Business
Ex-Meta exec says Mark Zuckerberg taught him a lesson in work-life balance: Now he has strict rules for meetings and emails at his $1 billion tax firm
When Martin Ott joined Facebook to lead its Northern and Central Europe operations as MD in 2012, the company was pre-IPO, pivoting from desktop to mobile phones, and had just a few thousand employees globally.
He’s one of the few leaders who witnessed Meta’s evolution firsthand from its scrappy early days under a twenty-something-year-old Mark Zuckerberg to one of the world’s most powerful platforms.
But the biggest lesson he took away from that period wasn’t about scale or speed—or grinding all hours of the day to make it. Ott credits Zuckerberg with teaching him the opposite: To focus on making the biggest impact you can during working hours.
“One of the things I’m also passing on is, there’s only so many hours in a day,” Ott, who’s now CEO of Taxfix, the Berlin-based tax app valued at more than $1 billion, tells Fortune.
“Ask yourself, what is the real one thing you could do today to really have impact, make a difference? Ask yourself, do you need to be in that meeting or not?”
Tech billionaires say you need to work 24/7 to make it, but Ott says you’ll just burn out
It’s a refreshing stance, when so many tech leaders say the only way to make it is by always being on.
Lucy Guo, the cofounder of Scale AI and the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire, wakes up at 5:30 a.m. and ends her day at midnight. She previously told Fortune that people who crave balance are in the wrong job.
Meanwhile, Twilio’s CEO Khozema Shipchandler previously told Fortune that the only gap he allows himself “to not think about work is six to eight hours on Saturdays.”
And then there’s Reid Hoffman, the visionary behind LinkedIn, who has said that work-life balance simply isn’t possible in the start up world—not least for founders. With the exception of dinner with family, he even admitted he expects employees to constantly be working.
“That 24/7 only works so long,” Ott says, while adding that switching off is not only important for leaders, but also those working under them. “It’s also protecting team members from getting burned out. You don’t ever want to get there.”
“It is making sure that you’re not about 24/7 constant on, but being deliberate.”
Balance and boundaries for emails and meetings
As well as focusing only on the meetings where he can make a real impact, Ott has built deliberate practices to protect both his own and his team’s boundaries.
“So the most important thing is I structure my day.” Ott gets up early most mornings at around 5:30 a.m. and reads for half an hour before working out.
“I exercise in the mornings, I go running here on the lake,” he says, adding that he tries to stay in touch with a support network and meditates for his mental health, too. “At times, I meditate every day, and then I drop it. Now I’m in the phase where I’ve dropped it and want to pick it up again.”
But even if Ott starts his day early, drafting emails before meetings begin, he’ll make sure they don’t land in his team’s inbox until they start work: “I start writing Slack messages and emails. Often, they only go out with a scheduling function at 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. So I don’t pull people out of their free time, which they need to recharge, because it is a marathon.”
“Everyone tells you, when you start a company, or you’re running a company, there will be ups and downs. There will be constant crises. There’s a lot of pressure as well,” Ott adds. “You need to make sure you see it actually as a marathon, not a sprint. And that also means you have to maintain the high performance over a long period of time. And that doesn’t work 24/7.”
