“And then there are people who are very analytic or focussed on strategy. “There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization,” he says. She asked about becoming the chief operating officer, but Google already had a troika making decisions-Schmidt and the two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin-and they didn’t want to further complicate things.īy February of 2008, Zuckerberg had concluded that Sandberg would be a perfect fit. He proposed promoting her to chief financial officer, a job she rejected because she didn’t think it gave her enough management responsibility. of Google, about her desire to do something else at the company. That winter, Sandberg met with Eric Schmidt, who was then the C.E.O. Sandberg says they asked each other, “What do you believe? What do you care about? What’s the mission? It was very philosophical.” Social networking seemed to have better prospects than newspapers and she didn’t want to move to D.C., so she gently turned down Donald Graham. “It was like dating,” says Dave Goldberg, Sandberg’s husband and the C.E.O. M., often had to usher the nocturnal Zuckerberg out at midnight. Sandberg, who goes to bed early and starts e-mailing at 5 A. So for six weeks they met for dinner once or twice a week at Sandberg’s six-bedroom home. His tiny Palo Alto apartment-which had almost no furniture-wouldn’t work. They met at the Flea Street Café, around the corner from her home in Atherton, but then decided that they needed more privacy.
After the holidays, Zuckerberg e-mailed her, and they had the first of many dinners. of the troubled Washington Post Company, about becoming a senior executive there. She had even talked with Donald Graham, the C.E.O. It turned out that Sandberg was ready for a new challenge. “We talked for probably an hour by the door,” Zuckerberg recalls. Zuckerberg hadn’t called her before (why would someone who managed four thousand employees want to leave for a company that had barely any revenue?), but he went up and introduced himself. That December, he went to a Christmas party at the home of Dan Rosensweig, a Silicon Valley executive, and as he approached the house he saw someone who had been mentioned as a possible partner, Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s thirty-eight-year-old vice-president for global online sales and operations. His social-network site was growing fast, but, at the age of twenty-three, he felt ill-equipped to run it. In 2007, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, knew that he needed help. Three years after Sandberg joined Facebook, the company is profitable.