started, she just wanted a seat at the table — and that meant doing a bit of creative networking.

"I knew that what I wanted to do was like be involved in all the wild stuff happening in Silicon Valley in the mid 2000's," Vora said.

Vora said she quit her job and traveled around the world before moving to New York and living an "extremely blissful lifestyle." Vora worked at Microsoft for three years as a product manager before leaving, according to her LinkedIn.

While her time unemployed was some of the best of her life, she said eventually she needed a job — and she wanted it to be at Facebook.

Vora said that in 2007, people considered Facebook as more important than their car. She described it as a "magical product" and said it was the way many people connected to the world.

Vora wrote in a post on Lean In that none of the jobs on the Facebook career page made sense for her at the time. While she said she looked at other companies and sent some applications, she "couldn't get Facebook's mission and energy" out of her mind.

So she didn't give up. The ex-Meta executive said she knew some people at Facebook and decided to fly out to its Palo Alto headquarters. Vora managed to work out an arrangement with one of the employees she knew: she would buy them "fancy coffee" at a downtown Palo Alto café if they took her around the office and introduced her to people.

"So everyone I met I said, 'Hey I'm Ami I really want to work here. I'll do whatever you need,'" Vora said in the podcast.

The ex-Meta executive admitted in her post on Lean In that she was nervous once she arrived and "paced around outside the Facebook building." She spent the day trying to initiate a conversation with anyone who would speak with her, she wrote in the post.

Vora said she only received one call from the head of PR after the day she spent at Facebook and they gave her several reasons why they couldn't hire her, including her lack of experience and current headcount. But they happened to need someone to review press releases so they offered her a temporary job in the department.

"This wasn't exactly what I'd been hoping for," Vora wrote in her post. "But I knew that I was passionate about the work and the company, so once again I flew from New York to San Francisco."

Vora said she took the offer and moved out to California and slept on couches. She said in her post on Lean In that she was offered a full time job a few months later.

"Eventually, they hired me full time and I didn't look back," Vora said in the interview.

Vora would later become a director at Instagram, VP of product at Facebook, and VP of product and design at Whatsapp, according to her LinkedIn. She left in 2022 after spending over 15 years at the company and became the chief product officer at Faire, an online wholesale marketplace.