Profile on Facebook’s COO
An interesting Vogue article on Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s impressive COO:
Zuckerberg says, “By the time I met Sheryl”—in 2007, on the way into a Christmas party hosted by former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig—“I’d almost given up on finding a person who’d be good in the COO role. But it was immediately clear from the crispness of her answers and the intensity she had when she talked that she was the kind of person who could do this.” For the next half hour, the pair barely moved from the entryway. “I’d just walked into the party with my girlfriend, Sheryl was standing there with her husband, Dave, and people kept coming up to us and asking very superficial questions. And we were just like, ‘Oh, yeah, OK, that’s nice,’ ” Zuckerberg remembers. “I mean, I have much less social tact than she does.”
Sandberg recalls “having this intense conversation in the front hall about how you ‘scale’ an organization,” using the tech-world synonym for “managing runaway growth.” “And everyone’s coming up and asking: ‘Do you want a drink?’ or ‘I like your dress.’ And Mark and I are like, ‘We’re trying to talk here.’”
My company’s CEO also gets several mentions, for reasons that are obvious. I think she actually came to our office once, but I stupidly didn’t put two and two together. I only realized who she really was after she left.