Sheryl Sandberg has officially stepped down as Meta's COO. Here's how she got her start in tech and became No. 2 at one of the world's most influential companies.
Sheryl Sandberg has stepped down as Meta's chief operating officer after 14 years at the company.
During her tenure, Sandberg pioneered her own brand of feminism and weathered high-profile scandals.
Here's how Sandberg got her start in tech and became Meta's second-in-command.
Sheryl Sandberg was born on August 28, 1969, in Washington, D.C. Her father was an ophthalmologist and her mother taught French at a local college. She has two younger siblings: a brother named David and a sister named Michelle.
Source: The New Yorker
The family moved to North Miami Beach when Sheryl was 2 years old. Her parents helped create the South Florida Conference on Soviet Jewry and turned their home into a safe haven for Soviet Jews looking to escape anti-Semitism.
Source: The New Yorker
Sandberg always shone in school, and was in the National Honor Society. "In public schools, for a girl to be smart was not good for your social life," her mother, Adele, told The New Yorker. She also taught aerobics while in high school.
Source: The New Yorker, Bloomberg
She went on to attend Harvard University, where both of her siblings also went. She majored in economics, and started an organization at college called Women in Economics and Government. She graduated with her undergraduate degree in 1991.
Source: Miami Herald, CNN Money
At college, Sandberg researched with future US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who would serve as an important mentor for Sandberg in the beginning phases of her career. Summers served as her thesis advisor in college, then hired her to work for him at the World Bank after she graduated.
Source: The New Yorker, CNN Money
Sandberg stayed at the World Bank for a year, during which she traveled to India to help curb the spread of leprosy. She then returned to Harvard to get an MBA, and worked for a year at the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
Sandberg said her parents instilled in her that the time to find a man was in college, because "the good ones go young." At age 24, Sandberg married a businessman named Brian Kraff, but they got divorced after only a year. Sandberg told Cosmopolitan she was nervous her divorce would prevent her from ever meeting someone else.
Source: Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker
Not long after Sandberg finished up her MBA in 1995, her mentor, Summers, joined President Bill Clinton's administration. Sandberg followed Summers to D.C. to work for him, and eventually became his chief of staff when he was named Treasury secretary in 1999.
Source: CNN Money
But after the Democrats lost the 2000 election, Sandberg decided to move to Silicon Valley to join the booming tech industry. At the time, Google was a small company with less than 300 people that wasn't making a profit. However, she found the company's mission attractive: "to make the world's information freely available."
Source: The New Yorker, CNN Money
When courting her, Eric Schmidt — Google's CEO at the time — reportedly called her every week, and told her, "Don't be an idiot ... This is a rocket ship. Get on it." Sandberg joined Google as the business-unit general manager in 2001 and took over the company's ad program, which had four people working on it at the time.
Source: The New Yorker
In 2004, Sandberg married her longtime best friend Dave Goldberg, whom she had met a decade before and dated for five years. They had a son in 2005, and a daughter born two years later. "The most important career choice you'll make is who you marry," Sandberg said at Insider's Ignition conference in 2011. Goldberg became the CEO of SurveyMonkey in 2009.
Source: Guardian, Business Insider
Sandberg and her family have lived in a 9,200-square-foot mansion in Menlo Park since 2013. The home has six bedrooms, a wine room, gym, movie theater, basketball court, and a giant waterfall. It's only a 20-minute drive from Meta's headquarters.
Source: Insider
Google grew immensely during Sandberg's time there, and she was instrumental in landing a deal with AOL to make Google its search engine. She was eventually promoted to Google's vice president for global online sales and operations.
Source: The New Yorker
But after nearly seven years at Google, Sandberg was ready for a new challenge. Schmidt proposed she become chief financial officer, but she turned it down for more responsibility. She asked about becoming chief operating officer, but Google executives reportedly didn't want to rock the boat and mess with the three men already in charge of decision-making: Schmidt and Google's two cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Source: The New Yorker
Fortunately, someone else was pursuing her: Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old whose company, Facebook, was still relatively new. He introduced himself to Sandberg at a Christmas party in 2007, and started to court her to come work at Facebook.
Source: New Yorker
Sandberg began to meet with Zuckerberg for dinner once or twice a week, first at a cafe in Menlo Park and then at Sandberg's home. Sandberg returned to that restaurant, Flea Street Cafe, for an interview with Oprah in 2013. After six weeks of dinner meetings, Zuckerberg eventually offered her the position as Facebook's chief operating officer.
Source: Fortune, The New Yorker
Zuckerberg told The New Yorker that Sandberg "handles things I don't want to." "There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization," Zuckerberg said in 2011. "And then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don't usually tend to be in the same person."
Source: The New Yorker
Sandberg is known by many as an advocate for women's rights in the workplace. Sandberg has campaigned against using the word "bossy," arguing that it damages women's confidence and desire to pursue leadership roles. She has also partnered with Getty Images to take stock photos that are meant to change the perception of women in the workforce.
Source: Insider
In March 2013, Sandberg published "Lean In," a best-selling book that recounts some of her own personal work experience as well as advice for women to pursue top positions in their field. "A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes," Sandberg wrote in the book.
But not everyone has been so crazy about Sandberg's advice to lean in. Some critics have said that it's not enough to tell women to have confidence if they're not being given the opportunity to succeed. Others say it's unfair to use Sandberg as a model for all women, as she is able to afford a nanny and a staff at work.
Source: The New Yorker
Sandberg announced in 2014 she and her husband would sign onto the Giving Pledge, a commitment by billionaires to donate at least half of their fortune during their lifetime or upon their death. The Giving Pledge was launched by Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Melinda French Gates.
Source: Forbes
Tragedy stuck in 2015 when Goldberg, Sandberg's husband, died suddenly after he collapsed while on vacation with his family in Mexico. Reports first indicated he died from head trauma after falling while on the treadmill, but Sandberg later revealed his death was due to a cardiac arrhythmia.
Source: Insider
"[Dave] showed me the internet for the first time, planned fun outings, took me to temple for the Jewish holidays, introduced me to much cooler music than I had ever heard. He gave me the experience of being deeply understood, truly supported and completely and utterly loved — and I will carry that with me always," Sandberg wrote on Facebook a day after Goldberg's death.
Source: Insider
Following Goldberg's death, Sandberg penned an essay about dealing with grief and "kick(ing) the s--t" out of option B in life when plan A is no longer available. Two years later, Sandberg turned that lesson into a book about her personal experience dealing with death and other stories of adversity.
Source: Insider
Sandberg also joined the board of directors of SurveyMonkey — the company her late husband served as CEO for — two months after his death. When SurveyMonkey went public in 2018, the company said Sandberg would donate her 10% stake to the charity she founded in her husband's honor: The Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg Family Foundation.
Source: Insider
A year after Goldberg's death, Sandberg began dating longtime friend Bobby Kotick, the CEO of video gaming company Activision Blizzard. Kotick was reportedly a "huge source of strength" for Sandberg in the wake of her late husband's death. However, the couple split in early 2019.
Source: Page Six
Sandberg publicly backed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. In return, Sandberg was reportedly on Clinton's shortlist for one of two cabinet positions: Treasury secretary and Commerce secretary, neither of which came to fruition after Clinton's defeat.
Source: Insider
Sandberg spoke out against former President Donald Trump's policies on abortion and immigration. A day after Trump reinstated the global gag rule that banned federally funded groups from discussing abortion, Sandberg donated $1 million to Planned Parenthood.
Source: Insider
Sandberg, and Facebook, drew heavy scrutiny in the wake of the 2016 election. Facebook revealed that Russia paid for thousands of ads on the platform to interfere with and manipulate political sentiment. The New York Times later reported that Sandberg tried to downplay implicating Russia in spreading misinformation on Facebook.
Source: The New York Times
Then in March 2018, details about the Cambridge Analytica scandal surfaced. The data-analytics company had harvested data from 87 million Facebook users and used it to target voters during the 2016 election. Sandberg admitted that Facebook knew about the improper data use back in 2015, but didn't make it public.
Source: Insider
Zuckerberg reportedly blamed Sandberg for the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and told her she should have been more aggressive in dealing with the "troublesome content." After meeting with Zuckerberg, Sandberg had told friends she worried whether she'd keep her job at Facebook, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
A bombshell New York Times report later revealed that Facebook directed a PR firm called Definers Public Affairs to conduct an "aggressive lobbying campaign" to blame billionaire George Soros — a Facebook critic — for spreading anti-Facebook sentiment. Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg denied knowing about Definers' activities, and communications head Elliot Schrage instead took the fall. However, Sandberg later admitted she had received a "small number of emails where Definers was referenced."
Source: Insider
The New York Times report put mounting scrutiny on Sandberg's role at Facebook. Although Facebook staffers threw their support behind Sandberg, investors reportedly questioned whether they should be worried Sandberg would leave the company.
Source: Insider
Despite the speculation, Sandberg remained at the company. In 2018, she was called to testify before Congress alongside then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey regarding Russian interference in the US election.
Source: Insider
Through it all, Sandberg's net worth has continued to rise. She's currently worth an estimated $1.6 billion, making her one of the 20 richest self-made women in the US.
Source: Forbes
In early 2020, Sandberg announced that she had gotten engaged to Tom Bernthal, the founder and CEO of a consulting firm in Los Angeles. The couple reportedly met through the brother of Sandberg's late husband, and started dating in spring 2019.
In April, The Wall Street Journal reported that while she was dating Kotick, Sandberg pushed the UK tabloid the Daily Mail to drop reporting on a temporary restraining order filed against him by a former girlfriend. Sandberg reportedly worried that the Mail's story would damage her reputation as a champion of women.
Source: Insider, The Wall Street Journal
In June, Sandberg announced that she would step down as COO later this year, writing in a Facebook post that "it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life." Zuckerberg wrote that Sandberg is "a superstar who defined the COO role in her own unique way." She officially left her role on August 1, and her last day at Meta will be September 30.
Madeline Stone and Paige Leskin contributed to an earlier version of this article.
Read the original article on Business Insider
