Bruce Wang is a buddy from the best neighborhood in San Francisco (Cole Valley – don’t @ me!). When I started Lightbulb Moments not too long ago, my mission was to surface the key moments that transformed careers and ultimately lives while also staying connected and growing my network in return.

Bruce’s journey has led him to be a Senior Director at Netflix in charge of Platform Systems. In other words, his team supports the API that you hit from any device and brings back the content (images / videos / games) you want to enjoy in the moment. Additionally, Bruce also runs the data telemetry team which tracks what a user does which is then given to the personalization team that provides the best recommendations for you. Finally, Bruce also oversees the lifecycle team which connects the old technology to the new technology. In other words, Bruce runs the infrastructure side of things so if Netflix is running too slow for you or zapping up all the bandwidth of a country (true story, keep reading) just let me know and I can track him down for you!

What led Bruce to Netflix was a series of challenging startups, one we highlight that had him bootstrap a company without getting paid and essentially putting himself on a edge to build, pivot and ultimately sell a business that taught him skills that he carries with him to this day. Bruce’s story represents the opportunity in the struggle and how a little belief in yourself can go a long way in working for your dream company.

Lightbulb Moment – The Grind

Bruce studied computer engineering at Michigan and was a classically trained software engineer, he moved to San Francisco and worked as an engineer for 4 years until getting the urge to start his own business with a few colleagues.

“Everyone’s doing the startup thing so why not? But I had to learn everything. We knew how to code but we had no idea on the business side of things, how to raise money and how to do sales.”

Bruce discovered a valuable lesson early, which is to think about the value in what you’re creating and who you’re creating that value for instead of just slinging code.

Bruce’s company, Twistage, settled into their offering which was video hosting after pivoting from a Content Delivery Network (CDN) play. The original idea was to take BitTorrent and business on top of their protocol but that soon changed.

“We stumbled on video because we couldn’t get people to buy our software. So we created a video site to show off our technology and soon after there was a wave of companies like YouTube and Vimeo that were coming out so we took that technology, threw away our CDN thing and then started selling a YouTube like experience but to companies that wanted more control.”

This was in 2004, which was right before Youtube dominated the B2C market and well before the TikTok movement that would take the video world by storm a decade later.

“Youtube was dominating the space early. They won the ‘Race to Scale’ and were one of the first movers in the space. So our second pivot was to focus on B2B not B2C and sell the software we built to companies wanting to build their own video communities.”

Twistage started focusing on companies that wanted to create their own user generated content and control the community as opposed to relying on YouTube.

“A good example was the company Kidz Bop. They were trying to start a social networking site utilizing user generated videos from kids. They were one of our early customers and they got kids uploading videos and it was pretty fun to watch grow.”

While Twistage ended up becoming a profitable startup over its 9 years of existence, Bruce and team soon got the itch to move to something else. They found an investment banker who helped Twistage get acquired.

“This experience taught me so much about the business side of software. Really understanding what people like and what they don’t like, what drives purchasing decisions and what drives people away. These are aspects that a lot of developers don’t get to see but it really helped me become a better engineer.”

The spirit of diving head on into something completely unknown can seem naive to some that haven’t done it, but there’s something special about jumping into a situation where you’re uncertain of what the outcome would be and figuring it out as you go. You’re essentially jumping off a cliff and building your wings on the way down. This type of mentality is contagious and what attracts like-minded entrepreneurs to San Francisco and why it continues to be a hot bed for innovation. Bruce’s team adapted a multi-language model of development, a continuous shipping of features that became popular later when The Lean Startup was published and ultimately, Bruce provided leadership through the uncertain times of the financial crisis of 2008 and many other hurdles along the way. While it wasn’t the most lucrative time for money, Bruce developed a perspective that would pay for itself multiple times over in the years ahead.

Lightbulb Moment – Finding Stability

Connected to Moment #1, Bruce met his wife, May, during this time and she immediately became influential for Bruce.

“I was not looking for love at the time. I was a nerd and meeting someone wasn’t my first priority. But during this very unstable time in terms of money and career, she brought stability to my life and someone who I was able to grow up together with.”

In the dating world before online dating, Bruce, took the indirect route to get May’s email address and soon things took off for both of them. This led to nearly 20 years together, two daughters and many memories together.

May would challenge Bruce very early on to be his best, read and debate interesting topics that would change his way of thinking and ultimately, help shape him to be a better person.

Lightbulb Moment – Dream Job

“I’ve done two video startups and one was a moderate success and the other a failure. Netflix was always one of the companies I dreamed about joining but I never thought about applying because I feared I’d be rejected.”

In 2019, Bruce gave a talk about APIs and Netflix reached out about a leadership position. He went through the first initial stages but seriously considered declining to continue so he didn’t get his hopes up. It was May that gave Bruce the confidence in himself to continue the pursuit and engage further.

“I revered this company so much I got intimidated by them! But then I realized that it’s a company, it has it’s own problems like any other company and it’s own challenges. From the outside these companies seem to have everything all figured out but that’s just not the case. Netflix turned out to be the most startup-like place I’ve seen!”

Bruce joined Netflix in January of 2020 and was given the reigns to build everything his own way: his team, his processes and control his own domain. His prior experience in doing it all at early started to show its value and the skill of thinking like an entrepreneur immediately shined through. Three months later the world went into lockdown and everyone was in front of their TVs signing into Netflix.

“This first year was a challenge. Combine ramping up for a job that has all the reputation around Keeper Tests, having to assimilate into this high performance culture while working from home at a company that was built for in person and having two kids remote learning. It was hard!”

Bruce led the API team which all online traffic went through to get to the content and delivery of the videos to certain devices.

“The good news is that we were ready for it. Netflix invented the concept of “Chaos Engineering” which replicated events of an unplanned event like shutting down all of our East Coast data centers over a holiday to see if Netflix could survive and handle the traffic. We build one of the most sophisticated Content Delivery Networks (CDN) in the world that could handle unrealistic traffic volumes at the time.”

Netflix was built for scale so much that at one point during the pandemic, Reed Hastings, got a call from a country in EU to downscale their videos because they were interfering with the countries internet.

After a challenging first year, Bruce started feeling more comfortable at Netflix.

“Netflix culture isn’t just about driving people into the ground to be excellent. They also support you tremendously and understand people’s challenges at home if you have kids but also if you’re all by yourself in a pandemic and need emotional support. There were a lot of discussions and training about giving people the grace needed in this unprecedented time. People don’t often realize that you don’t just need to be pushed to be successful, but you need to be supported as well. You can’t be successful if you’re not comfortable and not feeling supported.”

Soon after Netflix experienced record growth, it also started to lose subscribers for the first time in their history. The streaming market all of a sudden became explosively competitive.

“There’s never a perfect time. You’re never in harmony with it all, you have to continuously push yourself and your company forward and most of the times those two are not in sync but that’s part of the journey. This time taught us to diversify and build multiple products. Now we have games and a new ad business so it’s gotten more complicated technically but you have new use cases and divisions springing up. It’s fun.”

Bruce’s moments show how resiliency are keys to navigate the uncertain waters ahead. While times are different for Bruce now, there’s still an element of navigating the future with unknown certainty of what to expect that he learned early at Twistage that shows up in many different ways now and the days ahead. We can all find confidence in the uncertainty ahead based on the Moments that got us to this point.