Look at how much Sheryl Sandberg has done for Facebook (FB)

In 2008, Facebook was still a startup. Early investors were excited about its user growth — Microsoft had put $240 million into the company at a crazy-seeming $15 billion valuation the year before — but it was far from the powerhouse it is today.

That's when CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg made a fateful decision: he hired Sheryl Sandberg, then the VP of global sales and operations at Google, to help run the company as its chief operating officer.

Today is Sandberg's eighth anniversary at the company, and this chart from Statista shows it all. Facebook has grown its revenue more than 65x, gone from a $56 million annual loss to a nearly $3.7 billion profit, succesfully navigated an IPO and numerous public relations flaps over user privacy, and now ranks as the fourth-most valuable tech company in the world (after Apple, Google, and Microsoft) with a market value of more than $320 billion.

Sandberg would never take all the credit — a company is made up of its employees, not just its leaders. But her leadership certainly helped transform Zuckerberg's passion and smarts into a real business.

Statista/Facebook

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