Meta held a virtual meeting for its more than 70,000 employees on Thursday, and there was a special topic of discussion: the recently announced departure of Sheryl Sandberg, its longtime executive number 2.
“People asked me all day yesterday,‘ Why now? Why now? Why now is because it’s time to write the next chapter of my life, “Sandberg said at the meeting, from which Recode obtained an exclusive recording and transcribed below.” But really, [it’s] because I have a lot of faith in the leadership team that Mark and I have created, “he continued.
The meeting focused on Sandberg’s contributions to Meta’s business, that is, making it profitable, as well as Zuckerberg’s early Sandberg memories and Zuckerberg’s plans to more closely integrate product teams and Meta business when Sandberg leaves.
Sandberg’s departure comes at a time of unparalleled uncertainty about the future of Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. The tech giant has refocused its vision away from social media to focus on building the “metavers”; Meanwhile, its stock price has faced historic falls and continues to face the continuing threat of regulatory scrutiny.
That’s why Sandberg’s departure, which for a long time was considered the “room adult” that helped Zuckerberg mature his business, caused shock waves to the company and the entire technology industry. .
Unlike the regular weekly question and answer meetings of the executive that are normally held weekly at Meta, the “chat on fire” format of Thursday’s meeting meant that the company did not answer direct questions from employees. . The approximately 30 minute discussion was mainly Sandberg and Zuckerberg expressing their mutual appreciation. Zuckerberg thanked Sandberg for teaching his 23-year-old self “how to run a business” and Sandberg congratulated Zuckerberg on his vision and the teams they built together.
They did not mention the major issues facing the company, such as Meta’s ongoing challenges to content moderation (which was overseen by Sandberg), Facebook’s declining relevance to younger users in the midst of rise of its competitor TikTok and skepticism about the future of the metavers.
The congratulatory tone of the meeting also overlooked any doubts about the relationship between Zuckerberg and Sandberg, which according to various reports has moved away in recent years. (Meta has denied any loopholes.)
While the meeting was not directly immersed in the many pressing issues facing the company, this leaked recording of an internal Meta meeting provides information on how the company is positioning a key moment when one of its most formative leaders and prominent march.
The following is a quick transcript of Meta’s internal meeting on June 2, 2022. This transcript has been edited for extension and clarity.
Moderator
Hello everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today for being with us after the news, which you saw on Employee FYI, both Mark and Sheryl’s posts. And we won’t answer any questions – this time it’s a little different to the questions and answers. But we were really looking forward to hearing from Mark and Sheryl and talking directly to the employees about the news. So without further ado, Mark, we’ll send it to you.
Mark Zuckerberg
Okay, thanks. Well, I wanted to get the company together to talk about yesterday’s news. As I wrote my post, this is the end of an era. It really is. After 14 years, Sheryl has made the decision to leave her role as COO of Meta. And I think it’s hard for us to have, sitting where we are today, where we have this really successful company, getting into how things have been since Sheryl joined to understand the big impact it has had on that. place.
When Sheryl joined me, it was 2008. She was 23 at the time and knew almost nothing about running a business. We had this great product at the time, it was a website, not a mobile app, it was just Facebook. But it was a great product that people were very excited about. We really had nothing in the way of a profitable business. We had some ideas, we really didn’t know where we were going with the ads. And we were really struggling to move from that culture of loose start to a real organization.
And, you know, a lot of what Sheryl did was designing our ad business, hiring a lot of great people, building our management culture, and teaching me and so many people here how to run a business. company. And I think, you know, where we are now where we have this successful business and we have an organization that works efficiently. And we have hundreds and, in many ways, thousands of great leaders around the company who can drive them. It’s a very different world from where we were, when Sheryl was building all of that. So you know, I think a lot of his legacy is that he just created opportunities for millions of people around the world and I think he deserves a lot of credit for what Meta is today.
I think it has been really unusual for an association like this to last so long, Sheryl will say it thought it would last five years, but it lasted 14. I was a little more optimistic that it would have lasted a little over five. years. But I mean, these things usually don’t last that long because companies are evolving and people’s needs are evolving and people’s ambitions are changing. But I think our partnership worked for so long, because Sheryl is an amazing person and leader and partner and friend, and like a lot of what she did, she really focused on making the collaboration work and it focuses on fostering relationships and helping to grow the people around you.
I am so grateful to have had this opportunity to build this business and work so closely with Sheryl, and I feel like she is leaving us in a great place after training so many other amazing and talented people here. And of course it won’t go that far because it will be on our board from now on. So, bottom line is that we’re really looking forward to the big impact Sheryl has had on this site. But I just want to start by expressing my gratitude for everything you have done.
Sheryl Sandberg
Thanks. You know, I don’t know if I was expecting it to last five years. But the story is that I met Mark at this party. And we stood by the door wall and talked all the time. And then we went out to dinner once and then, you know, it was very recognizable. It wasn’t, but I did have a great team at Google. And someone on that team saw us there and we didn’t go out again. We had dinner at my house, we couldn’t have dinner at Mark’s house because Mark, remember you had a study with a mattress on the floor. And you rightly thought that was not a good place to dine with me.
And so we dined at my house many, many, many times for many months. And in the end, we went out to dinner. Me and Mark and Dave, my husband, and Priscilla were then his young girlfriend. And on the way Dave and I talked, he looked at me and said, “You have to be able to see yourself in this job for five years, but that doesn’t make sense.” And so it always came to my mind — and that was, as Mark said 14 years ago — can you work for and with that person for the next five years of your life? And the answer to that was just an overwhelming yes.
And I’ve said it in my post, but this job has been the honor and privilege of a lifetime, and it really starts with Mark.
On the way in, I asked her three things: to sit down together, to meet every week, and to get feedback. And to the third … I asked him to comment on me every week. And he immediately said, “No, I won’t give you comments every week unless they give me one.” And we got organized, I think it was the Friday of our first days for our meeting and the feedback days. And I remember in one of my first few weeks the comments came right away and it was a Tuesday, and I said, “Uh, it’s not comment day, comment day is Friday.”
But the fact that we talked about this in order to have a real partnership — and that’s something I’ve tried to convey to the company — because we’re a business full of people, we’re a business full of relationships, that’s all . the relationships between all of you that either make this site work or this site doesn’t work, that they make the products or that they don’t sell ads or that they don’t send or not, that they make things work or not. And it is being honest and direct that prevents things from accumulating and keeping them on track. And Mark said right away, “Well, it doesn’t have to be Friday.” And Mark was always very honest with me.
When I thought about this culture of feedback, what is the feedback that Mark has had the most for me? And it’s really that we have to be ambitious, even. I remember when that fall of 2008 happened, you know, and I was sad and I thought we would never sell another ad and our 2009 revenue projections, Mark was like “Not good enough.” And I said, “Well, you know, markets are crashing and the whole world is imploding.” And everyone remembers it, okay, not all of you because some of you are very young, but many of us remember that time in the world and in the markets. And it seemed like the end of the recession would never come. Mark says, “Well, we still have to sell ads and build the business through that.” And we did.
And at every stage of the game, Mark has always pushed us to be bolder. One of the other times I’ve always thought is that Mark has always said that there are two ways to fail a business. One way is to set ambitious plans and …