About
Sheryl Kara Sandberg (/ˈsændbərɡ, bərɡ/) (born August 28, 1969) is an American businesswoman. As of August 2013, she is the chief operating officer of Facebook. In June 2012, she was also elected to the board of directors by the existing board members, becoming the first woman to serve on Facebook's board. Before Facebook, Sandberg was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google, and was involved in launching Google's philanthropic arm Google.org. Before Google, Sandberg served as chief of staff for the United States Secretary of the Treasury.
In 2012 she was named in the Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time magazine. As of January 2014, Sandberg is reported to be worth over US$1 billion, due to her stock holdings in Facebook and other companies.
Career
After graduating from business school in the spring of 1995, Sandberg worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company for approximately one year (1995-96.). From 1996 to 2001, Sandberg served as Chief of Staff to then United States Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers under President Bill Clinton where she helped lead the Treasury’s work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis. She joined Google Inc. in 2001 and served as its Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations, from November 2001 to March 2008. She was responsible for online sales of Google's advertising & publishing products and also for sales operations of Google's consumer products & Google Book Search.
Facebook
In late 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, met Sandberg at a Christmas party held by Dan Rosensweig; at the time, she was considering becoming a senior executive for The Washington Post Company. Zuckerberg had no formal search for a COO, but thought of Sandberg as "a perfect fit" for this role. They spent more time together in January 2008 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and in March 2008, Facebook announced hiring Sheryl Sandberg away from Google.
After joining the company, Sandberg quickly began trying to figure out how to make Facebook profitable. Before she joined, the company was "primarily interested in building a really cool site; profits, they assumed, would follow." By late spring, Facebook's leadership had agreed to rely on advertising, "with the ads discreetly presented"; by 2010, Facebook became profitable. According to Facebook, Sandberg oversees the firm's business operations including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy and communications.
Sandberg's executive compensation for FY 2011 was $300,000 base salary plus $30,491,613 in FB shares. According to her Form 3, she also owns 38,122,000 stock options and restricted stock units (worth approx. $1.45 billion as of mid-May 2012) that will be completely vested by May 2022, subject to her continued employment through the vesting date.
In 2012 she became the eighth member (and the first female member) of Facebook's board of directors.
In October 2012, Business Insider reported that stock units (appx. 34 million) vested in Sandberg's name accounted for nearly US$790,000,000. Facebook withheld roughly 15 million of those stocks for tax reasons, leaving Sandberg with nearly US$417,000,000.[citation needed] The media reported on August 12, 2013 that Sandberg sold 2.4m shares in the company worth US$91 million (£51 million)—5 percent of her total stake in the company.