When Naomi Gleit joined a start-up called Facebook just over two decades ago, she was employee number 29. Today, she is the company's longest-serving staff member apart from founder Mark Zuckerberg — and she has watched it transform into a tech giant called Meta, weathering privacy scandals, election rigging accusations and teen mental health crises along the way.
Her mother, she recalls, was "very disappointed" when 21-year-old Gleit turned down a path that could have led to Lehman Brothers. The investment bank collapsed in 2008, triggering a global financial crisis. Meta, meanwhile, is still going strong — but has experienced its own earthquakes. Gleit acknowledges there have been moments where the company "didn't meet our standards" or missed the mark.
“Naomi Gleit, Meta's longest-serving employee, defends Mark Zuckerberg's reputation as 'unfair' and discusses AI agents.”
Yet she feels the reputation of her boss, Mark Zuckerberg, as a tech bro bad guy is "unfair". Actor Jesse Eisenberg, who played Zuckerberg in the 2010 film The Social Network, told the BBC last February he did not want to think of himself as associated with him and his "problematic" actions. Succession star Jeremy Strong will soon portray a more steely, savvy Zuckerberg in the follow-up film The Social Reckoning.
"I think that the difference between what people think of Mark and how Mark actually is, is huge," Gleit says. "He's also a great husband and a great dad to three little kids, and it's been really incredible to watch just how he's become the leader that he is today."
When asked what Zuckerberg is like as a boss, there is a slightly pregnant pause before she settles on "awesome". One of her team jokes that this will come up in her appraisal.
Gleit, now head of product, told the BBC working at Meta was her "dream job" even if her family needed persuading two decades ago. She came to the UK this week from Meta's US headquarters to talk about the company's latest big disruptor: AI agents. These are advanced chatbots capable not just of answering questions but of fully carrying out tasks. Gleit says agents can be "superpowers" for small firms, so Meta is incorporating them into WhatsApp, which counts hundreds of millions of business users among the 3.5 billion people worldwide on the platform. The company plans to charge firms great and small to have AI agents — a move that could either empower small businesses or deepen reliance on big tech.