No, Sheryl. You Can’t Keep Your Orkut Page for Old Times’ Sake
Well, veteran Google employee Sheryl Sandberg found a good use for her “20% time”: interviewing for the COO spot at Facebook. In news first reported on All Things Digital by BoomTown’s Kara Swisher, she’ll join the social network later this month as chief operating officer.
Quite a coup for Facebook. As Google’s vice president of global online sales and operations, Sandberg managed the division that handles sales for about 99% of the company’s advertisers. Her absence at Google (GOOG) will almost certainly be felt as deeply as her presence at Facebook, which stands to benefit a great deal from her experience building Google’s online sales and operations organization. Said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “She has just about the most relevant industry experience for Facebook, especially since we need to scale our operations and scale them globally.”
Interesting to see a Google veteran like Sandberg jump ship for Facebook. Especially after the departures of
Gideon Yu, now Facebook’s CFO, and Benjamin Ling, who heads up Facebook’s developer platform. Perhaps the search giant is beginning to suffer from the same sort of brain drain it brought to bear on the industry a few years back. Recall this 2005 quote from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman?
Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did. It’s largely that they’re hiring up so many talented people, and the fact they’re working on so many different things. It’s harder for start-ups to do interesting stuff right now.”
