In the summer of 2006, Kendall encountered his first difficult call. Middle East political groups were attempting to buy advertisements targeting college students that intended to stir up animosities on a given side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The ads were graphic, featuring gruesome images, including photos of dead children. The team agreed that they didn’t want to run the ads, but they were unsure how to justify their refusal to the political groups. Kendall quickly crafted a few lines stating that the company would not accept advertisements that incited hate or violence. He did not get approval from his bosses, and Zuckerberg did not weigh in.
It was all very informal; there was no legal vetting of the one-sheet policy paper. Content policy was far down on the company’s list of priorities. “We didn’t understand what we had in our hands at the time. We were one hundred people at the company with five million users, and speech was not on our radar,” another employee recalled. “Mark was focused on growth, experience, and product. We had the attitude that, how could this frivolous college website have any serious issues to grapple with?”
The CEO’s attention was trained elsewhere. Across the United States, high-speed internet access was growing. Better bandwidth at home and 24/7 internet access created fertile conditions for innovations in Silicon Valley—among which were new social networks focused on offering constant, ever-changing streams of information. Twitter, which had launched in July 2006, was on its way to reach a million users.19 It was used by everyone, ranging from the teenager next door to the man who would become the leader of the free world.
To stay ahead, Facebook would have to get bigger. Much bigger. Zuckerberg had set his sights on connecting every internet user in the world. But to get even close to that goal, he faced a daunting problem: how to monetize. In its fourth year, Facebook needed to come up with a plan to turn eyeballs into additional dollars. It needed to up its ad game. Investors were willing to tolerate rising costs and red ink—but only to a point. Expenses piled up as Zuckerberg hired more staff, rented more office space, and invested in servers and other equipment to keep pace with growth.
As Don Graham had sensed, Zuckerberg was a businessman with little enthusiasm for business. The year after Facebook was created, he reflected on his early experiences as a CEO in a documentary about Millennials by Ray Hafner and Derek Franzese. He mused aloud about the idea of finding someone else to handle all the parts of running a company that he found tiresome.
“The role of CEO changes with the size of the company,” the then-twenty-one-year-old Zuckerberg says in the film. He is sitting on a couch in the Palo Alto office, barefoot and wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts. “In a really small start-up, the CEO is very often like the founder or idea guy. If you are a big company, the CEO is really just managing and maybe doing some strategy but not necessarily being the guy with the big ideas.
“So, like, it’s a transition moving toward that and also, do I want to continue doing that? Or do I want to hire someone to do that and just focus more on like cool ideas? That’s more fun,” he says, chuckling.20
Chapter 3
What Business Are We In?
In the fall of 1989, more than a decade before Mark Zuckerberg arrived in Cambridge, Harvard professor Lawrence Summers walked into his Public Sector Economics course and scanned the room. It was a challenging class that delved into labor markets and the impact of social security and health care on broader economic markets. The thirty-four-year-old professor, a rising star in economics, could easily peg the suck-ups among the one hundred students in the lecture hall. They were the ones who sat at the front, trigger-ready to raise their hands. Summers found them annoying. But they were also typically the top performers.
So, months later, Summers was surprised when the top grade in the midterm exam went to a student who had barely caught his attention. He struggled to place the name. “Sheryl Sandberg? Who’s that?” he asked a teaching assistant.
Oh, the junior with the mop of dark, curly hair and the oversize sweatshirts, he recalled. She sat at the far right of the room among a group of friends. She didn’t speak up much, but she appeared to take copious notes. “She wasn’t one of those kids desperate to get called on, raising both hands,” he recalled.
As was his tradition, Summers invited the highest-scoring students to lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, located at the edge of Harvard Yard, the historic heart of campus. Sandberg shone during the lunch, prepared with good questions. Summers liked how she had done her research. But he was also struck by how different she was from most of the overachievers in his classes.
“There are a lot of undergrads who run around Harvard whom I called ‘closet presidents,’” Summers said. “They think they will be president of the U.S. someday and that they are really hot shit. Sheryl didn’t hold herself or treat herself as hugely important.”
At the time, Summers was beginning to draw national attention for his expertise on the intersection of government and economics; he had received his doctorate in economics at Harvard at the age of twenty-seven and had become one of the youngest tenured professors in the university’s recent history. He was not easily impressed, but Sandberg stood out from her peers. She asked him to support Women in Economics and Government, a student-run group she had cofounded with female classmates. The club’s goal was to increase the number of female faculty and students in the concentration; Sandberg rattled off data on the percentage of female economics majors, which was in the single digits. Summers accepted the invitation. She had clearly put a lot of thought into the club, and he appreciated her good manners and respectful demeanor.
“There are students who call me Larry before I tell them it’s okay to call me Larry. Then there are students who I’ve said to call me Larry and I have to remind to call me Larry and not Professor Summers,” he said. “Sheryl was the latter.”
Summers left during Sandberg’s senior year to become the chief economist for the World Bank, but he recruited her to Washington, DC, shortly after she received her diploma in the spring of 1991, to join him as a research assistant. (He had continued as her senior thesis adviser, but felt a “little guilty” for the limited time he could offer her from Washington.)
When Sandberg told her parents she was planning to return to her alma mater in the fall of 1993 to attend business school, they were skeptical. They had always assumed she’d end up in the public sector or at a nonprofit, and until recently, so had she. Her family was full of physicians and nonprofit directors. Her father was an ophthalmologist and, with her mother, had led the South Florida chapter of the Soviet Jewry movement, a national effort to raise awareness of the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union. Sheryl’s younger siblings followed their father’s professional path; her brother became a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon, and her sister, a pediatrician. The World Bank made sense to them. Law school seemed like a more logical next step.
A senior colleague at the World Bank, Lant Pritchett, who dubbed Sandberg “a Mozart of human relations,” had encouraged her to go to business school instead. “You should be leading people who go to law school,” he said. Years later, Sandberg’s father told Pritchett he was right.