The face of Facebook?
Time may be right for Zuckerberg to step out of CEO post and hand the reins to Sandberg
Nine years ago, I called on Mark Zuckerberg to resign as Facebook’s CEO, after a string of internal and external missteps that, as I wrote in Valleywag, “would have led to any normal CEO’s firing.”
Perhaps my timing was off, given the 1.8 billion users and the $450 billion in value Facebook has accrued under Zuckerberg’s leadership since then. Fine: Call me an early adopter. But might now be the right time to consider a change at the top?
I’m not alone in asking the question. Two journalists, on a conference call Wednesday with Zuckerberg to discuss the Cambridge Analytica scandal, asked about his role as Facebook’s supreme leader — both chairman and CEO, as well as unimpeachable founder.
The argument for Zuckerberg is his history: He has fallen on his face, time and time again, and picked himself back up. From the first protests over News Feed — too much sharing! — to Beacon — too much sharing! — to Timeline — too much sharing! — Zuckerberg has always bounced back, rallying his troops to amass new records for users, sharing more than ever before. No one over-cares if Facebook gets you to over-
share.
And it is impossible to overstate the veneration Silicon Valley has for founders. He (and it’s still far too often “he”) who created the product has a unique moral authority to dictate how it should change.
“Americans are born evangelical,” says Antonio Garcia Martinez, a former Facebook product manager who wrote a book, “Chaos Monkeys,” about his time at the company. “Sometimes it’s about Jesus, and sometimes it’s about other gods. In Silicon Valley, the startup has substituted for your particular Protestant sect.”
It’s not so much that founders have some magic ability to see into the future; it’s that it is maddeningly difficult to get an army of engineers to march in tune with anyone but a founder. The founder mystique is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But founders sometimes founder. Some realize their limits early. Look at LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, who smartly turned over the reins to Jeff Weiner, who led the company to a $26 billion sale to Microsoft two years ago and still runs it today. Some crash into them: See Uber’s Travis Kalanick. Jack Dorsey’s return to Twitter is an inconclusive data point.
A more salient point is Zuckerberg’s ironclad control of Facebook through a multi-class share structure that gives public shareholders little say. Were the board of directors to consider a change, Zuckerberg could simply replace them.
There is an increasing consensus in Washington, in Silicon Valley and around the world that something dramatic — something more than the flurry of announcements and privacy settings updates and crackdowns on developers — needs to be done.
“Facebook is in a crisis of trust,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at a recent meeting of The Chronicle’s editorial board. “Is it all about the product or is it all about trust?”
The CEO of San Francisco’s largest tech company says he stopped using Facebook three years ago, long before the #DeleteFacebook movement caught steam. Now, he says, he views it as the “new cigarettes”: “It’s not good for you, outside forces are trying to manipulate you to use it, and it should probably be regulated.”
Asked if there’s some scenario where it might be appropriate for Zuckerberg to step down, Benioff said: “I don’t think we’re at that point yet, but we haven’t seen all the data.”
Yet it seems impossible to imagine an outsider coming into this crisis and commanding the trust and loyalty of Facebook’s tens of thousands of restive employees.
“The problems at Facebook are inherent in the advertising business model,” says Roger McNamee, a tech investor at Elevation Partners who was an early Facebook backer. “It is not at all obvious that changing the top people will make it easier to fix those problems.”
Facebook’s board has expressed confidence in the leadership of Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. “Mark and Sheryl know how serious this situation is and are working with the rest of Facebook leadership to build stronger user protections. They have built the company and our business and are instrumental to its future,” Susan Desmond-Hellman, the board’s lead independent director, said in a statement through a spokeswoman.
Yet here’s a thought: What if Zuckerberg doesn’t actually want to be CEO?
When asked about his leadership in Wednesday’s call, Zuckerberg’s smooth delivery faltered. The long, awkward pauses that were a hallmark of his early public appearances returned. And in an interview last month, he gave some glimmer of frustration with what his job had turned into.
“What I would really like to do is find a way to get our policies set in the way that reflects the values of the community so I’m not the one making those decisions,” Zuckerberg told Recode. “I feel fundamentally uncomfortable sitting here in California at an office making content policy decisions for people around the world.”
Yet that is, increasingly, the job. Not imagining a virtual reality version of Facebook, not tinkering with data centers so they can store more baby photos, not coming up with ways to hobble the next hot social app like Snapchat.
Here’s a solution that will probably not make anyone happy — but could be the right answer. What if Zuckerberg handed the CEO job over to Sandberg, his right hand for the past decade?
Sandberg, who worked in the Clinton administration before coming west to join Google, knows politics. She is fluent in trade-offs and compromise, and, unlike Zuckerberg, gives the impression she might actually enjoy interacting with people.
Zuckerberg could stay as executive chairman, and keep a hand in Facebook’s products — an arrangement that seems to work well for Oracle’s Larry Ellison. That would please corporate governance critics who have called for Facebook to separate the roles of chairman and CEO, while Facebook engineers could be contented that the hacker-in-chief still reigns at One Hacker Way.
And it would salve politicians who are unsatisfied when anyone but the boss shows up. Witness the grousing that happened when Facebook sent its top lawyer instead of Zuckerberg to testify in a probe into Russian election interference in November — grousing that made it all but impossible for Zuckerberg to refuse invitations to testify before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday. As CEO, Sandberg could safely go in Zuckerberg’s stead.
It also solves a problem for Zuckerberg and Sandberg: namely, their next act. Before the disasters that began in 2016, the thought was that one or both of them might find their way into politics. Facebook even considered a change that allowed Zuckerberg to preserve his control if he took a leave of absence while “serving in a government position or office.” (The company canceled that plan in September in the face of a shareholder lawsuit.)
It seems clear that Facebook’s scandals have tarnished any prospect either has of a political career. And though Sandberg is constantly sought for other leadership roles, she has shown little interest in doing anything else. Which means more Facebook for both of them.
“I believe that Mark and Sheryl are capable of fixing Facebook,” says McNamee, the early investor. “What they have not shown yet is a willingness to address the fundamental flaws in the business model or a willingness to open up to investigators and users to eliminate the crisis of trust that has developed around the company.”
Benioff said he had advised Sandberg, whom he counts as a friend, to stop talking about the value of connecting people and talk about trust instead. (Sandberg did not respond to a request for comment about Benioff ’s advice.)
Would a rearrangement of boardroom chairs bolster people’s trust in Facebook? Perhaps, perhaps not. But some kind of motion would be helpful. Zuckerberg’s oft-quoted maxim is “move fast and break things.” Maybe his lock on the CEO chair is what needs breaking.