Sheryl Kara Sandberg (born August 28, 1969) is an American technology executive, philanthropist, and writer. Sandberg served as chief operating officer (COO) of Meta Platforms, a position from which she stepped down in August 2022. She is also the founder of LeanIn.Org. In 2008, she was made COO at Facebook, becoming the company's second-highest ranking official. In June 2012, she was elected to Facebook's board of directors, becoming the first woman to serve on its board. As head of the company's advertising business, Sandberg was credited for making the company profitable. Prior to joining Facebook as its COO, Sandberg was vice president of global online sales and operations at Google and was involved in its philanthropic arm Google.org. Before that, Sandberg served as research assistant to Lawrence Summers at the World Bank, and subsequently as his chief of staff when he was Bill Clinton's United States Secretary of the Treasury.
In 2012, she was named in the Time 100, an annual list of the most influential people in the world. On Forbes Magazine's 2021 billionaires list, Sandberg is reported to have a net worth of US$1.7 billion, due to her stock holdings in Facebook and in other companies. In 2022, she announced she would be stepping down as Meta COO in the fall but that she would remain on its board.
Sandberg was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C., to a Jewish family, the daughter of Adele (née Einhorn) and Joel Sandberg, and the oldest of three children. Her father is an ophthalmologist, and her mother, whose grandparents immigrated from Belarus, was a college teacher of French language.
Her family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida, when she was two years old. She attended North Miami Beach High School, from which she graduated in 1987 ranked ninth in her class. She was sophomore class president, became a member of the National Honor Society, and was on the senior class executive board. Sandberg taught aerobics in the 1980s while in high school.
In 1987, Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College.