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The illustrious career of Sheryl Sandberg, the female general of Facebook has just resigned

Sheryl Sandberg was born on August 28, 1969 in Washington DC (USA). Her father is an ophthalmologist and her mother is a French teacher at the local college. She has two younger brothers, David and Michelle.

Sandberg’s family moved to Miami when she was 2 years old. Her parents turned their house into a safe haven for people trying to escape anti-Semitism.

When she was at school, Mrs. Sandberg was always the brightest star of the school. However, her mother believes that, in public schools, a smart girl is not a good thing. Ms. Sandberg continued her academic excellence when attending Harvard University, majoring in economics. There she founded an organization called Women in Economics and Government. In 1991, she graduated.

The illustrious career of Sheryl Sandberg, the female general of Facebook has just resigned - Photo 1.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. (Photo: Shutterstock)

At Harvard, she did research with then-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. He was her “advisor” at the beginning of her career, recruiting her to work at the World Bank right after graduation. Sheryl Sandberg worked for the World Bank for a year, during which time she flew to India to help prevent leprosy. After that, she returned to Harvard to study for an MBA and worked for a year at the consulting firm McKinsey.

At the age of 24, she married Brian Kraff but divorced only a year later. She used to worry that the divorce would prevent her from seeing anyone else. Not long after, she completed her MBA in 1995. Her mentor, Summers, joined the administration of former US President Bill Clinton. She also followed him to the capital and eventually became his Chief of Staff when Summer was named Treasurer in 1999.

Still, when the Democrats lost the 2000 election, Sandberg decided to move to Silicon Valley and join the booming tech industry. At the time, Google was a small, unprofitable company with less than 300 employees. But she finds Google’s mission very appealing, which is “to make the world’s information completely free”.

In the process of “inviting” her to Google, then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt is said to have called every week and told her: “Stop being stupid, this is a rocket. Let’s get on the train.” She eventually joined Google in 2001 and took over the company’s advertising program with four employees.

In 2004, she married her longtime best friend, Dave Goldberg. The couple gave birth to their first son in 2005 and a daughter two years later. At a 2011 conference, she said, “the most important career choice is who to marry.” The Sandberg family has lived in a large mansion in Menlo Park since 2013, just a 20-minute drive from Facebook’s headquarters.

Google grew rapidly during Sandberg’s time here. She is the “conductor” in the deal with AOL to turn Google into AOL’s search engine. She was promoted to Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google.

Still, after nearly seven years at Google, Sandberg is ready to take on a new challenge. Mr. Schmidt offered her the position of CFO, but she refused. She wants to hold the COO position, but Google’s leadership does not want to cause disturbance. At that time, the three men in charge of decision-making at Google were Mr. Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

That’s when she was “followed” by another company. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is still relatively new. He became acquainted with Ms. Sandberg at a Christmas party in 2007 and invited her to Facebook. She started having dinner with Zuckerberg once or twice a week. After about 6 weeks, Zuckerberg asked her to be COO of Facebook.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Zuckerberg said that Sandberg helps him deal with things he doesn’t want. “There are people who are really good managers, there are people who can manage a large organization. And there are those who want to focus on strategy. These two types often cannot be the same person,” he said in 2011.

Ms. Sandberg is well known as an advocate for women’s rights in the workplace. She collaborated with Getty Images to take documentary photos that change the perception of women at work. In March 2013, she published the book “Lean In”, recounting her work experience, as well as advising women to pursue senior positions in their fields. “A truly just world would be one where women run half the country and businesses, and men run half the family,” she wrote.

In 2014, she announced that the couple had signed the Giving Pledge, pledging to donate at least half of their fortune over the course of their lives. This is the initiative of billionaires Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Tragedy happened in 2015 when Goldberg, her husband, died suddenly of a stroke while on vacation with his family in Mexico. Two years later, she shares her lessons learned from tragedies in her new book.

In 2016, she publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for President. In return, she was shortlisted for one of two cabinet positions should Clinton win the election: Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of Commerce. Sandberg criticized former US President Donald Trump’s immigration and abortion policies.

Ms. Sandberg and the Facebook “team” were heavily criticized for the 2016 US presidential election. Facebook revealed that Russia paid thousands of ads on the platform to interfere and manipulate voters. In March 2018, details of the Cambridge Analytica scandal were revealed. The company mined data from 87 million Facebook users and used it to target voters in 2016. Ms. Sandberg acknowledged Facebook beiets of unauthorized data use since 2015 but did not disclose it.

Zuckerberg is said to have blamed Sandberg for the scandal and said she should have been more aggressive when it came to handling troubling content. After meeting with Zuckerberg, she expressed concern to friends about her position at Facebook, according to the Wall Street Journal. A blockbuster article in the New York Times revealed that Facebook hired a PR firm to carry out a campaign to blame billionaire George Soros for spreading anti-Facebook ideology.

The New York Times article continues to focus attention on Ms. Sandberg’s role at Facebook. Investors are concerned that Ms. Sandberg may leave the company. Still, she stayed. In 2018, she was called to testify before Congress along with former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over Russia’s role in the US election.

After all, Mrs. Sandberg’s fortune continued to grow. Currently, her net worth is about $ 1.6 billion, making her one of the 20 richest self-made female billionaires in America. On June 2, she announced her resignation as COO of Facebook at the end of the year because “it’s time for me to write the next chapter of my life”. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg praised her as “a superstar who has redefined the COO role in her own way”.


According to Du Lam

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