Sheryl Sandberg

COO of Facebook

Net worth: US$1.38 billion (March 2017)

Board member of

Facebook

The Walt Disney Company

Women for Women International

Center for Global Development

V-Day

SurveyMonkey

Sheryl Sandberg was born in Washington, D.C., in 1969. She went to Harvard for her bachelor's degree in economics and worked at the World Bank after graduating summa cum laude. She then attended Harvard Business School and went to work in the U.S. Department of the Treasury during the Clinton administration. When the Republicans swept the Democrats out of office in November 2000, Sandberg moved to Silicon Valley and worked for Google for seven years. She then moved to Facebook, where she has been COO since 2008. Sandberg is the author of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which has sold more than a million copies.

Google and Facebook

With her government job behind her, Sandberg moved to Silicon Valley, eager to join the new tech boom that was under way. Google showed early interest in Sandberg, and she found Google’s mission, which she described as “to make the world’s information freely available,” compelling enough to sign on with the three-year-old company in November 2001.

As Google’s vice president of global online sales & operations, Sandberg was responsible for managing online sales of advertising and publishing products, Google Book Search and consumer products. Sandberg was with Google until 2008, with her tenure marked by stunning professional success and an ever-growing reputation as one of the top executives in the country.

In March 2008, Sandberg’s Google run came to an end, and she joined Facebook as the company’s chief operating officer. From her COO post, Sandberg oversees Facebook’s business operations, specifically helping Facebook scale its operations and expand its global footprint. She also oversees sales management, business development, human resources, marketing, public policy, privacy and communications. For her duties, Sandberg has been richly rewarded, and she made her way onto the billionaires’ list in early 2014, based on her stake in Facebook, which made its initial public stock offering in 2012, the same year that Sandberg became the first female member of the company's board of directors.

'Lean In' & Her Personal Life

Sandberg is the author of the bestseller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which has sold more than a million copies and has been optioned as a film. Lean In inspired a global community group, LeanIn.org, which Sandberg founded to support women striving to reach their ambitions.

In her personal life, Sandberg married briefly at the age of 24, and divorced a year later. In 2004, she married Dave Goldberg, a Yahoo! executive who later became the CEO of SurveyMonkey, and the couple have two children together.

Sandberg has written about her husband's supportive role in her life and career. On March 5, 2015, she posted on Facebook: "I wrote in Lean Inthat the most important decision a woman makes is if she has a life partner and who that life partner will be. The best decision I ever made was to marry Dave. "

On May 1, 2015, Goldberg died suddenly at the age of 47 while on a family vacation in Mexico. The cause of his death was head trauma after slipping on a treadmill.

Sandberg wrote about her husband in a Facebook post following his death: "Dave was my rock. When I got upset, he stayed calm. When I was worried, he said it would be ok. When I wasn't sure what to do, he figured it out. He was completely dedicated to his children in every way – and their strength these past few days is the best sign I could have that Dave is still here with us in spirit. . .Things will never be the same – but the world is better for the years my beloved husband lived."

Honors

• Sheryl Sandberg has been ranked one of the 50 "Most Powerful Women in Business" by Fortune Magazine:
  • In 2007 she was ranked #29 and was the youngest woman on the list.
  • In 2008 she was ranked #34.
  • In 2009 she was ranked #22.
  • In 2010 she was ranked #16.
  • In 2014 she was ranked #10.
  • In 2016 she was ranked #6.
• On the list of 50 "Women to Watch" by The Wall Street Journal.
  • She was ranked #19 on that list in 2007.
  • She was ranked #21 on that list in 2008.
• 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 Time.
• Lean In was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award (2013).
• In 2013, she was ranked #8 on "The World's 50 Most Influential Jews" conducted by The Jerusalem Post.
• Sandberg delivered the commencement address at the graduation of University of California Berkeley's Class of 2016. It was the first time she spoke publicly about her husband's death, and stressed the importance of resilience.
• Sandberg was given the honor to deliver the commencement address at the graduation of Virginia Tech's Class of 2017.