On Sandberg’s first day, Zuckerberg called an all-employee meeting and introduced the COO as the person who was going to help him “scale” the company. Sandberg gave a short speech explaining her role.
“Who’s Boz?” she then asked the crowd. She heard he had written a post expressing concern that the company was growing too quickly. He was afraid Facebook would lose its hungry hacker culture.
Clearly surprised, Boz sheepishly raised his hand. She thanked him. His post had helped her decide to join the company, she said. Her responsibility was to grow the company while retaining what made it special. “We’re going to have one thousand people someday, and we’re going to have ten thousand people someday, and then forty thousand people someday,” she said. “And we’re going to get better, not worse. That’s why I’m here. To make us bigger and better, not worse.”
It was a good pep talk. The mostly male room of engineers warmed up. She was coming in to steer the business safely, not change its direction. It had been traveling fast, and she was there to make sure it became successful and not just another tech start-up with fifteen minutes of hype.
Zuckerberg, for his part, wasn’t as eloquent. He mentioned to staff that Sandberg had “good skin,” and said they should have “a crush” on her,13 according to Losse.
Sandberg was like an alien to the young, upstart staff: she’d been a North Miami Beach High School student with big hair, big shoulder pads, and creamy blue eyeshadow when Zuckerberg, and most of his employees, were still in diapers. And on the surface at least, it was a strange landing for her. For much of her adult life, she had advocated for gender equity. Her college thesis examined how women in abusive domestic relationships were more likely to suffer financially. As a young associate at McKinsey, she stood up to a client who harassed her about dating his son. And at Google, she started Women@Google, a speakers’ series that brought Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, and other prominent women leaders to the company’s Mountain View campus.
Soon after she joined, Sandberg remarked that Facebook felt like the early days of Google. She didn’t comment on the male-driven culture, but employees like Naomi Gleit, one of the first women hired at the company, said she was relieved to see another woman in charge. Sandberg had gone to nearly every desk to introduce herself in the early days and made a particular point of spending time with female employees.
But not every female employee found herself in Sandberg’s favor. “It was very clear, starting in the second month or so, whom she was most interested in helping. They were the ones that looked like her and came to work with their gym bags or yoga bags and blown-out hair,” said one early employee. “They were not scruffy engineers who were in the trenches daily on male-dominated teams.”
A month into her new job, Sandberg gathered half a dozen members of the ad team for a working dinner in one of the Palo Alto office conference rooms. In attendance were Kendall and Rose, who was managing a partnership Facebook held with Microsoft for display ads. Chamath Palihapitiya, the head of growth; Kang-Xing Jin, a software engineer whom Zuckerberg had met at Harvard; and Matt Cohler, the head of product management, rounded out the group.14
Zuckerberg had gone on a rare extended vacation. The site had become global and had just launched in Spanish, with 2.8 million users in Latin America and Spain, but he himself had limited life experience and exposure outside his bubbles of Dobbs Ferry, Exeter, Harvard, and Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs, who had become a mentor or sorts, taking Zuckerberg on a few long walks in the hills behind Stanford University, encouraged him to see the world. Zuckerberg set off on a one-month trip, with stops in Germany, Turkey, Japan, and India, where he spent time at an ashram that Jobs had suggested he visit.
The trip was perfectly timed, affording Sandberg the opportunity to plot out the reinvention of the revenue-generating part of the company. “What business are we in?” she asked the leaders while scribbling furiously on a whiteboard. A subscription business or an advertising business? Did they want to make money by selling data through payments or through commerce?
There wasn’t much deliberation. Of course Facebook would be free, the executives said, so their best path to make money was through ads.
Sandberg nodded. To do this well, she continued, they would have to pinpoint what Facebook really had to offer. The difference between Google and Facebook, she continued, was the kind of data the two companies collected. Employing a well-known metaphor used by MBAs and Madison Avenue types, she described reaching customers through advertising as a funnel. Google, she explained, was at the bottom of the funnel, the narrow neck at which consumers are closest to pulling out their credit cards. Google used data from search queries to push over the finish line those users already in the mood to shop. Google didn’t really care who the individual was. It cared only about the key words entered into its search bar so it could churn out ads targeted for the search results.
The meeting was an exercise in the elementary aspects of advertising, but she wanted to start it with them all on the same page.
Just as the internet was opening up entire new worlds of information and connection for its users, it was also opening up a whole new world of promise for advertisers, she continued. The question was, how best to capture this audience? The visual real estate was entirely different from print, and so was viewers’ attention span.
In 1994, an engineer at Netscape had created the “cookie,” a string of code dropped by the Web browser to track users as they surfed sites across the internet, data that was then sold to advertisers.15 The cookie opened up the possibility of deeper tracking called “behavioral advertising” and put a new emphasis on the importance of data collecting. But for more than a decade, internet advertising was dominated by static, uninventive postage stamp–size ads, banner ads, and obnoxious pop-ups. Advertisers didn’t see a whole lot of return despite the ability to track users.
Many of the people in the conference room that day had been working on Facebook’s early ad targeting, which had started soon after the platform got off the ground. But their actual ads hadn’t developed beyond banner ads and the occasional sponsored link; internet users were ignoring them, studies showed. Much of the ad business was essentially outsourced to Microsoft, which in 2006 struck up a deal with Facebook to sell and place banner ads on the social network.16
Sandberg had been in charge of Google’s in-house ad auction known as “AdWords” and of another program, called “AdSense,” which was used by publishers to run text and graphic ads on sites across the internet.17 The biggest innovation was Google’s use of search data to spit out ads directly related to a user’s query. Type in “Hawaii flights cheap,” and an auction immediately ran behind the scene for vendors to bid to place their ads for Honolulu budget hotels, swimwear, and surfing lessons within search results. It was the purest and most powerful way of directly pitching products to someone already in the mood for shopping.