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Sheryl Sandberg

b. 1969 Specialist

A Harvard economist who built Facebook's ad machine, then its conscience

Portrait of Sheryl Sandberg — World Economic Forum from Cologny, Switzerland — 2013 — CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Sheryl Sandberg was born in Washington, D.C., to an ophthalmologist father and a French-professor mother, and grew up mostly in North Miami Beach after the family moved there when she was two. She graduated ninth in her North Miami Beach High School class, went on to Harvard College, and earned an economics degree summa cum laude in 1991, then a Harvard MBA in 1995 with highest distinction. In between and after, she worked for economist Lawrence Summers, first as a research assistant at the World Bank on health projects in India covering leprosy, AIDS and blindness, then as his chief of staff at the Treasury Department while he served as Treasury Secretary.

Sandberg joined Google in 2001 to run global online sales, building the team from four people to roughly 4,000 and turning search advertising into the company's dominant revenue engine. Mark Zuckerberg recruited her as Facebook's chief operating officer in March 2008, when the company had no real business model and a 23-year-old founder with little interest in building one; Sandberg built the advertising machine instead, and Facebook was profitable within two years. She ran sales, marketing, policy, communications and human resources for the next 14 years, becoming the company's first female board member in 2012 and turning Meta's ad business into one of the most profitable in the history of media before stepping down as chief operating officer in August 2022.

The book that made her a household name beyond Silicon Valley, Lean In, sold more than a million copies in 2013 and also drew a real backlash — critics, many of them feminists, argued its advice about ambition and confidence assumed a level of institutional power and household support most working women do not have. Two years later her husband, Dave Goldberg, died suddenly of cardiac arrhythmia on a family vacation in Mexico, leaving Sandberg a widow raising two children while running one of the largest companies in the world; she wrote about the grief afterward in Option B. The company she had helped build into an advertising giant became, on her watch, the subject of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal and years of scrutiny over Russian election interference, and in January 2025 a Delaware court sanctioned her personally for deleting emails relevant to shareholder litigation over exactly those failures.

Sandberg left Meta's board in January 2024, a year and a half after stepping down as chief operating officer, and now runs Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, the firm she built with her husband Tom Bernthal, whom she married in 2022, to back health-care and software startups. In 2024 she directed and produced Screams Before Silence, a documentary on sexual violence during the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, calling it the most important work of her life and describing herself as a proud Zionist, a public turn that has drawn both praise and sharp criticism. Whether she is remembered chiefly for building Facebook's advertising empire, for Lean In's influence on career advice, or for the controversies of her final years running the platform is still being argued rather than settled.

Lifespan

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Sheryl Sandberg's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

Notable works

Google global online sales company
Grew the ad sales team from 4 to roughly 4,000 2001
Facebook advertising business company
Built as COO into the revenue engine that made the company profitable 2008
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead book
Sold more than a million copies; launched the LeanIn.Org nonprofit 2013
Option B book
Written with Adam Grant after her husband's death 2017
Screams Before Silence film
Documentary on sexual violence during the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack 2024