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Facebook founder talks 'Google-isation' and aggressive growth…
Q&A: Mark Zuckerberg on hiring ex-Google exec

By Caroline McCarthy

Published: Thursday 06 March 2008

Facebook has announced it has hired six-year Google veteran Sheryl Sandberg as its chief operating officer, a big move as the hot social network attempts to convince people it's here to stay.

Here Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg chats about Sandberg's new role at the company.

On whether Sandberg's employment will help advertiser confidence…
Mark Zuckerberg: The reason why we did this is primarily to scale all of our different business operations. Advertising is definitely one piece of that, and Sheryl has a lot of experience there. But the primary reason why we did this is just because Facebook is scaling very quickly, and if we want to reach our goal - which is to help everyone in the world communicate more efficiently - we need to build an organisation that's going to grow and scale globally. And someone like Sheryl, who has experience doing this, is going to be a tremendous asset to us in doing that.

On the possible 'Google-isation' of Facebook…
I think there are a lot of really interesting companies out there, and different experiences that people have before they joined here. [Sandberg] is really the only senior executive at the company who's come from Google so far. Gideon [Yu] was at Google for a very short period of time after YouTube was sold to Google but that's not his primary experience.

On Sandberg smoothing things over…
I think it's [Sandberg's influence] going to be subtle in a lot of ways because the nature of operations is that you're scaling an organisation and powering other people. It's not that Sheryl is going to be doing all these things herself, but Facebook already has 500 employees and it's scaling very quickly, and I think it's just going to go a lot more smoothly with someone who's talented like her here.

On the relation her role has to the departed COO Owen Van Natta…
Well, they were different roles. Owen, as chief revenue officer, was mostly focused on direct sales, which is what we have now, and business development. He was just focused in different areas. I wouldn't view this as really a replacement there, as other people have characterised it. Owen was doing that role, and he wanted to be a CEO, and I think Owen did great work here and I'm supporting him in doing that… Sheryl's role is going to be managing sales and business development but also a handful of other things.

On the 'aggressive' growth of Facebook…
We have our projections that say we will probably get very near, maybe over a thousand, but it really just depends. We're hiring very aggressively just in terms of finding as many talented people as we can, and right now we're having a lot of success in doing that. So I think there's a good chance that we'll continue to grow very quickly this year, but I think over the long term in order to meet our goal just in terms of building this communication system that helps everyone in the world communicate more efficiently, that's going to require building a substantial business, and probably a lot of people all over the world, and we're going to need an organisation, a set of operations that can do that. Sheryl's going to be really critical to helping us do that.