Sheryl Sandberg is leaving Facebook, and with it, one of the most puzzling legacies we've seen in Silicon Valley for a while.
Because on one hand, as an executive, Sheryl Sandberg is sitting only a few rungs below Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook in the list of executives who created the most shareholder value for their company. When she joined as COO in 2008, Facebook was worth roughly $15 billion. At its stock peak in the summer of 2021, it was worth over $1 trillion. You can count on your hands how many executives oversaw that much market capitalization growth in their career.
She has also never been shy about her desire to be a role model for young women, and I think she's been quite successful in that. Even as women make up two-thirds of Bachelor's degree recipients and inch ever closer every year to fully closing the income gap, there have been very few highly visible female leaders in tech that didn't have the last name "Holmes," and we all know how that went. Sheryl Sandberg was that woman. Her unrelentingly ambitious yet deeply compassionate leadership style has been widely regarded by many who worked closely with her.
But she's also leaving Meta at a time when the company is drowning in controversy and widespread questioning of its ethics. In the last few years, Facebook has been directly linked to a) significantly increased rates of depression and suicide among teenage girls 2) major interference from Russia in our presidential elections 3) extremely concerning data security practices in aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and 4) rampant misinformation and political radicalization, especially as it relates to the January 6th Capitol insurrection. Zuckerberg deserves most of the ire here, but Sandberg was still his #2, and she largely did nothing to address any of these issues. The company's completely inept response still falls partially on her shoulders.
So which will it be? Will Sheryl Sandberg be remembered as a good person or a bad person?
Time will only tell, but even if she did everything she could on the Facebook platform to polarize us, I hope her legacy stays firmly in the grey area between pure good and pure evil because that's exactly what she was: an extremely brilliant yet remarkably complex character who enabled a wealth of societal ills but did so in a manner that more often than not revealed the inspiring, humane leader inside.
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