After 14 years as co-driver Sheryl Sandberg has announced that she will be leaving Facebook this fall, rather Meta, as it is called now. For most of his tenure at Facebook he held the position of Chief Operating Office, general manager. She was the most senior woman in an Internet company.
In an interview, Sandberg stated that he expected to stay at Facebook for only five years instead of the 14 he spent there. He added that he intends to focus on philanthropic work, on his foundation, lean in (from the title of his book Let's come forward: Women, work and the desire to succeed, Mondadori, 2013) and that this summer she will marry Tom Bernthal, a television producer with four children (she has three from her second marriage). This is an important decision after she unexpectedly lost her husband in 2015, a trauma that prompted her to write a much appreciated book, Option B: Face difficulties, build resilience and find joy again (Harper Collins, 2017), on the processing of grief and mourning. She will presumably devote a lot of energy to the new extended family.
We don't know what place history will reserve for Sheryl Sandberg. His professional and personal legacy is quite complex to assess. This is something we need to think about, wrote Shira Ovide who edits the New York Times newsletter on technology.
Sandberg herself asked herself “Did I do everything right? Absolutely not!"
In fact, that's all.
A star was born
After graduating from Harvard, Larry Summers called her a his chief of staff as Clinton's economics secretary. She was undoubtedly destined for a brilliant political career (at one point she had been included in the small group of future candidates for the presidency), she had landed in Silicon Valley to Google where he had helped build his multibillion-dollar advertising business.
In 2008 the then 38-year-old Sheryl Sandberg accepted the invitation of 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, who worked a few kilometers away, assisting him in transforming a start-up with enormous potential into one of the most influential and richest companies in the world. Sandberg thus became the “adult in the room” at Facebook's Memlo Park campus.
Here he coordinated all the work of operational construction of the advertising business of Facebook which still remains the economic engine of the company. When Sandberg began her work, Facebook generated revenues of 153 million dollars, today revenues are 85,96 billion. 98,8% still come from advertising. However, today that business is stagnant and there is a need to move the company's center of gravity elsewhere.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that very little Sandberg's voice has been heard in defining the new strategy of Facebook focused on the Metaverse, from which also derives the new denomination, Meta precisely.
Against the crystal barrier
Beyond Facebook, Sandberg's writings, conferences and example on the way women feel in the world of work, her elaboration of pain and mourning for the sudden loss of a loved one, have been a fundamental voice in the redefine the role of women in corporate America.
At one point, Facebook's COO seemed like the best equipped and solid person to lead women to break the glass ceiling which confined them to a minority status in the business world.
Unfortunately, the unedifying story of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, the other horsewoman of this expedition, has pushed back the cause of gender equality and the female contribution to the new technology-driven economy.
From this point of view, Sandberg's legacy is certainly not in question, even if there were some critical voices like that of Michelle Obama who says she is convinced that things are not at all as Sandberg puts them.
Facebook's failures
Sheryl Sandberg played also played a major role in Facebook's failures at pivotal moments in American history. It came as the company initially denied and sought to divert its responsibility for Russian-backed trolls who, through Facebook pages, aimed to radicalize divisions among Americans before the presidential election of 2016.
It happened again in 2018 in case of Cambridge Analytica when an evident and blatant violation of privacy due also to Facebook's lax rules on this matter, exposed the company to enormous damage to its reputation and image.
Sandberg, the head of public affairs, was held by Zuckerberg himself responsible for the company's vague and embarrassed response. The scheme followed on that occasion by the Sandberg team was that of deny, deflect, defend.
The management of the crisis that unnerved Zuckerberg who, having the majority of shares with voting rights, began to engage more in politics. It was Zuckerberg who made crucial decisions like that of remove President Donald J. Trump from the site after the riots of 6 January.
And indeed it was Zuckerberg who directly hired a supervisory role of different parts of the company, some of which had been under the exclusive aegis of Sandberg.
The same "New York Timeshe wrote last year that "the partnership between Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg hadn't survived Trump."
In the metaverse-centered corporate reorganization, some of Sandberg's responsibilities have been distributed between various figures. Nick Clegg, chairman of global affairs and former UK deputy prime minister, became the company's chief spokesperson, a role formerly held by Sandberg. In February, Clegg was promoted to president of global affairs for Meta.
In fact, as Ovide notes, "Sandberg is ending her tenure in Meta far from the pinnacle of reputation she reached in the past decade."
The architect of the Internet advertising business
In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg said Sandberg was instrumental in the company's success: "Sheryl was the architect of our advertising business, hired amazing people, forged our management culture and taught me how to run a business,”
He then added: “It's the end of an era“. Maybe it really is.
Google and Facebook have transformed product marketing from an art of divination to an often ominous science, and Sandberg has been among the architects of this change. She deserves the merit (or demerit) of having developed two of the most successful business models, and perhaps least defensible, of the history of the Internet.
All of today's concerns about apps that spy on people to understand every single detail of their activities and to guide them in their choices, not only in purchasing, can in part be traced back to Sandberg. As are the Facebook and Google $325 billion in annual advertising revenue and all other online businesses that make money from ads.
Harvard historian Shoshana Zuboff, who has written a well-researched book on surveillance capitalism that encapsulates the entire Facebook experience, said during a interview of 2019 to the "Guardian" that Sandberg played the role of Typhoid Mary, in the spreading contagion of the logic of surveillance in the world of the Internet.
Perhaps Sandberg's exit from Meta also marks the end of this era.
If judgment of the story is suspended pending the jury's verdict, it's safe to say that Sandberg has done her job very well. It doesn't always happen today.
Sources
Mike Isaac, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, Sheryl Sandberg Is Stepping Down From Meta, The New York Times, June 1, 2022
Shira Ovid, Sheryl Sandberg's Legacy, The New York Times, June 2, 2022
Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg's Partnership Did Not Survive Trump, The New York Times, July 8, 2021
John Naughton, 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism, The Guardian, 20 January 2019
Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew Rosenberg and Jack Nicas, Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook's Leaders Fought Through Crisis, The New York Times, November 14, 2018
