Co-CEO since 2008: Sheryl Sandberg left a Meta group on Facebook

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Co-Managing Director since 2008
Sheryl Sandberg Leaves Meta Facebook

01/06/2022, 11:27 PM

For years I worked closely with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Now Sheryl Sandberg is leaving the company. In the past, there were always rumors of a frosty relationship with the head of Facebook.

Senior manager Sheryl Sandberg, long considered the right-hand man of founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta group on Facebook, will leave the internet giant. “After 14 years I will be left dead,” Sandberg wrote on her Facebook page. The years she spent “alongside Mark” Zuckerberg, the company’s president and founder, were a huge honor, but now she’s stepping down as CEO.

The 52-year-old says she wants to focus more on her charitable activities in the future. The departure was planned for the fall, when their subordinate managers would have acquired new bosses. Meta shares fell about 4 percent on the news of the departure.

Sandberg gained his first experience at Google and joined Facebook in 2008. As the person in charge of the operational business, she played a leading role in the fact that the Internet grew from a relatively small player in the online business to a multi-billion dollar company.

In recent years, there has been speculation about a frosty relationship between the 38-year-old Zuckerberg and Sandberg – which has always been dismissed. Sandberg will remain on the board of Meta, the group’s supervisory body.

Facebook Ads Business Engineer

CEO Zuckerberg has recognized Sandberg as the architect of Facebook’s advertising business. “This is the end of an era,” said billionaire Zuckerberg. He remembered joining Sandberg in 2008 when he was 23 years old. At that time he did not understand anything about corporate management.

The idea of ​​using users’ insights and interests to give advertisers access to the target groups they want has proven to be very profitable.

When users switched from PCs to smartphones a decade ago, Facebook was initially unprepared with its ad banners. But Sandberg’s team quickly developed a system where ads are placed in the app between individual posts.

Sandberg told Bloomberg Financial Service it was “completely unlikely” that she would land a new job at a company or in politics. On the other hand, I learned a long time ago not to make any predictions about the future. Sandberg has also made a name for herself as an advocate for a greater role for women in business.

Facebook and Meta under pressure

At the same time, critics point out that Facebook data scandals, such as the controversy surrounding the analysis firm Cambridge Analytics, occurred under Sandberg upstairs. In recent years, there has been speculation about a frosty relationship between the 38-year-old Zuckerberg and Sandberg – which has always been dismissed. Sandberg will remain on the board of Meta, the group’s supervisory body.

Facebook and Meta are currently under pressure from several directions. Politicians are calling for it to be dismantled, and competition guards are increasingly targeting tech giants. Apple’s actions to further protect data on the iPhone also complicate Facebook’s business. A year ago, Apple mandated that app developers like Facebook must first obtain explicit permission from users so that they can collect information about their behavior across different services and sites. Many users refused.

However, Meta complains that this made it more difficult to customize the ads. Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post that Sandberg should not be replaced by someone else with the same job. He’s not sure if that’s ever possible, because Sandberg is a “superstar”.

At the same time, however, Zuckerberg also indicated his dissatisfaction with the earlier design of meta-structures: Maybe it’s time anyway to better align business and products, he wrote. Facebook has recently felt competition from video platform Tiktok with its short videos. Meta is now targeting its own apps like Facebook and Instagram for similar short videos.