Meet Javier Olivan, Sheryl Sandberg’s replacement and Meta’s new COO

The person entering into the oversize footwear Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg will go away behind has stored a low profile throughout his practically 15 years on the firm and has barely any social media presence.

Javier Olivan, a 44-year-old native of Spain who helped unfold Fb’s footprint abroad, was thrust into the highlight after Sandberg shocked the tech world Wednesday by abruptly saying her resignation following a 14-year run at Meta. 

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg named Olivan, the corporate’s chief development officer, to the outstanding new position however acknowledged it can “be totally different from what Sheryl has executed” lately, in a publish addressing the management shakeup.

“Will probably be a extra conventional COO position the place Javi will probably be targeted internally and operationally, constructing on his sturdy monitor report of constructing our execution extra environment friendly and rigorous,” Zuckerberg stated.

Olivan will not be used to being thrust into the highlight. Whereas Sandberg has constructed a large following on social media, written a ebook and made common tv appearances lately, he has remained largely behind the scenes.

Sheryl Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg abruptly resigned from Meta on Wednesday.
Bloomberg through Getty Photographs

For instance, his Instagram account is personal and has simply 17 followers, based on CNBC. 

Olivan indicated that he would seemingly be much less publicly seen than Sandberg whereas serving as COO.

“With some exceptions, I don’t anticipate my position can have the identical public-facing facet, provided that we've got different leaders at Meta who're already accountable for that work,” he wrote in a publish on the change.

Olivan will inherit the troublesome activity of serving to Meta reinvent itself as an organization targeted on the “metaverse” — following a sequence of scandals that sapped public confidence in its core platform and weighed on its inventory value. 

Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg
Sheryl Sandberg was a key public consultant for Meta because it confronted a sequence of scandals.
Getty Photographs

The corporate additionally just lately enacted a hiring freeze because it contends with slowing income development.

Regardless of the headwinds, Olivan has had a meteoric rise from his humble beginnings within the tiny city of Sabananigo, tucked within the Pyrenees Mountains within the northeast nook of Spain.

He left the mountain village and went on to obtain a level in electrical and industrial engineering from the College of Navarra in 2000, earlier than transferring abroad to get his MBA from Stanford College’s Graduate College of Enterprise.

Olivan joined Fb in 2007 — when the social media upstart had simply 40 million customers — as head of worldwide development after stints with Siemens and Japan’s NTT Information. 

Javier Olivan
Javier Olivan just lately joined Meta’s C-Suite.
Getty Photographs

As the corporate boomed, Olivan was promoted to vp of development and helped lead Fb’s growth into different international locations, together with Russia and India, based on Reuters. It now has practically 3 billion customers worldwide.

He has been chief development officer and vp of cross-Meta merchandise and infrastructure since 2018, managing “merchandise and features that span the 4 giant Meta purposes: Fb, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger,” based on his LinkedIn web page.

“I’ve primarily been behind-the-scenes, targeted on working with our groups to construct merchandise that serve billions of individuals and thousands and thousands of companies world wide,” Oliver wrote in Wednesday’s Fb publish.

“As Meta continues to develop, one among my largest priorities will probably be to make sure that the enterprise merchandise and partnerships sides of our firm are in lockstep. I feel these orgs can proceed studying rather a lot from one another and can profit from being much more tightly linked.”

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