Meta’s COO Sheryl Sandberg Is Leaving The Company

Sheryl Sandberg; Chief Operating Officer at Meta

Meta’s Sheryl Sandberg is leaving the company. She’ll be relinquishing her role of Chief Operating Officer to Javier Olivan. She joined Meta in early 2008 when the company still went under the Facebook name. She worked hand-in-hand with co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and was instrumental in turning Facebook into an advertising force as well as building the company into one of the biggest in the world today. Although he’ll no longer be COO, she’ll continue to serve on Meta’s board of directors.

Her successor Javier Olivan who currently holds the position of Chief Growth Officer will be taking over as Chief Operating Officer by fall.

In a lengthy post she made on Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg noted that “over the next few months, Mark and I will transition my direct reports.” According to Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company is also planning an internal reorganization.

“Looking forward, I don’t plan to replace Sheryl’s role in our existing structure. I’m not sure that would be possible since she’s a superstar who defined the COO role in her own unique way. But even if it were possible, I think Meta has reached the point where it makes sense for our product and business groups to be more closely integrated, rather than having all the business and operations functions organized separately from our products,” Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.

While speaking in an interview, Sheryl Sandberg explained that her decision to step down stemmed from the desire to focus more on her philanthropic work, and isn’t because of any setbacks that the company has recently faced.

Before Facebook, she served in the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton’s administration and went on to join Google in 2001 where she helped grow the company’s advertising business.

She joins quite a growing list of executives that have left the company in the last year.