Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Kara Sandberg (born August 28, 1969) is an American technology executive, philanthropist and writer. She was the chief operating officer of Meta Platforms from 2008 to 2022 and is the founder of LeanIn.Org.

Sandberg is the first woman to have been elected to Facebook's board of directors. As head of the company's advertising business, Sandberg has been credited for making the company profitable. Prior to joining Facebook as its COO, Sandberg was vice president of global online sales and operations at Google and was involved in its philanthropic arm Google.org. Sandberg graduated from Harvard University, later serving as a research assistant to Lawrence Summers at the World Bank and subsequently his chief of staff when he became Bill Clinton's United States Secretary of the Treasury.

In 2012, she was named in the Time 100, an annual list of the most influential people in the world. On Forbes magazine's 2021 billionaires list, Sandberg is reported to have a net worth of US$1.7 billion, owing to her stock holdings in Facebook and in other companies. In 2022, she announced she would be stepping down from Meta in the fall but would remain on its board. In January 2024, she announced that she would not stand for re-election to the board in May 2024.

As of July 2025, Sandberg's net worth is estimated to be $2.4 billion according to Forbes.

Sandberg was born on August 28, 1969, in Washington, D.C. into a Jewish family. She is the eldest of three children, born to Adele (née Einhorn) and Joel Sandberg. Her father is an ophthalmologist, while her mother, a college professor of French, has roots tracing back to Belarus, as her grandparents were immigrants from there.

Her family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida, when she was two years old. She attended North Miami Beach High School, from which she graduated in 1987 ranked ninth in her class. She was sophomore class president, became a member of the National Honor Society, and was on the senior class executive board. Sandberg taught aerobics in the 1980s while in high school.

In 1987, Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College. She graduated in 1991 summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts 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 also met Professor Lawrence 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 degree, graduating with the highest distinction. In her first year of business school, she earned a fellowship.

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 Lawrence Summers, who was then serving as the United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton, as his chief of staff. Sandberg assisted in the Treasury's work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis.

Sandberg joined Google in 2001, where 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. During her time at Google, she grew the ad and sales team from four people to 4,000.

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 chief operating officer, but thought of Sandberg as "a perfect fit" for this role. In March 2008, Facebook announced the hiring of Sandberg for the role of COO and her leaving Google.

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, (as of 2012) she oversaw the firm's business operations including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy and communications.

In 2012, she became the eighth member of Facebook's board of directors.

In 2008, Sandberg wrote an article for The Huffington Post in support of her mentor, Larry Summers, who was under fire for his comments about women. She was a keynote speaker at the Jewish Community Federation's Business Leadership Council in 2010. In December 2010, she gave a TED speech titled "Why we have too few women leaders." In May 2011, she gave the Commencement Address at the Barnard College graduation ceremony. She spoke as the keynote speaker at the Class Day ceremony at the Harvard Business School in May 2012. In April 2013, she was the keynote speaker during the second annual Entrepreneur Weekend at Colgate University, in Hamilton, New York. In 2015, she signed an open letter which the ONE Campaign had been collecting signatures for; the letter was addressed to Angela Merkel and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, urging them to focus on women as they serve as the head of the G7 in Germany and the AU in South Africa respectively, which will start to set the priorities in development funding before a main UN summit in September 2015 that will establish new development goals for the generation. In 2016, she delivered the Commencement Address at the University of California, Berkeley graduation ceremony. It was the first time she spoke publicly about her husband's death, and stressed the importance of resilience. The following year she delivered the Commencement Address to Virginia Tech's Class of 2017. On June 8, 2018, she gave the Commencement Address for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. She has also served as a member of the advisory board of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

Sandberg released her first book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, co-authored by Nell Scovell and published by Knopf on March 11, 2013.

The book concerns 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 had sold more than one million copies and was on top of the bestseller lists since its launch.

The book has been reviewed by various media outlets. In Lean Out, former Facebook employee Marissa Orr affirms that women should not have to mimic men and that society needs to change to adapt to women's issues instead. The book has also been criticized by Vox Media for overlooking the struggles of mothers who may not be able to "lean in." Zoe Williams in The Guardian referred to Lean In as "an infantilising, reactionary guide for ambitious women." She emphasizes Sandberg's contradictory approach in both criticizing and upholding misogynistic workplace practices. Sandberg has been denounced by The Guardian as a COO who avoids engaging in this leadership crisis.

Furthermore, following the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Sandberg's willingness to actually lean in was questioned by Roger McNamee. "She's not leaning in at all," McNamee said, in a reference to Sandberg's widely read book published five years before. "If ever there was a time for her to lean in, this is it."

In November 2016, Sandberg renamed her Lean In Foundation to the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, after herself and her late husband. This new foundation serves as an umbrella for LeanIn.Org and a new organization around her book Option B. Sandberg also transferred roughly $100,000,000 in Facebook stock to fund the foundation and other charitable endeavors.

In October 2024, Sandberg donated $5 million through her charitable foundation to Marshall University for its 'Marshall For All' program.

Sandberg married Brian Kraff in 1993 and divorced a year later. In 2004, she married Dave Goldberg, then an executive with Yahoo! and later CEO of SurveyMonkey. The couple had a son and a daughter.

Sandberg and Goldberg frequently discussed being in a shared earning/shared parenting marriage. Sandberg also raised the issue of single parenting conflicting strongly with professional and economic development in America.

Sandberg has been ranked one of the 50 "Most Powerful Women in Business" by Fortune Magazine:

In 2007 she was ranked No. 29 and was the youngest woman on the list.

On the list of 50 "Women to Watch" by The Wall Street Journal.

She was ranked No. 19 on that list in 2007.

She was ranked No. 21 on that list in 2008.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Knopf. 2013. ISBN 978-0385349949

Written with Adam Grant: Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy. Knopf. 2017. ISBN 978-1524732684