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........

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