As FACEBOOK prepares to raise US$10 billion from their IPO in MAY 2012, all eyes are on the SHERYL SANDBERG, the woman who gave
Facebook their profit strategy and is well on the way to building Facebook into the first $100 billion dollar online company in the world! Come May 2012, Sandberg will emerge as AMERICA’s first self-made WOMAN billionaire of Silicon Valley!
B ack in 2007,
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg had a difficult problem on his hands. While he had already founded
the largest and most valuable social networking website in the world, Mark’s problem was that it was still free and it was still gobbling up hundred thousands of investment capital each day. Unless Facebook found a way to make money soon, what he had was in effect a very cool, but very profitless website. He needed a solution and that solution arrived in the tail end of the Year of the Boar in 2007. At a Christmas Party organised by Yahoo!’s COO Dan Rosensweig, Mark met Sheryl Sandberg,
the
woman who transformed Google from a humble search engine site into the most profitable advertising spinner in the world. After several months of courting her, Sheryl finally left Google to join Facebook in 2008, taking her place as Mark Zuckerberg’s right hand lady. So who is Sheryl Sandberg? She
is Silicon Valley’s Rising Phoenix Lady… an EARTH ROOSTER, born in 1969 into a family of medical practitioners. Sheryl chose not to become a doctor but opted to study
36 FENGSHUIWORLD | MARCH / APRIL 2012
“managing hypergrowth,” Sandberg is one of the few executives on earth with a demonstrated knack for it.
“Whether you call it “scaling the company” or
It’s clear why Zuckerberg, in particular, needed her.” - Vogue, May 2010
Economics at Harvard University, and was awarded the John H. Williams Prize for graduating as top student of her class. With her stunning academic record, Sheryl made a strong impression on Larry Summers her Economics professor and it was he who became Sheryl’s mentor and helped launch her career. Having come from a family with strong views on politics and championing the underprivileged, Sheryl accepted Larry Summers’ offer to work as his research assistant when he became Chief Economist at the World Bank, involving herself in health projects to eradicate leprosy and AIDS in India. In 1995, Sheryl
returned to
Harvard on a Baker and Ford scholarship to earn her MBA with distinction, and went to work for McKinsey’s as a management consultant right after graduation. After 5 years in consultancy, she was invited to work for Larry Summers again, but this time to serve as Chief
of Staff for the United States Treasury during the presidency of Bill Clinton. In 2001, Sheryl joined Google and became their Vice president of Global Online Sales, a move that completely changed everything for Google. Sheryl entered Google before their IPO, at a time when their income statements were showing losses. During her 7-year stint with Google, Sheryl turned it around and created Google Adsense, a brilliant strategy that enabled the technical giant to monetize its market leader position as the most popular search engine in the world. When Google went public, Sheryl became an instant multi-millionaire when her stock options went up and up! True to her philanthropic values, Sheryl then gave back to the community by pioneering Google’s charity arm “Google.org”, a foundation that provides free or heavily subsidized use of Google’s integrated services to non-profit organisations around the world.