Big shot of the week
WHEN Hillary Clinton stood against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2008, the comedian Chris Rock nailed it for many Americans by telling audiences: ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a woman president… but does it have to be that woman?’
If the United States ever gets round to catching up with us by having a female head of state, it would be nice to think it could find someone with a bit of untainted lustre.
Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg has style, good looks, charisma and lottsa, lottsa brain power. A regular media performer and constant champion of women’s issues, some reckon she’s considering a run at the White House in 2020.
When Sandberg joined the allencompassing social network in 2008, it was seeping cash and struggling to find a business platform. Within three years of her arrival, it grew from 130 employees to 2,500, and from 70m worldwide users to nearly 700m.
Today, it is ranked the world’s 71st largest company, boasting revenue of £13bn and counting.
SCRUFFY founder Mark Zuckerberg may still have his hand on Facebook’s tiller, but it is his chief operating officer who’s driving the engine.
While he’s allowed to ape Bono and opine in T-shirt and sneakers on issues such as global warming and poverty, Sandberg is the one left to explain the figures. She is the corporate face, the company suit, the grown-up in the room.
Sandberg deftly combines being one of the world’s most respected – not to mention wealthiest – businesswomen (she has a fortune estimated at £1bn) with being a mother of two, as well as a bestselling author.
Her 2013 leadership book Lean In, a feminist call to arms, has sold over 2m copies worldwide.
But along with vast success, her meteoric career has been blighted with tragedy. Two years ago, her second husband David, who was chief executive of tech firm Surveymonkey, died suddenly while the pair were celebrating a friend’s birthday in Mexico. Sandberg discovered him in their hotel gym after suffering a heart attack. Ghastly.
While many Silicon Valley success stories are high school drop-outs, Sandberg appeared destined for greatness from an early age.
Raised in Miami, the eldest of three, by an eye surgeon father and French teacher mother, she was a straight-A student and prize-winning economist at Harvard.
It was there her brilliance was spotted by her professor, Larry Summers, who recruited her as his assistant at the World Bank.
She had a brief stint at McKinsey, but when Summers, who coincidentally was president of Harvard when Zuckerberg founded Facebook there, was appointed part of Bill Clinton’s Treasury team in 1995, he again persuaded her to join him in Washington. When he was made Treasury secretary four years later, Sandberg became his chief of staff.
After the Democrats lost the 2000 election, she decided to move to Silicon Valley to join the technology boom. When Eric Schmidt tried to recruit her at Google, she initially dithered. Schmidt’s advice: ‘When you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship you don’t ask, “What seat?” You just get on.’
She met Zuckerberg at a party in 2007 where the pair spent an hour chatting in the doorway. As vicepresident of sales at Google, she felt she’d gone as far as she was going to go there, and was ripe for a new challenge – she was weighing up a move to the Washington Post. So when Zuckerberg offered the role of COO the following year she had little trouble accepting.
Sandberg continues to defend her company against accusations it doesn’t do enough to fight terrorism online, though how long she will fight its battles is moot.
After all, if Facebook has morphed into an unpoliceable breeding ground for the world’s undesirables, as many attest, it is a monster of Zuckerberg’s creation, not hers.
America has its imperfections, but it is the world’s only superpower and when it is ready for its first female president it deserves better than a charmless autobot from a mired political dynasty.
It deserves someone box office. It deserves a Sheryl Sandberg.