Sandberg had a couple false starts in the ensuing years. In June 1994,1 in the middle of her MBA program, she married Brian Kraff, a Columbia Business School graduate and start-up founder in Washington, DC. The marriage ended after one year; Sandberg later told friends that she got married too young and that it wasn’t a good match: Kraff seemed content to settle into a comfortable life in Washington, while she was more ambitious.
MBA in hand, she went to Los Angeles to work at the consulting firm McKinsey and Company, but she found she wasn’t interested in management consulting. After a year, in late 1996, she rejoined Summers in Washington, at the Treasury Department. There, she encountered a stroke of good fortune. A constant stream of CEOs passed through the doors of Treasury to meet with Summers, and one of them was Eric Schmidt, a tech executive who was poised to take the reins at Google.
Sandberg was drawn to the dynamism of Silicon Valley. Companies like eBay were enabling millions of people to transform themselves into entrepreneurs. Yahoo and Google promised to expand knowledge across the world, bringing search and free communications tools like email and chat to Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Founded as a garage start-up in Seattle in 1995, Amazon was roiling the U.S. retail sector, with $2.7 billion in revenue in 2000.
In particular, Sandberg was curious about the profound impact tech was having on people’s lives and the potential of companies to lead social movements. “Sheryl wants to have impact with a capital I,” a friend explained. “Yes, money is important, but more important is the idea of doing something big and with impact.”
Sandberg had traveled with Summers to meet with Schmidt, then the chief executive of the business software giant Novell. Unlike Wall Street and Fortune 500 executives, who used chauffeured Lincoln Town Cars and dressed in expensive custom-tailored suits, Schmidt picked them up from the San Francisco airport in his own car, wearing jeans. They ate at a local pizza place with Yahoo’s founder, Jerry Yang, who had just become a billionaire. Sandberg was used to the ways of conventional business and political power, but here were these men with no interest in stuffy protocols exchanging both the ideas in their heads and the food on their plates with all the casualness in the world.2
The memory stayed with her. In 2001, when Schmidt became the chief executive of Google, he offered her a job as a business unit manager. It was a vague title, and there were no business units at the time. Sandberg told Schmidt she was reluctant to join without a clear mandate. “Sheryl, don’t be an idiot,” Schmidt said. “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, get on, don’t ask what seat.”3 The company was the most exciting start-up at the time, its name already used as a verb for finding anything online, and it was destined to have one of the biggest IPOs on the market. But Sandberg was primarily taken with the vision of its founders, two former doctoral students at Stanford whose aim was to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. After Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the search engine in 1998, they’d adopted an unofficial motto: “Don’t Be Evil.”
This sense of idealism resonated with Sandberg. The work felt important. She also had personal reasons to return to the West Coast. Her sister, Michelle, lived in San Francisco, and Sandberg had many friends in Los Angeles. She began to date one of those friends, Dave Goldberg, a music tech start-up founder in 2002. They were engaged six months later. After he sold his company, Launch, to Yahoo in June 2003, Goldberg stayed in LA at first, but joined Sandberg in the Bay Area a year later. “I lost the coin flip as to where we were going to live,” he said.4 In 2004, they were married in a desert wedding in Carefree, Arizona.
Sandberg thrived at Google and was credited with growing the search engine’s nascent advertising business into a $16.6 billion enterprise.5 She was quoted in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Newsweek, and spoke at conferences like the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Start-up founders got headlines, but those in the know recognized that it was people like Sandberg who worked behind the scenes to turn early-stage start-ups into Fortune 100 corporations.
She met Zuckerberg at a Christmas party thrown by former Yahoo executive Dan Rosensweig in December 2007 at his home in Woodside. Zuckerberg was avoiding small talk, but he was interested in talking to Sandberg. As guests milled around them socializing, the two discussed business. He described his goal of turning every person in the country with an internet connection into a Facebook user. It might have sounded like a fantasy to others, but Sandberg was intrigued and threw out ideas about what it would take to build a business to keep up with that kind of growth. “It was actually smart. It was substantive,”6 Zuckerberg later recalled.
That they would cross paths was inevitable, given their many connections. Rosensweig was one of several friends Zuckerberg and Sandberg had in common. Goldberg had worked with Rosensweig at Yahoo; Rosensweig had shaken hands with Zuckerberg over the failed Yahoo deal. Roger McNamee was an early investor in Facebook, and his partner at his investment firm, Elevation Partners, was Marc Bodnick, who was married to Sandberg’s sister, Michelle.7
Zuckerberg and Sandberg ended up talking for more than an hour at that party, standing in the same spot near the entrance. She was intrigued by the guy who had turned down Yahoo’s $1 billion buyout offer and by the nerve it took to walk away in the face of employee protests in support of the deal. And she found his ambition of exponentially increasing Facebook’s fifty million users irresistible. As she would later tell Dan Rose, a former vice president at Facebook, she felt that she was “put on this planet to scale organizations.” Facebook’s earliest business executives, including Sean Parker, didn’t know how to run or grow a business at global scale.
After the Christmas party, Zuckerberg and Sandberg met at her favorite neighborhood restaurant, Flea Street, and over several long dinners at her home in Atherton. As their discussions grew more serious, they hid their meetings to avoid speculation about her departure from Google. They couldn’t meet at Zuckerberg’s apartment, a studio in Palo Alto with only a futon mattress on the floor, a small table, and two chairs. (In 2007, Google’s founders, Brin and Page, and Chief Executive Eric Schmidt discussed a partnership with Zuckerberg in the tiny apartment. Zuckerberg and Page sat at the table, Brin sat on the futon, and Schmidt sat on the floor.)
In their conversations, Zuckerberg laid out his vision for what he called “the social web,” how Facebook was an entirely new communications technology, one where news entertainment would be generated for free by its users. Sandberg walked Zuckerberg through how she had helped scale Google’s ad business, turning search queries into data that gave advertisers rich insights about users, contributing to the company’s spectacular cash flow. She explained how Facebook would increase its number of employees, budgeting more money for capital expenses like data centers, and grow revenues at a manageable pace to keep up with the explosion of new users.
Their conversations ran so long that Sandberg, who had a newborn and a toddler, had to kick Zuckerberg out so she could get some sleep.