For Sheryl Sandberg, a career in tech was never the plan

Photo credit: Facebook

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with When to Jump, a podcast dedicated to exploring the fundamental question we all think about: When do you chase your dreams? This is heavily revised from the show’s original transcript. Subscribe to the podcast for free here.

Sheryl Sandberg was chief of staff for the Treasury Secretary in the US government before making a jump to a young company called Google and, seven years later, to Facebook. She has served as the social network’s chief operating officer for nearly a decade.

Sandberg has some amazing insights and perspectives on careers. She quotes her colleague Lori Goler when she says, “Careers are like jungle gyms. They’re not linear staircases.”

The other thing that she has told me is that you should prioritize learning, and that it’s good to feel a little bit scared. In fact, one of her favorite lines is: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”

Here’s our conversation.

What’s the most important jump of your life?

Probably from the government to Silicon Valley. I went to the government in 1996 as a political appointee in the second term of Bill Clinton’s administration. Political appointee means that when the next person wins, you turn over the keys to them. In 2001, that meant I needed a job.

I never thought I’d work in the private sector. I thought I’d only ever work in the nonprofit world or in the government. But I sat at the US Treasury during the tech boom with Yahoo, AOL, and the internet. And so I decided to make the jump and really changed my expectations.

But when I moved out here, it was the tech crash. Hewlett-Packard had just fired thousands of people. There were no jobs. It took me almost 10 months from the time I moved to start working at Google. There was some free time and some downtime, but also a lot of rejection and some nervousness of “would I ever get a job in this industry?”

I definitely had a lot of rejections along the way, but then I had a couple of job offers. One was at Google and one was at another company. In the other company, the job was very specific: I would have a team to manage and goals to hit. The job offer at Google was to be the general manager of a business unit, but there weren’t any business units. They kept saying they were going to form business units, but they didn’t know when. It just felt not real.

I said to Eric Schmidt, “This job makes no sense. Of all my criteria, Google meets none of them.” But I love Google, and I liked it better than the other company.

He said, “When you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.”

Now I tell people that the opportunity often lies in the gray. If everything is perfectly figured out at the company you’re going to, maybe they don’t need you as much. Sometimes, taking the job or even a project and finding a zone where things are not figured out, where you have to provide the structure, where you not only answer the questions but also ask them—that’s where the real opportunity lies.

Facebook does a real interesting job of promoting internal jumps. How important is that?

It’s really important. My favorite quote on this is from Lori Goler, who is Facebook’s head of HR, who said, “Careers are not a ladder. They’re a jungle gym.”

What pushed you forward in the jump to Facebook?

What advice would you give to your younger self about taking a jump?