Sheryl Kara Sandberg was born in August 28, 1969 in Washington D.C, to a Jewish family. She is an American technology executive, activist, and author. She is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Facebook and founder of Leanin.org (also known as the Lean In Foundation). In June 2012, she was elected to the Board of Directors by the existing board members, thus becoming the first woman to serve on Facebook’s board. Before she joined Facebook as its COO, 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 United States Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers.
Sheryl’s family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida, when she was 2 years old. She attended North Miami Beach High School, where she was “always at the top of her class”, and graduated ninth in her class with a 4.646 grade point average. She was sophomore class president, became a member of the National Honor Society, and was on the senior class executive board. She taught aerobics in the 1980s while in high school.
In 1987, Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College. She graduated in 1991 summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor’s degree in economics and was awarded the John H. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics. While at Harvard, she co-founded an organization called Women in Economics and Government. She met then-professor Larry Summers, who became her mentor and thesis adviser. Summers recruited her to be his research assistant at the World Bank where she worked for approximately one year on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness.
In 1993, she enrolled at Harvard Business School and in 1995 she earned her MBA with highest distinction. In her first year of business school, she earned a fellowship.
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 June 2015, Sandberg is reported to be worth over US$1 billion, due to her stock holdings in Facebook and other companies.
After graduating from business school in the spring of 1995, Sandberg worked as a Management Consultant for McKinsey & Company for approximately one year (1995-1996). From 1996 to 2001 she again worked for Larry Summers, who was then serving as the United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton. Sandberg assisted in the Treasury’s work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis.
When the Republicans gained the US Presidency in November 2000, Sandberg left her job. She then moved to Silicon Valley in 2001 and joined Google Inc., serving as its Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations from November 2001 to March 2008. She was responsible for online sales of Google’s advertising and publishing products as well as for sales operations of Google’s consumer products and Google Book Search.
In late 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, met Sandberg at a Christmas party held by Dan Rosensweig. Zuckerberg had no formal search for a COO, but thought of Sandberg as “a perfect fit” for this role. In March 2008, Facebook announced hiring Sandberg away from Google for the role of COO.
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, she oversees the firm’s business operations including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, and communications.
In 2012 she became the eighth member (and the first woman) of Facebook’s board of directors.
In April 2014, it was reported that Sandberg had sold over half of her shares in Facebook since the company went public. At the time of Facebook’s IPO she held approximately 41 million shares in the company; after several rounds of sales she is left with around 17.2 million shares, a 0.5% stake in the company, worth about $1 billion.
In 2009 Sandberg was named to the board of The Walt Disney Company. She also serves on the boards of Women for Women International, the Center for Global Development and V-Day. She was previously a board member of Starbucks with a $280,000 annual salary, Brookings Institution and Ad Council.
She released her first book, Lean In: Women, Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, co-authored by Nell Scovell and published by Knopf on March 11, 2013. It is about business leadership and development, issues with the lack of women in government and business leadership positions, and feminism. As of the fall of 2013, the book sold more than one million copies and was on top of the bestseller lists since its launch.
Sheryl Sandberg has been ranked one of the 50 “Most Powerful Women in Business” by Fortune Magazine:
On the list of 50 “Women to Watch” by The Wall Street Journal. Sandberg was named one of the “25 Most Influential People on the Web” by Business Week in 2009. She has been listed as one of the world’s 100 most powerful women by Forbes. In 2014, Sandberg was listed as ninth, just behind Michelle Obama.
In 2012, Newsweek and The Daily Beast released their first “Digital Power Index”, a list of the 100 most significant people in the digital world that year (plus 10 additional “Lifetime Achievement” winners), and she was ranked #3 in the “Evangelists” category.
In 2012, she was named in Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world assembled by Times.
Her book, Lean In was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award(2013).