Julie Zhuo

Julie Zhuo was born in Shanghai, China, and moved to Texas in the United States at age 5. She gravitated toward the visual arts and began building websites in the early days of the web.⁠[1]

She earned a B.S. and an M.S. in computer science from Stanford University, where she was a Mayfield Fellow.⁠[2]

In May 2006, at age 22 and fresh from Stanford University, Zhuo joined Facebook as the company’s first intern and was hired full-time a month later. She later described herself as roughly employee number 100. At the time, Facebook served mainly college and high school students and had about 8 million users.⁠[1][3][4][2]

In October 2008, Zhuo was promoted to manager of product design, co-managing Facebook’s product design team.⁠[3][1]

In 2012, Zhuo became director of product design. By 2014 she led a design group of about 35 people responsible for the Facebook app’s News Feed and tools for sharing with close contacts.⁠[3][1][2]

In February 2016, Zhuo became Facebook’s vice president of product design, overseeing design and research for the Facebook app. During her tenure, Facebook grew from about 8 million users to more than 2 billion.⁠[3][5]

On March 19, 2019, Portfolio published Zhuo’s management guide The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You, aimed at new managers. The book became a Wall Street Journal bestseller and was named one of Amazon’s Best Business and Leadership Books of 2019.⁠[6][7]

In February 2020, Zhuo announced she was leaving Facebook after nearly 14 years, the only company she had ever worked for. With her former colleague Chandra Narayanan she co-founded Inspirit, an advisory firm helping fast-scaling technology companies build and scale products through data and design. She explained that the name was chosen for its meaning “to embolden; to enliven.”⁠[3][8][5]

On November 16, 2020, Kadiant, a provider of applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapy for people with autism spectrum disorder, announced that Zhuo had joined its board of directors. Zhuo said she looked forward to supporting the company as it scaled its care to millions of people who need it.⁠[7]

On July 8, 2025, Sundial, the AI data analytics platform co-founded by Zhuo and Narayanan, announced it had raised a total of US$23 million, including a US$16 million Series A led by DJ Patil, a partner at GPV and the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, with participation from Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry, Sunflower Capital, Slow Ventures and others. Sundial combines dashboards, notebooks and data transformation pipelines in one platform and pairs AI with analytical frameworks to support company decisions; Zhuo said the company aimed to make analytics accessible to everyone from product and engineering to go-to-market and finance.⁠[9]

On October 23, 2026, a Meta spokesperson confirmed that Meta had acquired Sundial. Zhuo and Narayanan joined Meta along with other members of the team, and the Sundial platform was folded into the newly formed Data Analytics Tooling & Agents unit (DATA) led by Meta Chief Data Officer Alex Schultz. Sundial will stop serving external customers once the deal closes.⁠[10]

Zhuo has long written about design, technology and leadership, and runs The Looking Glass, a Substack newsletter for product builders covering product and design, leadership and teams, and personal growth, with tens of thousands of subscribers.⁠[4][11]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.juliezhuo.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

X: Public account: https://x.com/joulee (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

Sundial: Official website: https://www.sundial.so/ (opens in a new window)⁠[9][11]

Meta: Official website: https://about.meta.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[10]