Mark Zuckerberg employed Sheryl Sandberg as Fb’s chief working officer in 2008 because the social community was rising quick and making an attempt to draw funding. Zuckerberg, who based Fb in his Harvard dorm room, was simply 23 – Sandberg, then 38, was deemed “the grownup within the room”.

The previous gross sales government at Google and chief of workers on the US Treasury rose to turn out to be one of the influential figures in world expertise sector and certainly one of only a few ladies on the high of the trade. She additionally made some huge cash – after promoting most of her stake in Fb’s father or mother firm, Meta, which additionally owns Instagram and WhatsApp, she is now value near $2bn (£1.6bn).

Sandberg, now 54, left that position a 12 months and a half in the past and on Wednesday evening she introduced she was leaving Meta’s board too. “This seems like the fitting time to step away,” she wrote in a Fb publish, as Meta was “well-positioned for the long run”.

“Thanks Sheryl for the extraordinary contributions you’ve got made to our firm and neighborhood over time,” mentioned Zuckerberg, the world’s sixth-richest particular person with an estimated $133bn private fortune. “Your dedication and steerage have been instrumental in driving our success and I’m grateful on your unwavering dedication to me and Meta over time.”

Sandberg was certainly one of six government officers named within the prospectus when Fb filed for an preliminary public providing in 2012. Along with her exit, solely Zuckerberg stays of the six. She had been seen as so vital to the success of the corporate that she was named alongside the founder as one of many key personnel who posed a possible danger to traders cash in the event that they have been to depart.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg met at a Christmas social gathering on the house of Dan Rosensweig, a Silicon Valley government in 2007. “We talked for in all probability an hour by the door,” Zuckerberg informed the New Yorker. They went on to have twice-weekly dinners at Sandberg’s home, usually till she needed to kick him out at midnight. Dave Goldberg, Sandberg’s late husband, mentioned it was like Sandberg and Zuckerberg have been “relationship”.

“What do you consider? What do you care about? What’s the mission? It was very philosophical,” Sandberg mentioned of the late evening chats. Describing her position at Fb, Zuckerberg has mentioned she “handles issues I don’t wish to. All that stuff that in different corporations I may need to do. And she or he’s significantly better at that.”

That “stuff” included creating an promoting technique to make the corporate a whole lot of billions a 12 months in income and hiring and firing staff. She additionally dealt with political and moral points, coping with scrutiny over the Cambridge Analytica breach, the January 2021 assault on the US Capitol and the paperwork leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen that exposed a few of the platform’s most poisonous impacts.

The run of scandals throughout Sandberg tenure prompted activists to name for her resignation and query her legacy as a ladies’s rights advocate. Shaunna Thomas, the co-founder of ladies’s rights group UltraViolet, has mentioned that below Sandberg’s watch, Meta platforms turned “a rightwing playground the place misogyny, racism, disinformation” proliferated.

“Sheryl Sandberg might fancy herself a feminist, however her selections at Meta made social media platforms much less secure for girls, individuals of color, and the American electoral system,” Thomas mentioned. “Sandberg had the ability to take motion for 14 years, but constantly selected to not.”

Nonetheless, Debra Williamson, an analyst at Insider Intelligence who has been following the corporate since its founding, mentioned: “There have been loads of controversies surrounding Meta, however from a purely enterprise standpoint, what she constructed at Fb is fairly highly effective, and can go down within the historical past books.”

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Sandberg testified in entrance of Congress in 2018 to reply for Fb’s missteps and allegations of voter manipulation within the 2016 election, and once more in 2021 to deflect blame from the corporate for its position within the Capitol riots – appearing as a softer and extra personable foil to Zuckerberg.

In addition to successfully working one of many world’s largest expertise corporations, she has additionally discovered time to put in writing two books. 2013’s Lean In: Girls, Work, and the Will to Lead turned a world bestseller and established Sandberg as a pacesetter in feminine empowerment.

“What we realised is that with the intention to actually get to equality, equality in management all over the place, from our parliaments to our statehouses to our houses, we’re going to must go youthful,” she mentioned final 12 months. “Who desires to say to a lady seven years earlier than she enters the workforce, ‘Someday you’re going to be in a gathering and a few man goes to speak over you, voice one thing you simply mentioned and get credit score on your concepts.’”

Her second e-book, Possibility B, is “about dealing with adversity, constructing resilience, and discovering pleasure” and focuses on her husband’s loss of life. “I used to be in ‘the void’,” she wrote, “an unlimited vacancy that fills your coronary heart and lungs and restricts your capability to assume and even breathe.”

Sandberg will now spend extra time working with a basis she set as much as concentrate on ladies’s points within the office, and “construct a extra equal and resilient world”. Nonetheless, there’s hypothesis that the dedicated Democrat could also be planning an entry into politics. Not too long ago she has spoken out in opposition to abortion bans, given $3m to the American Civil Liberties Union and campaigned in opposition to sexual violence within the Israel-Gaza battle.