Sheryl Sandberg

[ The move ]

In 2007, Sheryl Sandberg was VP of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. She had built it. Eric Schmidt told her she'd be the next CFO. She was 38 and had a clear lane to a top-three job at the most successful tech company in the world.

At a Christmas party that year, she met Mark Zuckerberg. He was 23, running a 4-year-old social network with no advertising business and a CEO who had told the board he wasn't interested in revenue. Facebook had 50M users, no profit, and a culture nobody believed could scale.

Sandberg left Google in March 2008 to become Facebook's COO. The board offered her a job with no defined remit. She took it. She spent the first 60 days asking every Facebook employee what they thought the business should be. Then she built the advertising organisation that turned Facebook from a hobby into a $1T public company.

She left in 2022. The advertising playbook she wrote at Facebook is now the operating system for almost every consumer tech business: data-driven targeting, performance attribution, programmatic auction.

[ Why it was risky ]

In 2008, Google was revenue. Facebook was a question mark. Sandberg left a defined CFO trajectory at the most successful company on earth for an undefined COO seat at a startup that had no business model. The pattern repeats throughout her career: walk into the room where the org chart is unwritten, write it.

[ What it looked like ]

[ EVIDENCE 01 / SHERYL SANDBERG, TED 'WHY WE HAVE TOO FEW WOMEN LEADERS' / 2010 ]

[ The numbers ]

From 50M users and no business model to 2.9B daily active users and one of the most profitable companies in the world. The advertising organisation Sandberg built funded everything Facebook (now Meta) became.

[ The lesson ]

The risk wasn't Facebook. It was leaving the certainty of Google to write a manual that didn't yet exist. Sandberg's career compounded because she repeatedly chose the unwritten seat over the named one. R.I.S.K. exists for operators who recognise that the most valuable role is often the one that doesn't have a job description yet, and that asking for a defined role is sometimes the smaller bet.