Sheryl Sandberg Biography

Sheryl Sandberg’s remarkable career has included stops at the World Bank, the U.S. Treasury, Google and Facebook, where she’s been Chief Operating Officer since 2008. Sheryl Sandberg grew up in North Miami Beach, Florida, and studied economics at Harvard. After her graduation in 1991, she worked at the World Bank as a research assistant to Lawrence Summers (who had been her professor and thesis advisor at Harvard), then went on to Harvard Business School, earning an MBA in 1995. She joined Summers again when he was Deputy Treasury Secretary under Robert Rubin; when Summers became Treasury Secretary himself in 1999, Sandberg advanced as his chief of staff. She was 29 years old. After Summers’ term ended in 2001, Sandberg moved to California and joined Larry Page and Sergey Brin at a fledgling company called Google. As Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations, she helped build the super-successful AdWords and AdSense advertising services, which made the company billions of dollars. In 2008 she was hired away by Mark Zuckerberg to become COO of Facebook. Her position as one of Silicon Valley’s most successful female executives has made her a lightning rod for both praise and criticism, especially after the publication of her 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead in 2013.