Sheryl Kara Sandberg born August 28, [ 2 ] is an American technology executive, philanthropist, and writer. Sandberg served as chief operating officer COO of Meta Platforms , a position from which she stepped down in August As head of the company's advertising business, Sandberg was credited for making the company profitable.
In , she was named in the Time , an annual list of the most influential people in the world. Sandberg was born in in Washington, D. Her family moved to North Miami Beach , Florida, when she was two years old.
In , Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics. In , she enrolled at Harvard Business School and in she earned her MBA, graduating with the highest distinction. From to 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.
She later joined Google in , 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.
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. In , she became the eighth member and the first woman of Facebook's board of directors. In April , it was reported that Sandberg had sold over half of her shares in Facebook since the company went public. At the time of Facebook's IPO, she held approximately 41 million shares in the company; after several rounds of sales she is left with around The New York Times published a report in detailing Sandberg's role in handling Facebook's public relations after revelations of Russian interference in the United States elections and its Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
