$2bn woman: how Sheryl Sandberg became one of tech’s most successful bosses | Sheryl Sandberg

Mark Zuckerberg employed Sheryl Sandberg as Fb’s chief working officer in 2008 because the social community was rising quick and attempting to draw funding. Zuckerberg, who based Fb in his Harvard dorm room, was simply 23 – Sandberg, then 38, was deemed “the grownup within the room”.

The previous gross sales govt at Google and chief of workers on the US Treasury rose to grow to be some of the influential figures in international expertise sector and certainly one of only a few girls on the high of the business. She additionally made some huge cash – after promoting most of her stake in Fb’s mum or dad firm, Meta, which additionally owns Instagram and WhatsApp, she is now value near $2bn (£1.6bn).

Sandberg, now 54, left that position a 12 months and a half in the past and on Wednesday evening she introduced she was leaving Meta’s board too. “This seems like the precise time to step away,” she wrote in a Fb submit, as Meta was “well-positioned for the longer term”.

“Thanks Sheryl for the extraordinary contributions you have got made to our firm and group through the years,” stated Zuckerberg, the world’s sixth-richest individual with an estimated $133bn private fortune. “Your dedication and steerage have been instrumental in driving our success and I’m grateful on your unwavering dedication to me and Meta through the years.”

Sandberg was certainly one of six govt officers named within the prospectus when Fb filed for an preliminary public providing in 2012. Together with her exit, solely Zuckerberg stays of the six. She had been seen as so vital to the success of the corporate that she was named alongside the founder as one of many key personnel who posed a possible danger to buyers cash in the event that they had been to go away.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg met at a Christmas social gathering on the dwelling of Dan Rosensweig, a Silicon Valley govt in 2007. “We talked for in all probability an hour by the door,” Zuckerberg instructed the New Yorker. They went on to have twice-weekly dinners at Sandberg’s home, typically till she needed to kick him out at midnight. Dave Goldberg, Sandberg’s late husband, stated it was like Sandberg and Zuckerberg had been “courting”.

“What do you consider? What do you care about? What’s the mission? It was very philosophical,” Sandberg stated of the late evening chats. Describing her position at Fb, Zuckerberg has stated she “handles issues I don’t wish to. All that stuff that in different corporations I may need to do. And she or he’s a lot better at that.”

That “stuff” included creating an promoting technique to make the corporate a whole lot of billions a 12 months in income and hiring and firing workers. She additionally dealt with political and moral points, coping with scrutiny over the Cambridge Analytica breach, the January 2021 assault on the US Capitol and the paperwork leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen that exposed among the platform’s most poisonous impacts.

The run of scandals throughout Sandberg tenure prompted activists to name for her resignation and query her legacy as a girls’s rights advocate. Shaunna Thomas, the co-founder of ladies’s rights group UltraViolet, has stated that beneath Sandberg’s watch, Meta platforms turned “a rightwing playground the place misogyny, racism, disinformation” proliferated.

“Sheryl Sandberg could fancy herself a feminist, however her choices at Meta made social media platforms much less protected for ladies, individuals of color, and the American electoral system,” Thomas stated. “Sandberg had the ability to take motion for 14 years, but persistently selected to not.”

Nevertheless, Debra Williamson, an analyst at Insider Intelligence who has been following the corporate since its founding, stated: “There have been loads of controversies surrounding Meta, however from a purely enterprise standpoint, what she constructed at Fb is fairly highly effective, and can go down within the historical past books.”

Sandberg testified in entrance of Congress in 2018 to reply for Fb’s missteps and allegations of voter manipulation within the 2016 election, and once more in 2021 to deflect blame from the corporate for its position within the Capitol riots – appearing as a softer and extra personable foil to Zuckerberg.

In addition to successfully operating one of many world’s largest expertise corporations, she has additionally discovered time to write down two books. 2013’s Lean In: Girls, Work, and the Will to Lead turned a global bestseller and established Sandberg as a frontrunner in feminine empowerment.

“What we realised is that with a purpose to actually get to equality, equality in management in every single place, from our parliaments to our statehouses to our properties, we’re going to should go youthful,” she stated final 12 months. “Who desires to say to a woman seven years earlier than she enters the workforce, ‘Sooner or later you’re going to be in a gathering and a few man goes to speak over you, voice one thing you simply stated and get credit score on your concepts.’”

Her second ebook, Possibility B, is “about going through adversity, constructing resilience, and discovering pleasure” and focuses on her husband’s demise. “I used to be in ‘the void’,” she wrote, “an unlimited vacancy that fills your coronary heart and lungs and restricts your capability to suppose and even breathe.”

Sandberg will now spend extra time working with a basis she set as much as deal with girls’s points within the office, and “construct a extra equal and resilient world”. Nevertheless, there’s hypothesis that the dedicated Democrat could also be planning an entry into politics. Lately she has spoken out in opposition to abortion bans, given $3m to the American Civil Liberties Union and campaigned in opposition to sexual violence within the Israel-Gaza struggle.