With 1.39 billion active monthly users, Facebook processes immense amounts of data every single day. The person managing that operation is Sheryl Sandberg—a visionary executive who’s changing the way people think about business. We’re ecstatic to announce she’ll be a keynote speaker at Domopalooza next month!
As author of a New York Times bestselling book, she is hardly a stranger to high-profile leadership roles. “Leadership,” Sandberg says, “is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.”
Before entering the C-suite at Facebook, she was Chief of Staff to the U.S. treasury secretary and Google’s Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations.
Sandberg is a forward-thinking master of strategy, and it shows. At the end of February, Facebook hit a milestone of two million active advertisers (advertisers who’ve placed ads in the last 28 days). A huge accomplishment in and of itself, what’s even more extraordinary is the rate at which it happened—less than two years ago, Facebook had only one million active advertisers.
Sandberg attributes that rapid growth to simplification: “A couple years ago, our offering was, ‘Do you want to become a Facebook advertiser?’ That sounds complicated,” she says. “Now you do a post, and we ask, ‘Do you want to promote this post?’ That’s a pretty easy on-ramp to being an advertiser.”
Video has also become key to Facebook’s strategy. To support exploding video growth, Facebook developed a native player where videos come to life seamlessly in News Feed, and worked with partners to create tools such as a public view counter, detailed insights and a call to action button. It’s working – more people than ever before are sharing, discovering, and engaging with videos on Facebook and video views have tripled since last summer.
Outside of Facebook, Sandberg wrote the bestselling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which seeks to empower women in business. She also launched Lean In Circles—small groups of women and men who help each other achieve their ambitions. Now there are almost 22,000 Circles in 97 countries and 350 college campuses. Lean In recently partnered with Facebook, LinkedIn, and the Anita Borg Institute to launch a global network of Lean In Circles specifically focused on including and encouraging women studying computer science and engineering on college campuses.
And of course, Sheryl Sandberg’s thought leadership can be found in her popular TED Talks and on the pages of the New York Times.
It wouldn’t be accurate to describe Sandberg as just a game-changer. She builds new ones. Whether with a Fortune 500 company, policymakers, or an entire generation of women, her influence leaves everyone better off. By her own definition, that’s leadership.