Yahoo Finance Sheryl Sandberg is leaving Meta’s board. What will she do next?
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The Honey Pot gets acquired for $380 million, Japan Airlines announced Mitsuko Tottori as the airline's first female president, and Sheryl Sandberg is stepping down from Meta's board. Have a thoughtful Thursday.
- An empty seat. In the year-and-a-half since Sheryl Sandberg announced her departure as COO of tech giant Meta, she has spent more time on her work with LeanIn.org, become a co-owner of a new Bay Area women's soccer team, and started advocating for Israeli victims of sexual violence in the Hamas attack. All the while, she has remained a member of Meta's board of directors.
Yesterday, Sandberg announced that she will step down from Meta's board this year. "With a heart filled with gratitude and a mind filled with memories, I let the Meta board know that I will not stand for reelection this May," she wrote in a Facebook post.
She says she stayed on as a board member after her Aug. 1, 2022 exit as COO and Sept. 30, 2022 departure as a Meta employee "to help ensure a successful transition." Now, she says, executives and their teams "have proven beyond a doubt that the Meta business is strong and well-positioned for the future, so this feels like the right time to step away." She name-checked her COO successor Javi Olivan, as well as Meta ads business leaders Justin Osofsky and Nicola Mendelsohn, for their work steering the business. On Meta's board, she leaves behind women directors including former PayPal exec Peggy Alford, Estée Lauder CFO Tracey Travis, and former McKinsey senior partner and U.S. Treasury CFO and COO Nancy Killefer. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg thanked Sandberg for the "extraordinary contributions [she has] made to our company and community over the years."
While Sandberg said she will continue to serve Meta as an adviser, her exit from the company's board brings to an end her last significant professional role at the company she joined in 2008, building a business model that led to its $114 billion in revenue today. She spent 14 and a half years as the company's COO and has sat on the board for 12, she noted in her announcement.
While Sandberg has long advocated for women's equality in the workplace, in recent months she stepped up her public-facing advocacy work. Her stand this fall against sexual violence in Hamas's attack on Israel was a particularly bold—and more political than usual—stance for the former business executive. At an event hosted by Israel's permanent mission to the UN in early December, I asked Sandberg if she would have been able to take up such a cause if she were still an executive at Meta. She declined to comment at the time.
With her actions no longer tied to Meta, it will be intriguing to see what she does next.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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