Why there might not be another COO like Meta's Sheryl Sandberg

Sandberg's India visit in 2014 was no lower in profile than Jeff Bezos' two months later

In 2008, when Sheryl Sandberg was getting ready to join Facebook as its chief operating officer, she made three demands:
* She would sit next to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive officer
* Zuckerberg will meet her one-on-one every week
* During the one-on-ones, he would give her honest feedback
 
Zuckerberg agreed, and went a step further. The feedback, he said, must come from both sides.
 
Then he went another step further. Soon after Sandberg joined, Zuckerberg had this realisation that he had not really had a chance to travel. So, he took off for a month without leaving many instructions for the new COO, nor was he easy to reach during his month off.
 
“It seemed crazy – but it was a display of trust I have never forgotten,” said Sandberg in a Facebook post announcing her decision to step down as the COO of Meta, as the company owning Facebook is now called.
 
That trust sowed the seeds of what would become a unique equation between a founder and a professional COO. It was this trust that helped Sandberg become a close and commanding second face for Facebook – not usual for a professional manager in a startup culture dominated by a founder whose t-shirts and hoodies have become a thing. It is their near-equal partnership during the last 14 years that made Meta what it is today.
 
This kind of thing happens once in a generation, not least because founders such as Zuckerberg and companies such as Meta do not roll around too frequently. This is what Steve Jobs might have had in mind when he got John Sculley from Pepsi to run Apple in 1983. We know how that story ended – Sculley fired Jobs and Apple went downhill.
 
Compared with Jobs-Sculley, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had a far more fruitful association with Eric Schmidt, whom they hired as the CEO of Google in 2001. Schmidt’s years at Google saw tremendous growth, but his most impactful contribution, as Wired magazine put it, was to redefine adult supervision through “a delicate balancing act” of being the boss of the two founders as well as their student.
 
Schmidt was 46 when he joined Google; Page and Brin were both 28. The founders got Schmidt because they had promised their two main venture capital investors they would get an experienced CEO once the company took off.
 
The circumstances of Sandberg’s joining Meta were different.
 
Leaning in
 
Sandberg and Zuckerberg first met at a party. He was 23, the hotshot founder of a fledgling startup. She was 38, already a seasoned professional having served as vice-president of global online sales and operations at Google and chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department under former President Bill Clinton. They got introduced right at the door and talked for most of the night.
 
Joining Facebook on March 24, 2008, Sandberg took time to fit in. In the beginning, she said in her post, she would schedule a meeting with an engineer for nine o’clock in the morning, but no one would show up, assuming she had meant nine in the evening. “Who comes to work at nine in the morning?” In time, she would go on to shape parts of Facebook in her own image.

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg | Photo: Sheryl Sandberg/Facebook

 
She took charge of the business operations. Zuckerberg was now free to focus on what he was good at and loved doing: developing products (what Jobs wanted to do when he brought in Sculley). Together, the two engineered Meta’s momentous shift from PC to mobile, which is a gift that keeps on giving as the global smartphone population keeps on growing.
 
Sandberg, despite never becoming the CEO of Meta, is seen as the brain behind the gigantic advertising machinery that is Facebook’s business model, and gets credit for picking up the threads of a startup and turning it into a revenue magnet.
 
“When Sheryl joined me in 2008, I was only 23 years old and I barely knew anything about running a company… Sheryl architected our ads business, hired great people, forged our management culture, and taught me how to run a company… and she deserves the credit for so much of what Meta is today,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post about Sandberg’s exit.
 
Despite the boss’s ringing endorsement, the jury would stay out for a while on Sandberg’s legacy. She cannot avoid being spoken of in the same breath as some of the controversies – involving critical and sensitive matters such as privacy and misinformation -- surrounding Facebook. But her status as a global corporate celebrity is undeniable.
 
Lightning strikes
 
Sandberg’s celebrity was all too evident when she came to India in the monsoon of 2014. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the world’s richest, came a couple of months after her and it was clear that Sandberg’s visit was no lower in profile than Bezos’.

Sheryl Sandberg with village women at Kalthana Village, Rajasthan | Photo: Sheryl Sandberg/Facebook

 
That was not Sandberg’s first visit to India. She was here in the early 1990s, working on a World Bank leprosy project. Back then, there was no internet and her hotel had a rickety treadmill.
 
Things had changed by the time she came in 2014. Everywhere Sandberg went, she owned the place and the audience. People responded to her, connected with her, and went away enchanted. One could see why Zuckerberg once said few combined IQ and EQ in a single package as well as Sandberg did.
 
She could always connect with audiences, right from the time when, in the sixth grade, she stood on a stool to look over the lectern during an oratory contest. She was the youngest participant. She came second.
 
In later years, few would be able to beat her at this game. Her profile rose higher with her advocacy of the issues women face in the workplace -- as embodied in her 2013 global bestseller, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which some have dubbed “the feminist manifesto”. When her husband died, she openly and evocatively articulated her grief. That, in a corporate culture that ranks low on the emotional scale, raised her status as a professional icon.
 
Sandberg’s replacement at Meta will have a role different from what she did. It will be a more traditional COO job, focused internally and operationally. “Looking forward, I don't plan to replace Sheryl's role in our existing structure. I'm not sure that would be possible since she's a superstar who defined the COO role in her own unique way,” Zuckerberg said in his post.
 
He would know that Sandberg is a superstar not just because of who she is and what she did, but also because where Providence placed her in space and time. And Providence, like lightning, does not strike the same place too often.