Sheryl Sandberg is stepping down as Chief Operating Officer COO of Facebook-parent Meta.
In a post on Facebook, Sandberg said she was planning to focus on her philanthropic work going forward, after working for the company for 14 years.
“The debate around social media has changed beyond recognition since those early days. To say it hasn’t always been easy is an understatement,” Sandberg wrote. “But it should be hard. The products we make have a huge impact, so we have the responsibility to build them in a way that protects privacy and keeps people safe.”
She said that over the next few months, “Mark and I will transition my direct reports.”
In a separate post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg remembered how he was just a 23 years old entrepreneur when Sandberg joined him in 2008. “We’d built a great product but we didn’t yet have a profitable business and we were struggling to transition from a small startup to a real organization,” he said.
With Zuckerberg and Sandberg, Facebook’s revenue grew from roughly $150 million in 2007 to more than $3.7 billion in 2011, the year before it went public.
Sandberg will continue to serve on the company’s board of directors. Javier Olivan, Meta’s Chief Growth Officer, will become its next COO but he will assume “a more traditional COO role,” Zuckerberg said.
