Facebook Gets Big Helping Hand

Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old chief executive of Facebook, has found help running the social networking company by hiring Sheryl Sandberg, a well-regarded top executive at Google.

The two companies are increasingly finding themselves rivals as they hunt for top talent in Silicon Valley and build businesses in the rapidly growing field of social networking.

Sandberg, currently vice president of global online sales and operations at Google, joined the search giant in 2001 and helped to develop its immensely lucrative online advertising programs, AdWords and AdSense. She will join Facebook this month as chief operating officer, working closely with Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder, the company said Tuesday.

"A big theme of this hire is that there are parts of our operations that, to use a pretty trite phrase, need to be taken to the next level," Zuckerberg said during an interview. "Communicating what we are about clearly is an important thing for us to do. We can do that better and Beacon showed that, as did a handful of other things."

Sandberg will help Facebook expand outside the United States and develop an advertising network that will help justify its $15 billion valuation, set last year when Microsoft invested $240 million for 1.6 percent of the company. She will also oversee Facebook’s marketing, human resources and privacy departments – essentially guiding how Facebook presents itself and its intentions to the outside world.

Facebook has more than 66 million users and is growing rapidly, but the company, based in Palo Alto, California, has been dogged by criticism over its business practices. For example, its attempt to allow advertisers to exploit the social connections between friends on a service called Beacon encountered stiff resistance from users.

Sandberg is 39, but the age difference of the two executives did not stand in the way of a whirlwind professional courtship. The pair met at a Christmas party last December. Roger McNamee, a prominent venture capitalist and an investor and occasional adviser to Zuckerberg, helped broker ensuing conversations with a recommendation of Sandberg.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg then spent time discussing Facebook’s future in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and over a series of dinners at Sandberg’s home in Atherton, California.

Sandberg joined Google three years before it went public, when it had only 260 employees. Like many veteran Googlers, she is a multimillionaire. In building the online operations of AdWords and AdSense, the two programs that accounted for the overwhelming majority of Google’s revenue of $16.6 billion in 2007, she saw the size of her department swell to thousands of employees from four people.

She says that Facebook today reminds her of Google back then.

"For me that is part of the excitement," she said. "I’ve loved being part of the process of helping to build Google. The opportunity to help another young company to grow into a global leader is the opportunity of a lifetime."

Sandberg is only one of a handful of top executives to have made for the exits at Google, including George Reyes, the chief financial officer, who announced in August that he would retire but has agreed to remain in his post until Google hires a successor.

But the company has suffered a larger number of defections among vice presidents, senior managers and engineers in recent months as its size has ballooned to more than 16,000 workers. Most employees who joined before the company’s 2004 initial public offering have seen their initial grant of stock options fully vested.

Sandberg’s appointment comes as the competition between Google and Facebook intensifies on a number of fronts. The two companies are growing rapidly and find themselves going after many of the same top engineering talent in Silicon Valley.

In addition, Google competed furiously for a part of Facebook’s advertising business last year and lost to Microsoft.

Google, which has had mixed success with its own social network initiatives, subsequently announced that it was leading an alliance of social networks to promote a new standard for third party developers to create programs that run on their sites.

The alliance, which includes the leading social network MySpace, was seen as a way to counter Facebook’s growing popularity with software developers.

Google’s own social network, Orkut, is popular in Brazil and other countries, but not in the United States. Still Google’s social networking ambitions go beyond Orkut, and the company has begun allowing users of Google’s mapping, blog reading and other online services to share their activities with friends.

When asked if she thought Facebook and Google were competitors, Sandberg said she thought "they are at their core very different companies."

Before joining Google, Sandberg was chief of staff to the former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers. The experience in government could serve Facebook well if the company again encountered federal or state inquiries over its privacy policies.

Sandberg yields influence in Silicon Valley political circles, where she is a backer of Senator Hillary Clinton.

Sandberg is married to David Goldberg, a former vice president at Yahoo, where he ran that company’s music business. He left last year to become an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital, a venture capital firm.