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In some ways, they were opposites. Sandberg was a master manager and delegator. At Google, her calendar was scheduled to the minute. Meetings rarely ran long and typically culminated in action items. At thirty-eight, she was fifteen years older than Zuckerberg, was in bed by 9:30 p.m. and up every morning by 6 for a hard cardio workout. Zuckerberg was still dating his Harvard girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, who had just graduated and was working at a private school in San Jose, thirty minutes away from Palo Alto. But he was focused mostly on his work. He was a night crawler, coding way past midnight and up in time to straggle into the office late in the morning. Dan Rose recalled being pulled into meetings at 11 p.m., the middle of Zuckerberg’s workday. Sandberg was hyper-organized and took voluminous notes in a spiral-bound scheduler, the kind she had used since college. He carried around his laptop and would show up late to meetings, or not at all if he was in a conversation or a coding groove he found more interesting.

Zuckerberg recognized that Sandberg excelled at, even enjoyed, all the parts of running a company that he found unfulfilling. She had high-level contacts at the biggest advertising agencies and with the top executives of Fortune 500 companies. And she would bring to Facebook an asset that her new boss knew he would need: experience in Washington, DC.

Zuckerberg wasn’t interested in politics and didn’t keep up with the news. The year before, while shadowing Donald Graham for a few days at the Post, a reporter handed him a book on politics that he had written. Zuckerberg said to Graham, “I’m never going to have time to read this.”

“I teased him because there were very few things where you’ll find unanimity about, and one of those things is that reading books is a good way to learn. There is no dissent on that point,” Graham said. “Mark eventually came to agree with me on that, and like everything he did, he picked it up very quickly and became a tremendous reader.”

Yet, in the lead-up to his talks with Sandberg, Zuckerberg had had a brush with controversy that stoked concerns about potential regulations. Government officials were beginning to question if free platforms like Facebook were harming users with the data they collected. In December 2007, the Federal Trade Commission issued self-regulatory principles for behavioral advertising to protect data privacy.8 Zuckerberg needed help navigating Washington. “Mark understood that some of the biggest challenges Facebook was going to face in the future were going to revolve around issues of privacy and regulatory concerns,” Rose said. “[Sandberg] obviously had deep experience there, and this was very important to Mark.”

To Sandberg, the move to Facebook, a company led by an awkward twenty-three-year-old college dropout, wasn’t as counterintuitive as it might have appeared. She was a vice president at Google, but she had hit a ceiling: there were several vice presidents at her level, and they were all competing for promotions, and Eric Schmidt wasn’t looking for a number two. Men who weren’t performing as well as she were getting recognized and receiving higher titles, former Google colleagues maintained. “Despite leading a bigger, more profitable, faster-growing business than the men who were her peers, she was not given the title president, but they were,” recalled Kim Scott, a leader in the ad sales division. “It was bullshit.”

Sandberg was looking for a new endeavor. She’d been courted for multiple jobs, including a senior executive role at the Washington Post. Don Graham had struck up a relationship with her when she was working for Summers, and in January 2001 he had tried to recruit her during a luncheon with his mother, Katharine, but she chose to join Google instead. Six years later, he tried to recruit her again. He was nervous about the decline in print news publishing and offered her a role as a senior executive and the chance to turn an old media brand into an online powerhouse. Again, she declined.

In spite of the fact that he had been rejected by both Zuckerberg and Sandberg, Don Graham remained close with them, and they continued to seek his counsel. When each asked him for his opinion about the other, he encouraged them to join forces. Toward the end of January 2008, less than a month after they first met, Zuckerberg accompanied Sandberg and other executives on Google’s corporate jet to the World Economic Forum in Davos, and over several days in the Swiss Alps, they continued to discuss a vision for Facebook.9 On March 4, Facebook sent out a press release naming Sandberg as chief operating officer of the company.

The headline the Wall Street Journal gave its coverage of the hire, “Facebook CEO Seeks Help as Site Grows Up,” spelled out Sandberg’s challenge. She was in charge of operations, growing revenues, and global expansion. She was also in charge of sales, business development, public policy, and communications.

“Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg will face mounting pressure to find a better business model,” the article read. “Facebook’s Web traffic continues to rise. But industry watchers are now questioning whether that growth will ever translate into Google-size revenue.”10

At the time of Sandberg’s appointment, the company’s four hundred employees occupied several offices around University Avenue, an upscale thoroughfare of boutiques and restaurants in Palo Alto that was within walking distance of the juniper- and palm-lined campus of Stanford University. Apple CEO Steve Jobs lived nearby and was sometimes seen walking in the neighborhood in his trademark black turtleneck and jeans.

The office culture hadn’t changed much since the company’s earliest days. Half-consumed bottles of Gatorade and Snapple populated workstations that held stacks of coding books. Employees rode scooters and RipStiks down the halls. Achievements were invariably celebrated with booze drunk from Red SOLO cups.

Plenty of other start-ups offered more perks. But these employees had chosen Facebook in large part because of Zuckerberg himself. He was one of them, a “product guy” who knew how to make things. It was an intensely competitive environment. (On a whiteboard at the Emerson Street office, an engineer had jokingly kept a tally of the number of times he needed to go to the bathroom but had resisted, a barometer of his focus and commitment.) Engineers placed bets on how late into the night they could code complex projects.

One engineer who helped set the tone was Andrew Bosworth, a Harvard grad whom Zuckerberg hired in 2006 to help lead engineering and who was one of the creators of the News Feed. Bosworth, known to all as Boz, was an intimidating presence, fully bald and with the stature of a linebacker. He was a computer science TA at Harvard when he met Zuckerberg in an Artificial Intelligence course; the two kept in touch after Zuckerberg didn’t return for his junior year. Boz was a jokester and full of energy, with no filter on his thoughts. He drove the engineers hard and embraced a tough-guy image. He had a joke catchphrase, “I’ll punch you in the face,” which colleagues grew accustomed to hearing. It was emblazoned on a T-shirt he would wear every so often. Some employees complained, and at the end of 2007, in a winding Facebook post, he announced that he was retiring it: “I enjoyed my moment in the sun as a nominal part of the budding Facebook culture,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, it has come to my attention that as a loud, 6ʹ3ʺ, 250lb, often bearded beast of man I am not well served by an intimidating reputation.”11

It was a difficult place for Facebook’s few female employees. Katherine Losse, employee number fifty-one and eventually Zuckerberg’s speechwriter, would later recall the demeaning comments casually made about women around the office. One day, speaking to a female colleague, a male coworker said, “I want to put my teeth in your ass.” At a company meeting in which the incident was raised, Zuckerberg attempted to dismiss the comment, asking, “What does that even mean?” Later, when Losse followed up with Zuckerberg, she was struck by his callowness. “He listened to me, which I appreciated, but understanding the crux of the matter; that is, that women by virtue of our low rank and small numbers were already in a vulnerable situation in the office, did not seem to register.”12