Latest news with #SherylSandberg
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
OpenAI chairman's career advice? Remember what Eric Schmidt told Sheryl Sandberg about joining Google.
OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor believes you shouldn't allow pride to stand in the way of success. If someone offers you a seat on the "rocket ship," you don't ask which seat, you get on, he said, recalling Eric Schmidt's conversation with Sheryl Sandberg. Flexibility and perspective are key in both your career and life, he said on an episode of the "Grit" podcast. Bret Taylor, the chairman of OpenAI, believes that if you have the chance to attach yourself to success, you shouldn't let ego get in the way. "I think this is the quote I always heard, was Eric Schmidt to Sheryl Sandberg: 'If someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat,' you know? I like that philosophy of life," Taylor said on an episode of "Grit." At the time, Sandberg, who would famously later become Facebook's chief operations officer, was deciding whether or not to join a different tech company: Google. Google was a tiny fraction of the size in 2001, with fewer than 300 people. Eric Schmidt had recently been brought on by cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to be CEO. Sandberg talked about her conversation with Schmidt during a speech to Harvard students. "So I sat down with Eric Schmidt, who had just become the CEO, and I showed him the spreadsheet and I said, this job meets none of my criteria," Sandberg recalled. "He put his hand on my spreadsheet and he looked at me and said, 'Don't be an idiot. Get on a rocket ship. When companies are growing quickly and they are having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves. If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on.'" Sandberg did end up taking the job, and joined as the general manager of Google's business unit, which had four people at the time. "I do think, especially in Silicon Valley, there's just unique moments, and you just have to be self-aware and aware of the market," OpenAI's Taylor said. Beyond being ready to jump at opportunity wherever it comes knocking at your door, remaining broadly flexible is also important, he added. "Most of the unhappiest people I know are rigidly following a plan and not observant of their own happiness or observant of the opportunities around them," Taylor said. "I actually think that a big part of life is recognizing when there's a unique opportunity that you didn't plan for, and asking yourself the question, 'Should I change my plans?' Whether that's in your personal life or your professional life." Taylor's own career spans Big Tech and startups alike — from leading the team that helped create Google Maps and acting as co-CEO of Salesforce, to founding his own AI company, Sierra. "The idea of sitting on the sidelines, and drinking a mai tai on a beach, doesn't give me joy at all," he said. "I want to build." Just as Taylor was leaving Salesforce, ChatGPT was released. After a conversation over lunch with his cofounder, Clay Bavor, Taylor said the decision to start Sierra was set. But even if he wasn't heading this particular company, he added, he would still be working in an adjacent sphere. "I would be building open source software if not running a company right now, because I just want to work in the technology and help shape it," Taylor said. "Because it's the most exciting technology of my memory, and I want to play a part in shaping how we all use it." That's another key piece of Taylor's personal philosophy: being as involved as possible in shaping the trajectory of the world. "There's this Alan Kay quote: 'The best way to predict the future is to invent it.' And that is like, my operating principle," he said. "I want to impact the future, and I want to help invent it." Read the original article on Business Insider
Forbes
29-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How A Balanced Home Life Can Lead To Success At Work
Sharing household chores can help employees manage workplace stress. Back in 2013, when then Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg published her book Lean In, one of the pieces of advice she offered to women setting out on their careers was to choose partners who would be supportive. 'When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home,' she wrote. It seems this principle holds true regardless of gender. According to recently published research, employees with emotionally intelligent spouses say they have better relationships with their supervisors, are better able to manage their own and others' emotions and have greater psychological resilience at work. The paper published by Anna Carmella Ocampo, a professor at Esade, a global academic institution with campuses in Barcelona and Madrid, was based on work conducted in collaboration with Macquarie University, the University of Alberta, the University of New South Wales, Monash Business School and KPMG. It draws on data from China and the U.S.. The findings challenge the conventional belief that personal life distracts from professional success. 'Spouses act not only as cheerleaders, boosting employees' enthusiasm at work, but also as healers, alleviating their stress and frustration,' said Professor Ocampo in a press release. Researchers carried out in-depth interviews with employees, organized a large-scale survey involving matched spouse-employee-supervisor groups in China and set up a scenario-based experiment in the U.S.. Across all three, the researchers found that the capacity to manage one's own and others' emotions — what is known as emotional regulation ability (ERA) — played a critical role in supporting employees' ability to handle stress, build positive relationships at work and persevere in emotionally demanding situations. In particular, the study published in the Journal of Business Research earlier this year found that employees with spouses who scored highly in ERA reported 'greater psychological capital and more effective emotion management.' These resources were associated with more constructive interactions with supervisors and an increased ability to navigate work challenges. Conversely, when spouses were overwhelmed with household responsibilities, the benefits of their emotional intelligence were less apparent, according to the report. The research also suggests that spousal support enhances employees' own capacity to help others in the workplace. This can make them more valuable team members and help to strengthen the social fabric of their organisations, it adds. In other words, the idea that organizations are best served by employees who maintain their focus on the job and do not share their workplace experiences — good or bad — with their families is open to question. In fact, a committed and supportive partner might be a valuable asset the organization did not know it had. As Professor Ocampo put it: 'Rather than viewing family life as a potential obstacle to workplace performance, employers should embrace policies that acknowledge the benefits of non-work resources. Family-friendly working conditions and equitable sharing of domestic responsibilities are essential to creating the supportive environments that allow employees to thrive.' Or as Sandberg might say, it is not just the employee who needs to lean in, but also their partner. But it would help a lot if employers acknowledged properly the importance of their employees' personal lives.
Fast Company
28-05-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Endless growth, endless harm: Facebook is a symptom, not an outlier
The recent exposé Careless People, by former Facebook (now Meta) executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, has received significant attention for its jaw-dropping revelations about the social media company and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. According to the author, company decisions enabled the Chinese Communist Party to suppress dissent, undermined the mental health of teenage girls, and led to genocide in Myanmar and election interference in the U.S. While there has been much attention to details showing the moral bankruptcy of Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg, there has been less discussion of how financial pressures shaped executives' decisions. Are Meta's leaders just 'bad apples,' or are the many troubling revelations in Careless People representative of pervasive problems across corporate America? While Careless People focuses on Facebook, it also prompts a broader reflection on the tech industry as a whole. Companies like Amazon, X, Google, YouTube, TikTok, and many others similarly operate extractive growth models that prioritize engagement, surveillance, and monetization over social responsibility. What Wynn-Williams has laid bare is a shared playbook of scale over ethics. Facebook's meteoric rise—and the ethical corners cut by its leaders to meet its goals—reveals fatal flaws at the heart of growth-obsessed capitalism. The company had a vast infrastructure overseen by a chief growth officer operating '. . . fast and loose, and always looking for opportunities in the gray area created by the lack of regulation.' When Facebook reached 1 billion users, COO Javier Olivan (who succeeded Sandberg) expressed fear and uncertainty, not pride and accomplishment, because it meant the company had to figure out things 'like how to reach children, how to get into places like China that are hostile to any social media site.' The final deadline for Fast Company's Brands That Matter Awards is Friday, May 30, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
Asharq Al-Awsat
16-05-2025
- Business
- Asharq Al-Awsat
US Rests Case in Landmark Meta Antitrust Trial
The US government rested its case against Facebook-owner Meta on Thursday, as it tries to persuade a US judge that the tech giant bought Instagram and WhatsApp to neutralize them as rivals. The landmark case, brought by the Federal Trade Commission, could see Meta forced to divest itself of the two apps, which have grown into global powerhouses since their buyouts. The trial, held in a federal court in Washington, is presided over by Judge James Boasberg who will decide the outcome of the case. At the heart of the antitrust battle is the question of whether the crucial ingredient that undergirds Meta's success is its ability to make connections between friends or family across its apps. The argument -- that real-life connections are the glue that make Facebook's apps successful -- is the foundation of the government's argument that describes a world where only youth-targeted Snap is a credible, if very distant, rival. Meta counters that its rivals are YouTube and TikTok and that it competes furiously in a much wider and ever-changing market to capture the eyeballs and attention of the world's users. The trial, expected to continue for several more weeks, has seen top Meta executives take the stand, including founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Much of the testimony has been devoted to government lawyers building their case that Facebook and its family of apps constitute a market that is distinct from TikTok and YouTube, apps where personal connections have very little impact on usage. The US government argues that Meta's hold on friends and family offers a unique ability to build out its products and rake in billions of dollars in profits every quarter. As a sign of the monopoly, the government also points to widespread reports of customer dissatisfaction with Meta products but continued success and growth of its apps. Meta executives argue that its apps are facing major headwinds and that calling them a monopoly is wrong. On the government's last day of calling its witnesses, the head of Facebook, Tom Alison told the court the company is in an "upheaval," facing generational changes in online habits as young users prefer TikTok-style short video content over sharing pictures and text. "The reality is that Facebook was built 21 years ago and Gen Z users have different expectations," Alison said. But the government believes that Facebook's hold on friends and family shields its business from swings in the market and that it bought Instagram and WhatsApp, in 2012 and 2014 respectively, to remove potential threats to its dominance. 'Failed' Testimony in the past weeks has included revelations by Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram, that he felt that Zuckerberg had undermined the success of his photo-sharing app in favor of Facebook once he was bought out. This seemed to back the government's argument that the purchase of Instagram was originally intended as an effort to remove a potential rival, before it became successful in its own right. Meta on Thursday began calling its own list of witnesses, beginning with executives from Snap. "After five weeks of trial, it is clear that the FTC has failed to meet the legal standard required under antitrust law," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. "Regardless, we will present our case to show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram competes with TikTok (and YouTube and X and many other apps)," Meta added.
Daily Mail
13-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
The terrifying truth about dying while exercising - and why even seemingly fit and healthy people could be at risk
The death last week of ex-SAS officer and former mercenary Simon Mann of a heart attack at the age of 72, reportedly while exercising on an indoor rowing machine, is not the first to be linked to strenuous exercise and gym machines. The husband of Facebook 's then-chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, died while running on a treadmill in 2015 – autopsy results suggested that Dave, just 47, had an undiagnosed heart arrhythmia, which may have caused him to fall while working out, leading to a fatal head injury.
