Sheyrl Sandberg will step down as Meta's chief operating officer.
Meta (former facebook) CEO Zuckerberg announced the news in a post on his Facebook account.
Sandberg joined Facebook in 2008 as COO and is the company's de facto number two, the head of almost everything non-technical, and has been responsible for the company's organizational structure design, core revenue business, key employee recruitment and other important matters. Zuckerberg called Sandberg a "friend and partner" good.
Sandberg said that he only planned to work at Facebook for five years, but he didn't expect to do it for 14 years, "I'm not entirely sure what the future holds, but I know I'll spend more time with my foundation and other philanthropic causes, especially at a time when it's so important for women." ”
As for the reason for leaving the company, neither Sandberg nor Zuckerberg have revealed. However, rumors may be due to Sandberg's help to block media coverage in 2016-19, violating company policies and being investigated internally.
Sandberg will gradually hand over Meta's work reports starting this week and officially leave the company this fall. Chief Growth Officer Javier Olivan will succeed as Meta COO.
Turn cool companies into big companies
According to Zuckerberg, in 2008, the company was still very young, with a large number of technology experts, but still had no idea how to make money, and also encountered many obstacles in the transformation of startups into large companies.
Since its inception, Facebook has grown tremendously, relying on Zuckerberg's own genius and ability to lead a technical team. Yet, as Zuckerberg says, Facebook's commercialization has been a very painful topic in the early days of the company.
Co-founder and former CFO Eduardo Saverin has insisted that the company make money from advertising from day one, but has been rejected by Zuckerberg because he deems "uncool." Safrin was ostracized by Zuckerberg and was soon replaced by the new president, Sean Parker. Under Parker's advocacy, Facebook continued to take growth as its primary goal, generally ignoring profits, and laying the foundation for the company's difficulty in making money and transforming later.
Fast forward to Christmas 2007, at a party at the home of former Yahoo executive Dan Rosensweig, Sandberg and his future "boss" Zuckerberg met for the first time and had a good conversation.
Sandberg university undergraduate, studied at Harvard University, under the tutelage of former bank chief economist, U.S. Treasury Secretary, Harvard President Larry Summers, and worked at McKinsey, the World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury Department.
Before joining Facebook, Sandberg had just started his new career in Silicon Valley, where he served as vice president of global online sales operations, and single-handedly built the search engine giant's online advertising business, in addition to AdWords, while managing the sales and operations of many of Google's consumer products at that time. Sandberg grew Google's advertising and sales team from 4 people to 4,000 people.
Sandberg's experience and skills are perfectly matched by Zuckerberg's desire for Facebook's revenue growth and company transformation. At that time, Facebook did not have a COO, and Sandberg did not have the idea of changing jobs, but after meeting and eating together many times, Zuckerberg decided to create a COO position for Sandberg.
Sandberg said that when he first joined Facebook, it was very chaotic.
The company has some advertising business, but the effect is not good, which annoys the advertiser very much, and even puts forward a lot of excessive requirements (such as completely occupying the user's home page, etc.) "When I rejected the advertiser, she even knocked on the table with her fist and walked directly out of the conference room. ”
The actual management and operation of the company is also scattered. Facebook is a company with a very strong engineer culture, and Sandberg asked an engineer to meet at 9 a.m., but it was canceled because the other party thought no one would come to work at 9 a.m.
Under Sandberg's leadership, what became Facebook, along with the company's array of other social products, was reinvented into a powerful advertising machine, making huge revenues and supporting Facebook's successful public listing. Today, more than 3 billion users use Meta's products and more than 200 million businesses have created Facebook/Instagram stores.
Initially, worried that there was a generation gap between himself and the other core members of the company, creating communication barriers, Sandberg immediately joined the company and Zuckerberg "about three chapters of the law": two artificial positions next to each other, at least once a week 1 to 1, and both sides must provide 100% honest feedback to each other. These three principles are still adhered to to this day by the two (except during the epidemic period of working from home).
"Being able to sit by Mark's side for 14 years is a lifetime honor for me. He's a real visionary and a caring team leader," Sandberg said in his own post, "even though he was 23 when we started working together and I was 38, we went through a lot of ups and downs when we ran the company together, and it was like we grew up together." ”
Without Sandberg, perhaps Facebook's fate would have been more like many of the short-lived social networking/social product companies we've heard of. It can even be said that Sandberg single-handedly ensured the long-term survival of Google and Facebook, two representative Silicon Valley "cool" companies.
While engineers and product people are responsible for maintaining the "cool" attributes of both companies, Sandberg's task is to provide for the family, making sure the company can develop a lucrative product/technology/tool that makes enough money to continue to support this group of people who do cool things.
As she says of Zuckerberg, a company needs someone like Zuckerberg who stands in the present and looks to the future — of course, the company also needs someone like herself who can strategize and control the overall situation.
According to Zuckerberg's description, in addition to personally building Facebook's advertising business, Sandberg's other most important achievement is to form a top management team and form an excellent management culture. Many of the staff she personally recruited, including Nick Clegg, president of global affairs, Jennifer Newstead, chief legal officer, and Javier Olivan, chief growth officer, are now corporate executives and report directly to Zuckerberg.
"I'm very sad not to be able to work intimately with Cheryl anymore. But more importantly, I thank her for all she did to build the Meta she is today. She did so much for me, for our community, for the world. We've all gotten better because of her comeback. Zuckerberg wrote.
Take a step forward and promote new feminism in the workplace
Sandberg published his first book, Lean In, in 2013.
The book was inspired by Sandberg's balance between "mother" and "coos of big companies" when she joined Facebook, and later in her 2010 TED talk, "Why There Are So Few Female Leaders in the Workplace."
In the book, Sandberg raises the issue of the absence of professional women at the level of political and business leaders, delves into the structural, policy, and social causes inherent in them, and provides inspiration for solutions.
Sandberg pointed out in particular in the book that 1) one of the major bottlenecks encountered by women in the workplace is male-based sexism and even normalized sexual harassment; 2) due to long-term structural and systematic discrimination, women have gradually internalized this unfair treatment and set limits on their growth and identity diversity.
"One Step Forward" quickly became popular and maintained its bestseller performance for many years. Some book reviews argue that the book's greatest value lies in clearly informing women that the biggest obstacle to their growth is not external, but internal. There have also been comments that the book's approach to asking women to "take a step forward" is too elitist, ignoring the shackles that the inherent identity of contemporary house women cannot break free.
Personal Disputes
The controversy surrounding Sandberg is that in many of the major events she encountered in the second half of her career, she did not "take a step forward" like the books she wrote, but adopted a shrinking attitude and even personally participated in some actions that were unfavorable to women in the workplace.
The 2016 U.S. presidential election was marked by the Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the "Russian intervention." Inside information made public years later showed that Sandberg did not intervene knowing that Facebook was involved in both incidents and that it would become a scandal if it went public. According to the Wall Street Journal, at a meeting, Zuckerberg was very annoyed by the Cambridge Analytica incident and angrily denounced Sandberg as "directly responsible" for the consequences of the incident. Afterwards, Sandberg was worried about whether he would be kicked out of the company as a backhand.
After top billionaire George Soros publicly criticized Facebook and shorted its stock, Sandberg directly asked Facebook's public relations department to conduct opposition research (a common smear attack in politics).
After the death of her ex-husband, Sandberg dated Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick intermittently between 2016 and 2019. An ex-girlfriend of Kotic applied to court for a restraining order, which was intended to be exposed by the British tabloid Daily Mail, when Sandberg coordinated a group of employees directly from Facebook's public relations department and Activision Blizzard to form a small team to prevent the Daily Mail from publishing articles.
This time, Sandberg not only directly violated Facebook's corporate policies, but also violated the image he has always established to support women in the workplace against sexual discrimination. The incident came to light in April this year and is most likely one of the direct causes of Sandberg's departure from the company.