There is no feast that never ends. Every journey, every story has its end. As Zuckerberg himself said, her departure ended an era of Facebook. For a long time, the outside world believed that Sheryl Sandberg was the "shadow CEO" of Facebook (the parent company was renamed meta after the restructuring in 2021). After joining Facebook in 2008, although she was nominally the COO, she actually played the role of "mentor" of Zuckerberg.
14 years shadow CEO curtain call
In 2012, Sandberg joined Facebook's then eight member board of directors and became the first female director.
In the past 14 years, she has been the second person in meta after Zuckerberg. The two met twice a week to discuss the company's affairs. In addition to the regular coo duties, Sandberg also assists Zuckerberg, who is 15 years younger than her, to help him operate this huge global social network kingdom. More importantly, Sandberg has to deal with external relations for Zuckerberg, especially to deal with the complex government regulation.
But now, the era is over. The most powerful woman in Silicon Valley suddenly posted a post on Facebook on Wednesday, announcing her resignation as meta COO (but continued to stay on the meta board). In her farewell letter, she gave Zuckerberg endless praise. "It has been an honor and honor for me to sit beside him for the past 14 years. He is a leader with real foresight and care."
Sandberg wrote in his letter, "When I took over this position in 2008, I only hoped to hold it for five years. After 14 years, it is time to write the next chapter of my life. Ö Ö I am not completely sure what the future will be like, and no one can know about the future. But I understand that I will pay more attention to foundation and charity work. Considering that it is a critical moment for women (rights), this is more important to me than anything else."
Sandberg also revealed that she plans to complete her wedding this summer. In 2015, her ex husband, Dave Goldberg, CEO of online survey company surveymonkey, died of a heart accident. In 2020, Sandberg, 50, announced his engagement. His fiance was Tom Bernthal, founder of Kelton global, a strategic consulting firm. The two had five children in their previous marriage.
It is worth noting that although meta announced that Javier olivan, the current chief growth officer, would take over the COO position of Sandberg, his responsibilities were significantly less than Sandberg's, and he focused more on the company's internal affairs. Although olivan is also Zuckerberg's assistant and friend for many years, Zuckerberg admits that no one can completely replace Sandberg's role.
Over the past five years, Zuckerberg has gradually received the dominant power of the company into his own hands. Facebook has been restructured into meta, and the company's future strategy has begun to turn to the meta universe. Although Sandberg is still his most trusted number two figure, Zuckerberg will not be greatly affected without this "mentor". After Sandberg left, Zuckerberg could reorganize the management completely according to his own wishes.
Over the past year, several core executives have been promoted within meta, and Marne Levine has assumed the newly established chief business office r) Nick Clegg became president of global affairs. To some extent, they shared Sandberg's work affairs. Maybe Facebook is preparing for Sandberg's departure.
Zuckerberg is thirsty for talents
In Facebook's corporate history, two core executives have played a crucial role. When Zuckerberg was young and young, the two industry veterans helped him firmly steer the social network one after another, and then he became a global Internet giant. The two core executives, one is Sandberg, who has just resigned, and the other is Sean Parker, the first president.
As the first president of Facebook, Parker introduced the first investor Peter Thiel to Zuckerberg, completed early financing, clarified the ownership structure, set up super voting rights, and ensured Zuckerberg's absolute control over the company. In addition, he also postponed the website's advertising revenue plan, focusing on product development and user experience.
Although Parker helped Zuckerberg enormously, his Facebook career was unusually short. In 2005, the police seized cocaine at a party organized by Parker, and he was arrested. Although he was not prosecuted later, Parker resigned and left Facebook.
After Parker left, although Facebook maintained rapid growth, Zuckerberg, who was just in his early twenties, obviously lacked experience in management and operation. He is eager to find a senior executive with rich experience in the Internet industry and contacts in government departments to take over the operation responsibilities of the company, formulate the commercialization strategy of the website, share his own management pressure, and help him gradually mature.
Zuckerberg's demand is not surprising in Silicon Valley. It is out of this mentality that the two co founders of Google hired Eric Schmidt, the former Novell CEO, who has worked in Silicon Valley for nearly 20 years, to become the CEO of Google. Schmidt served as CEO of Google for ten years, and then resigned as chairman of the board of directors until 2017, completely fading out of Google.
At the Christmas party at the end of 2007, Zuckerberg met Sandberg for the first time. In his own words, he found the "perfect person". Although Zuckerberg doesn't like parties, he is very interested in Sandberg's work experience. Sandberg wrote in his resignation letter, "when I first met Zuckerberg, I was not looking for a new job, nor did I think that meeting him would change my future life."
The two left the Christmas party and went to flea Street, a quiet restaurant near Sandberg's house, and talked until late at night. Zuckerberg explained to her the future vision of Facebook and believed that the future of social networking sites is the sharing and connection of real identities. Sandberg also introduced to Zuckerberg how to develop and expand Google's advertising business, which is the change Zuckerberg most expected to bring.
In the following time, Zuckerberg kept making appointments with Sandberg. In order to persuade Sandberg to join Facebook, Zuckerberg, who was eager for talents, even went to her home in Atherton, Silicon Valley. Three months later, Zuckerberg fulfilled his wish and Sandberg officially joined Facebook.
Sandberg, then 38, was Google's vice president of sales. After joining Google in 2001, Sandberg developed his online sales team into a cash cow team with more than 4000 people. Her work experience was what Zuckerberg valued most because Facebook was just beginning to seek commercialization.
It is worth mentioning that before joining Google, Sandberg also served as the chief of staff of the US Treasury Secretary for five years. Her tutor at Harvard University, well-known economist Lawrence Summers, served as US Treasury Secretary in Clinton's second term. This experience enabled Sandberg to establish a wide range of contacts in American politics, especially in the Democratic Party. This is also what Zuckerberg expects and needs in the future.
For Sandberg, leaving Google to join Facebook is also a huge opportunity. She was only a vice president at Google, and the road to promotion was highly competitive. At that time, Facebook was already a newly rich social networking site valued at tens of billions of dollars. More importantly, she can not only serve as coo, but also act as Zuckerberg's most trusted mentor. This is the company status that she can not obtain in Google.
Career successful female leaders
Sandberg did not disappoint Zuckerberg. Her first task in joining Facebook is how to improve the commercial revenue and help Facebook make profits. Before Sandberg joined, Facebook always focused on how to create cool products to attract users to achieve growth, but paid little attention to how to achieve revenue. At that time, the advertising form advocated by the Facebook commercialization team was still a huge display advertisement on the home page like MySpace.
It was Sandberg who persuaded Zuckerberg to focus his future revenue on more accurate and valuable social advertising rather than traditional display advertising that destroys the user experience, which has become the cornerstone of Facebook's future commercialization success. In the summer of 2008, Zuckerberg even gave himself a month's holiday, leaving the commercialization work to Sandberg, who had just joined the company for a few months. It can also be seen that Zuckerberg has given Sandberg unparalleled trust.
Two years after Sandberg joined Facebook, Facebook finally made its first profit in 2010, preparing for the subsequent initial public offering (IPO). In addition to advertising sales, Sandberg is also responsible for sales, marketing, business development, human resources, government relations, public policy and other functions, and can be called the COO with the largest authority. It can also be seen from this that she actually plays the role of "shadow CEO".
In addition, Sandberg also introduced Zuckerberg to Democratic President Barack Obama by virtue of his network in the Democratic Party, and won the position of the White House employment and competition Advisory Committee for the childish Zuckerberg. At Obama's business leaders' dinner, Zuckerberg, jobs and many other business leaders sat side by side. In april2011, Sandberg even accompanied Obama to fly from the east coast to Silicon Valley on air force one to visit Facebook headquarters. The president also personally conducted a webcast with Zuckerberg. This is the highlight moment Zuckerberg dreamed of.
In 2010, Sandberg personally took charge of the negotiations and reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Facebook's privacy issues, which won a loose regulatory environment for Facebook. Jonathan Leibowitz, chairman of FTC at that time, recalled that in a slightly nervous conference room, Sandberg was always confident and could relax his opponents with a smile.
With Facebook becoming a social networking giant with more than one billion users worldwide, Sandberg also reached the peak of his career. In 2012, Facebook was listed, and Sandberg's shares were worth more than $1 billion. In the same year, she was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by time magazine. In 2014, she was listed as the world's top 100 most powerful women by Forbes magazine, ranking ninth, second only to the then first lady Michelle Obama.
As the most successful woman in Silicon Valley, Sandberg has been committed to promoting women's rights movement. In her book "lean in" published in 2013, she used her experience to encourage women to strive for progress and improvement in the workplace and break the glass ceiling. The book sold more than 4million copies worldwide, and all the proceeds were donated to leanin Org to help women resist gender bias. She has also been working on Facebook to improve gender equality and create a diverse culture.
According to US media reports, after Travis kalanick, the founder and CEO of Uber, was forced to resign in 2017 due to a series of scandals of internal management confusion, Sandberg was once the ideal new CEO of Uber's board of directors. But she was not interested in this. Sandberg publicly said in an interview that year that Uber's corporate culture crisis was very troublesome.
Struggling to cope with scandal
Sandberg's career success and personal reputation reached its peak with the development of Facebook, but it was also criticized for the endless scandals of Facebook in the past few years. To be exact, both her personal image and Facebook's corporate reputation suffered a major blow because of the 2016 US election.
During the 2016 U.S. election, many false information spread wantonly on social networking sites such as Facebook and twitter, especially many true and false negative and rumors about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. According to the subsequent congressional investigation, it is true that foreign governments have purchased political advertisements on Facebook to put such information. Facebook has taken a sit-by attitude towards all this. Liberals therefore believe that Facebook needs to take responsibility for the defeat of the 20216 general election.
Different from Zuckerberg's ambiguous political position, Sandberg once worked in the Clinton administration and has always been a supporter and big donor of the Democratic Party. She also publicly supported Hillary Clinton's candidacy for president, actively held fund-raising activities for the latter in Silicon Valley, and actively brokered Hillary Clinton to meet Zuckerberg. At that time, most people thought that Hillary Clinton would definitely win the election and become the first female president of the United States. But the final election result disappointed Sandberg.
In 2018, Facebook even exposed the Cambridge analysis scandal, making itself the focus of controversy in American society and government regulation. As Facebook failed to effectively protect users' privacy, a British data company took advantage of the loopholes in the imperfect system to collect personal data of more than 87million users, and provided targeted political advertising services for trump, the Republican candidate, during the 2016 general election.
Although Sandberg helped Facebook build a luxury government public relations team in Washington, D.C., and invested tens of millions of dollars every year to lobby the U.S. government and Congress, this did not reduce the huge government and public opinion pressure on Facebook. Democrats are dissatisfied with Facebook's connivance at the spread of false information, while Republicans accuse Facebook of suppressing conservative remarks.
2018 was the year of Facebook scandal. Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg went to Washington, D.C., to attend several congressional hearings on the political influence of social networks, facing cross examination by congressmen. Compared with Zuckerberg's nervousness at the hearing, Sandberg seemed more confident and calm, but this did not bring much help to her public image.
A series of major events in 2020 have made Facebook the target of public criticism in American society. The COVID-19, ethnic riots, general election contests, "election fraud" and even the Capitol Hill riots in January of the next year, every time Facebook's content disposal was criticized, even the co-founder Chris Hughs publicly called for the spin off of this giant company.
In december2020, FTC, together with prosecutors from 48 states and regions in the United States, filed an anti-monopoly lawsuit against Facebook, demanding that the Facebook platform be separated from instagram and WhatsApp. After the Democratic Party came to power, the newly elected FTC continued to promote the litigation war with Facebook more firmly.
In October, 2021, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, publicly exposed Facebook's internal documents, accusing the social networking site of taking a laissez faire attitude in pursuing traffic even though it knew that its algorithm would lead to the spread of false information. This disclosure further verified the responsibility of the democratic government to Facebook, and once again damaged the relationship between Facebook and Biden's government, which has fallen to the freezing point. Again, Sandberg could do nothing about it.
Deeply involved in one scandal after another, Zuckerberg's public image has also changed from a harmless young entrepreneurial leader who has changed the world in the past decade to an irresponsible, mercenary, evil and unscrupulous millionaire. He has attracted protesters from time to time at the gate of his luxurious house in San Francisco. His donation of $50million in sponsorship for the hospital naming right has been condemned by the municipal government. After the outbreak of the epidemic, the Zuckerberg family simply moved directly to the island of Hawaii, far away from the local political rights and wrongs.
The criticism and anger of external public opinion on Facebook mainly focused on Zuckerberg, but also partially shifted to Sandberg. In the past few years, Sandberg has been questioned about the sharp issue of Facebook content control almost every time he participated in activities and was interviewed. To Sandberg's dismay, even the media people close to her did not save face on these issues.
Photo note: Kaplan was the one who influenced Zuckerberg most in the past few years
No longer dominating external relations
Although Zuckerberg and Sandberg still maintained close cooperation and mutual respect, their relationship began to undergo subtle changes during the trump administration. During the trump administration, Zuckerberg trusted Joel Kaplan, vice president of government relations, who had close relations with the Republican Party, when handling government relations. Kaplan joined Facebook in 2011. He worked in the White House of the Bush Administration for eight years as deputy chief of staff. He is considered to be the person with the closest relationship between Washington and the Republican Party.
According to wired magazine, Zuckerberg chose to listen to Kaplan when deciding how to handle Trump's controversial content. Kaplan became the man behind Zuckerberg, guiding him to deal with the delicate relationship with the trump administration. On September 19, 2019, Kaplan and petertier introduced Zuckerberg to the Oval Office of the White House and held a private meeting with trump. In the chaotic days of 2020, Zuckerberg and trump have always maintained direct contact.
In contrast, Sandberg's relationship with the Democratic Party has become increasingly cold. In the past few years, Pelosi, Biden and other senior Democratic officials have made fierce public criticisms of Facebook, and Warren and other radical democrats have even publicly called for the split of Facebook, which has also made Sandberg, a democratic supporter, feel extremely embarrassed.
In march2019, a false video about Pelosi with unclear words spread rapidly on Facebook and other social networking sites, with more than 2million hits. Even Rudy Giuliani, Trump's private lawyer, publicly forwarded it for ridicule. But Facebook and Zuckerberg rejected Pelosi's request to delete the video and decided to let the video continue to circulate online. This made Pelosi and other senior Democratic leaders extremely angry and damaged their originally good relationship with Sandberg.
Sandberg accepted Zuckerberg's decision, and she did not try to explain it to Pelosi's office. In the days that followed, Sandberg began to remain silent on his political position. During the 2020 general election, Sandberg did not stand up for the Democratic candidate, nor did she hold fund-raising activities, which was in sharp contrast to her active investment in 2016.
Within Facebook, Sandberg is no longer the person who decides the relationship between the government and Zuckerberg, and can no longer affect Zuckerberg's attitude towards content control; Zuckerberg was more concerned about the White House opinion transmitted by Kaplan. A common view has gradually formed within Facebook: now the decision makers of Facebook are not Zuckerberg and Sandberg, but Zuckerberg and many executives.
After his resignation, Sandberg can gradually repair his public image through philanthropy to prepare for the next stage of work. It would not be surprising to see her become the CEO of a technology company in the next few years.
Just after Sandberg resigned, mainstream media did not forget many problems of Facebook while evaluating her business success. Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor, said bluntly on CNBC television channel, "Sandberg puts shareholder value above social responsibility."
The title of time magazine is more direct, "she has built Facebook into a global giant, but the world has paid a price for it." (Sandberg made Facebook into a giant。 But at a cost to the world。)
Sina Technology Zhengjun from Silicon Valley