MARK Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg may well be Silicon Valley’s oddest couple. Mr. Zuckerberg, a 26-year-old engineer and product visionary, is socially awkward and reserved. At 41, Ms. Sandberg is the opposite: polished, personable, chatty and at ease in the limelight.
The differences don’t end there. Mr. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to focus on building Facebook, and has never worked anywhere else. Ms. Sandberg, who has a Harvard M.B.A., is a veteran of Google, where she had a central role in building the largest, most successful advertising business on the Internet. By the time she left Google, her unit had grown from a handful of people to about 4,000 employees, or about one-quarter of Google’s total, and it accounted for more than half of the company’s revenue.
Despite their obvious differences — or maybe because of them — Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg have grown close. “A lot of people choose to hire people who look exactly like them,” Mr. Zuckerberg says. “Here we just value balance a lot more. It takes work to build those relationships, but if it does work, you end up with a much better system.”
Ms. Sandberg earned a reputation for mentoring many younger employees — especially women, encouraging many of them not to shy away from important roles simply because they were planning to start families. Ms. Sandberg can speak to that topic from experience: she is married to Dave Goldberg, the chief executive of SurveyMonkey, a maker of software for online surveys, and the couple have two young children.
The embrace of Ms. Sandberg by Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook’s 20-something rank-and-file was not preordained. When she was hired, a frat-house atmosphere permeated the company, according to many early employees, and technology blogs speculated that she had been brought in to clean up the place.
To this day, Ms. Sandberg looks a bit out of place at Facebook. She sits in a cluster of desks that includes Mr. Zuckerberg’s as well as those of other engineering and product executives. Their penchant for jeans, T-shirts and hoodies is in sharp contrast to her taste for elegant clothing. Her own staff, which handles most of Facebook’s business functions, works in another building a few blocks away.
“I make sure that I understand the basic things that we are doing,” says Mr. Zuckerberg. But, he adds, he trusts that anything Ms. Sandberg handles will run smoothly. “The dynamic on the management team,” he says, “has improved a huge amount since she joined.”
Source: The New York Times, October 3, 2010
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