Facebook lures Google executive / She will help on overseas expansion, ad sales

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Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is not stepping aside for a head executive director as Larry Page and Sergey Brin did at Google or as Kraut Yang and Saint David Filo did at Yahoo. He is following the Bill Bill Gates theoretical account and retention the top station as he engages a Google executive, Sheryl Sandberg, as main operating officer.

Sandberg, currently frailty president for planetary online gross sales and trading operations at Google, joined the hunt giant in 2001 and helped to develop its immensely moneymaking online advertisement programs, AdWords and AdSense. She will fall in Facebook this calendar month to work closely with Zuckerberg, a co-founder of Facebook, the company said Tuesday.

"A large subject of this hire is that there are parts of our trading operations that to utilize a pretty trite phrase, demand to be taken to the adjacent level," Zuckerberg said in an interview. Sandberg volition assist Facebook spread out abroad and develop an advertisement web that will aid warrant its $15 billion valuation, put last twelvemonth when Microsoft invested $240 million for 1.6 percentage of the company. She will also supervise Facebook's marketing, human resources and privateness sections - essentially guiding how Facebook shows itself and its purposes to the outside world.

Sandberg's going is a blow to Google, where she was a well-regarded executive. "Sheryl was a valued member of the Google team, and we wish her well in her new endeavors," Omid Kordestani, Google's senior frailty president for planetary gross sales and concern development, said in an e-mail statement.

Kordestani said Saint David Hans Fischer will take over Sandberg's job. Hans Fischer was frailty president for online gross sales and operation, reporting to Sandberg.

Facebook have more than than 66 million users and is growing rapidly, but the Palo Alto company have been dogged by unfavorable judgment over its concern practices. For example, its attempt to let advertizers to work the societal connexions between friends on a service called Beacon encountered stiff opposition from users.

"Communicating what we are about clearly is an of import thing for us to do," Zuckerberg said. "We can make that better, and Beacon showed that, as did a smattering of other things."

Zuckerberg had a head deputy sheriff once before. Robert Owen Avant Garde Natta, a former Amazon executive, held the statute title of main operating military military officer before he was given the narrower function of main gross officer last year. Last month, he announced he was leaving Facebook to prosecute chances as a head executive director elsewhere.

Zuckerberg is 23 and Sandberg is 38, but the age difference of the two executive directors did not stand up in the manner of a whirlwind professional person courtship. The brace met at a Christmastide political party in December. Roger McNamee, a outstanding venture rugged individualist and an investor and occasional advisor to Zuckerberg, helped agent ensuing conversations with a recommendation of Sandberg.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg then spent clip discussing Facebook's hereafter at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January and over a series of dinners at Sandberg's place in Atherton.

Sandberg joined Google three old age before it went public, when it had only 260 employees. Like many veteran soldier Googlers, she is a multimillionaire. In edifice the online trading operations of AdWords and AdSense, the two programmes that accounted for the overpowering bulk of Google's $16.6 billion in 2007, she saw the size of her section crestless wave from four people to one thousands of employees.

She states Facebook today reminds her of Google back then. "For me, that is portion of the excitement," she said.

Before joining Google, Sandberg was main of staff to Lawrence Summers when he was Treasury secretary in the Bill Clinton administration. The experience in authorities could function Facebook well if the company again meets federal or state enquiries over its privateness policies.