An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination [calibre 4.99.5]

In the fall of 1989, more than a decade before Mark Zuckerberg arrived in Cambridge, Harvard professor Lawrence Summers walked into his Public Sector Economics course and scanned the room. It was a challenging class that delved into labor markets and the impact of social security and health care on broader economic markets. The thirty-four-year-old professor, a rising star in economics, could easily peg the suck-ups among the one hundred students in the lecture hall. They were the ones who sat at the front, trigger-ready to raise their hands. Summers found them annoying. But they were also typically the top performers.

So, months later, Summers was surprised when the top grade in the midterm exam went to a student who had barely caught his attention. He struggled to place the name. “Sheryl Sandberg? Who’s that?” he asked a teaching assistant.

Oh, the junior with the mop of dark, curly hair and the oversize sweatshirts, he recalled. She sat at the far right of the room among a group of friends. She didn’t speak up much, but she appeared to take copious notes. “She wasn’t one of those kids desperate to get called on, raising both hands,” he recalled.

As was his tradition, Summers invited the highest-scoring students to lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, located at the edge of Harvard Yard, the historic heart of campus. Sandberg shone during the lunch, prepared with good questions. Summers liked how she had done her research. But he was also struck by how different she was from most of the overachievers in his classes.

“There are a lot of undergrads who run around Harvard whom I called ‘closet presidents,’” Summers said. “They think they will be president of the U.S. someday and that they are really hot shit. Sheryl didn’t hold herself or treat herself as hugely important.”

At the time, Summers was beginning to draw national attention for his expertise on the intersection of government and economics; he had received his doctorate in economics at Harvard at the age of twenty-seven and had become one of the youngest tenured professors in the university’s recent history. He was not easily impressed, but Sandberg stood out from her peers. She asked him to support Women in Economics and Government, a student-run group she had cofounded with female classmates. The club’s goal was to increase the number of female faculty and students in the concentration; Sandberg rattled off data on the percentage of female economics majors, which was in the single digits. Summers accepted the invitation. She had clearly put a lot of thought into the club, and he appreciated her good manners and respectful demeanor.

“There are students who call me Larry before I tell them it’s okay to call me Larry. Then there are students who I’ve said to call me Larry and I have to remind to call me Larry and not Professor Summers,” he said. “Sheryl was the latter.”

Summers left during Sandberg’s senior year to become the chief economist for the World Bank, but he recruited her to Washington, DC, shortly after she received her diploma in the spring of 1991, to join him as a research assistant. (He had continued as her senior thesis adviser, but felt a “little guilty” for the limited time he could offer her from Washington.)

When Sandberg told her parents she was planning to return to her alma mater in the fall of 1993 to attend business school, they were skeptical. They had always assumed she’d end up in the public sector or at a nonprofit, and until recently, so had she. Her family was full of physicians and nonprofit directors. Her father was an ophthalmologist and, with her mother, had led the South Florida chapter of the Soviet Jewry movement, a national effort to raise awareness of the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union. Sheryl’s younger siblings followed their father’s professional path; her brother became a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon, and her sister, a pediatrician. The World Bank made sense to them. Law school seemed like a more logical next step.

A senior colleague at the World Bank, Lant Pritchett, who dubbed Sandberg “a Mozart of human relations,” had encouraged her to go to business school instead. “You should be leading people who go to law school,” he said. Years later, Sandberg’s father told Pritchett he was right.