Scripted Yet Personable, Sheryl Sandberg Talks About Facebook, Friending, and Zuckerberg
Last night, while still under the influence of painkillers after having dental work done, I stopped by the 92YTribeca to hear Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg speak with BusinessWeek’s Editor-in-Chief Steve Adler. This was part of the magazine’s Captains of Industry series.
Since I skipped out of their event earlier this year about the state of blogging in NYC, I stuck around for the whole hour, at least until Sandberg and Adler began taking audience questions. Here’s some of the more interesting things which I learned and heard:
- Sandberg studied under and later went to work for Larry Summers, now part of Obama’s Treasury Department.
- Her pre-school boyfriend recently friended her on Facebook without knowing what she does for a living now, namely running Facebook as Mark Zuckerberg’s second-in-command.
- Sandberg only has 1,400 friends on the service.
- She reminded the crowd that Facebook’s users have protested against redesigns before, including the news feed which they eventually came to like.
- Zuckerberg himself provides the company’s “product vision.” So basically, he’s the last word on this “constantly evolving” site’s direction.
- Born in Miami, Florida, Sandberg went to a public high school where she couldn’t see herself sending her children. Her parents were active in human rights causes, explaining her interest in working for the World Bank. (Interestingly, no one asked her if she made sure to pay her taxes as she mentioned knowing Geithner personally.)
- Adler did his best to take Sandberg out of her comfort zone, asking about the company going public, being sold, and whether or not they would charge for services at some point. (Her response was priceless: “We have no plans to charge for basic services.”) A journalist friend of mine said that these remarks sounded like “iambic pentameter.”
Wish that I could have stayed later to hear more, especially her thoughts on the survival of newspapers in physical form, but again, still out of it, I made my way back to Harlem. A special thanks to the 92YTribeca team for an extremely timely and informative discussion.
[Editor’s Note: BusinessWeek’s article on the conversation and video of it is now available online here.]
