Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Kara Sandberg, born August 28, 1969, is an American technology executive, philanthropist, and writer whose career is closely tied to the growth of online advertising and social networking. She served as chief operating officer of Meta Platforms from 2008 to 2022, after earlier leadership work at Google and in the United States Treasury Department. She is also the founder of LeanIn.Org and was the first woman elected to Facebook’s board of directors.

Sandberg was born in Washington, D.C., into a Jewish family, the eldest of three children of Adele and Joel Sandberg. Her father is an ophthalmologist, and her mother was a college professor of French with family roots tracing back to Belarus. When Sandberg was two, the family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida. At North Miami Beach High School, she graduated in 1987 ranked ninth in her class, served as sophomore class president, joined the National Honor Society, sat on the senior class executive board, and taught aerobics during the 1980s.

Her habits of analysis and leadership were formed early at Harvard. Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College in 1987 and graduated in 1991 summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. She received the John H. Williams Prize as the top graduating student in economics and co-founded Women in Economics and Government. At Harvard she met Lawrence Summers, who became her mentor and thesis adviser. Summers recruited her to work as his research assistant at the World Bank, where she spent about a year on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness. She later earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1995 with the highest distinction.

After business school, Sandberg worked for McKinsey & Company for about a year, then returned to work with Summers when he was United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton. As his chief of staff from 1996 to 2001, she assisted in Treasury work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis. In 2001 she joined Google, where she was responsible for online sales of advertising and publishing products, sales operations for consumer products, and Google Book Search. During her years there, Google’s ad and sales team grew from four people to 4,000.

In late 2007, Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg met Sandberg at a Christmas party held by Dan Rosensweig and came to see her as a fit for the chief operating officer role. Facebook announced her hiring in March 2008. Sandberg focused on how the company could become profitable, helping guide its reliance on advertising, with ads presented discreetly. By 2010, Facebook was profitable. As of 2012, she oversaw business operations including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, and communications. That same year, she became the eighth member of Facebook’s board of directors and was named to the Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people.

Sandberg’s public career also included scrutiny. Reports in 2018 examined her role in Facebook’s response to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, as well as research into George Soros’s finances after he criticized tech companies. In 2025, a Delaware Chancery Court vice chancellor imposed sanctions on her for deleting emails related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. Sandberg announced in 2022 that she would step down as Meta COO while remaining on the board, then said in January 2024 that she would not stand for re-election. Her words still resonate because they come from a career built around execution at scale. “Done is better than perfect” captures the practical, forward-moving style for which she became widely known.