Who is Javier Olivan?

Javier Olivan, Facebook‘s chief growth officer, will be taking Sheryl Sandberg‘s position as the chief operating officer once formally steps down in the fall.

On Wednesday, Sandberg, who served as the COO at the social media giant for 14 years, wrote in a Facebook post that she is stepping down from her post.

“When I took this job in 2008, I hoped I would be in this role for five years. Fourteen years later, it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life,” she wrote.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post that Javier Olivan “will become our next Chief Operating Officer since he will now lead our integrated ads and business products in addition to continuing to lead our infrastructure, integrity, analytics, marketing, corporate development and growth teams.”

“But this role will be different from what Sheryl has done. It will be a more traditional COO role where Javi will be focused internally and operationally, building on his strong track record of making our execution more efficient and rigorous. As part of this, Molly Cutler, our VP Strategic Response, will join Javi’s team and report to Naomi Gleit,” he added. 

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Who is Javier Olivan?

Javier Olivan grew up in a small town in the Pyrenees mountains of Spain. He currently resides with his family in Palo Alto, California.

Olivan has a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford University and a master’s degrees in both electrical and industrial engineering from the University of Navarra.

He worked as the product manager at Siemens Mobile before joining Meta as the chief growth officer. At Meta, Olivan “leads the central products and functions that span the company’s apps: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp. This includes Meta’s growth efforts, integrity, ads and business platform, commerce and social impact efforts,” his profile on Meta’a official website states. 

He also leads several other groups apart from product, including teams for data science, internationalization, UX research, and content strategy.

He is only on the board of Endeavor, which is a nonprofit supporting the global entrepreneurial ecosystem. 

“I want to thank Sheryl for everything she’s done for Meta and for the billions of people around the world who use our products. It’s hard to fully describe the incredible impact she’s had at this company. I’ve learned a lot from her over the years, and she’s not only been a great colleague but become a personal friend, too. I’m excited to take on this new challenge as COO. As Mark said, you can’t really replace someone like Sheryl; so while I’ll have the same title, this will be a different role,” he wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday.