What Does Give Away Your Legos Mean?

Molly Graham's phrase give away your Legos means handing the work you built an identity around to someone else, then going on to something new. Rapid growth makes that handoff scary. You become the person who owns the blog, a part of the stack, or a product, and then a manager says to pass that work on.

The advice began as a little talk for people who worked for her at Google and Facebook. Google was already about 10,000 employees when she joined in 2007, and her department grew from 25 people to 125 in nine months. Facebook had 500 employees and 80 million users, and was smaller than MySpace, when she joined. She left five years later, when Facebook had 5,500 employees and over a billion users. Scale changes everything around you. The work you built a whole identity around has to move to someone else.