Chief Operating Officer of Facebook beginning in 2008, Sandberg was also the youngest woman on Fortune Magazine's "50 Most Powerful Women in Business" list in 2007. She had previously served as Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google, where she was also involved in launching Google's philanthropic arm Google.org. Prior to Google, Sandberg served as Chief of Staff for the United States Department of the Treasury.
She was born in Washington, D.C., but her family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida when she was two years old. She attended public school, where she was "always at the top of her class". In 1987, she enrolled at Harvard College and in 1991 graduated with a B.A. in Economics, earning the John H. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics. While at Harvard, Sandberg 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 on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness. She was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 1993, she enrolled at Harvard Business School and in 1995 earned her M.B.A. with highest distinction. She then worked as a Management Consultant for McKinsey & Company.
From 1996 to 2001, Sandberg served as Chief of Staff to then United States Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers under President Bill Clinton, where she helped lead the Treasury's work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis. In 2004, she married David Goldberg, who later became CEO of SurveyMonkey.
In late 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook, met her at a Christmas party held by Dan Rosensweig; at the time, she was considering becoming a senior executive for the Washington Post Company. Zuckerberg had no formal search for a COO but thought of Sandberg as "a perfect fit" for this role. They spent more time together in January 2008 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and in March 2008 Facebook announced hiring her away from Google.
After joining the company, she 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", and by 2010, Facebook became profitable. At Facebook, Sandberg oversaw the firm's business operations including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, and communications.
Her executive compensation for FY 2011 was $300,000 base salary plus $30,491,613 in FB shares. In addition, she held 38,122,000 restricted stock units (worth approximately $1.15 billion at $30/share) that were to be completely vested by October 2020, subject to her continued employment through the vesting date.
Sandberg has been ranked one of the "50 Most Powerful Women in Business" by Fortune Magazine from at least 2008. In 2007, she ranked #29 and was the youngest woman on the list. That same year, she ranked #19 on "50 Women to Watch" by The Wall Street Journal, and #21 in 2008. In 2011, Sandberg ranked #5 on "the world's 100 most powerful women" by Forbes and was named one of the "25 Most Influential People on the Web" by Business Week.
In 2009, she joined the board of the Walt Disney Company. She also joined the Board of Directors of Starbucks, which came with a $280,000 annual salary, and has served on the boards of the Brookings Institution, Women for Women International, V-Day, and the Ad Council. In 2008, Sandberg wrote an article for The Huffington Post in support of her mentor Larry Summers, who was then under fire for his comments about women. In May 2011, she gave the Commencement Address at the Barnard College graduation ceremony.
