Sheryl Sandberg

The move

2007. Sheryl Sandberg is VP of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. She built it. Eric Schmidt tells her she'll be the next CFO. She's 38, with a clear path to a top-three job at the most successful tech company in the world.

At a Christmas party that year she meets Mark Zuckerberg. He's 23, running a four-year-old social network with no ad business, and he's told the board he isn't interested in revenue. Facebook has 50M users, no profit and a culture nobody thinks can scale.

She leaves Google in March 2008 to become Facebook's COO. A job with no clear brief. She takes it anyway. Spends her first 60 days asking every employee what they think the business should be. Then builds the ad business that turns Facebook from a hobby into a $1T public company.

She left in 2022. The ad playbook she wrote at Facebook now runs almost every consumer tech business. Targeting with data. Tracking what works. Ads sold by auction.

Why it was risky

In 2008 Google was the money. Facebook was a question mark. Sandberg left a clear path to CFO at the most successful company on earth for a COO job with no brief at a startup with no business model. It's a pattern with her. Find the room where nobody's written the org chart yet, and write it.

The numbers

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

The lesson

Facebook wasn't the risk. Walking away from a sure thing at Google to write a playbook that didn't exist yet was. Her career kept growing because she kept picking the seat with no name on it. R.I.S.K. is for operators ready to take the job with no job description.