Spaniard Javier Olivan, who has been named to replace Sheryl Sandberg as the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook’s parent company Meta, summed up the change in a post, saying, “While I’ll have the same title, this will be a different role.” This isn’t just about the fact that Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Olivan, both Facebook veterans, have been involved with different aspects of the company’s operations but also that they are two different personalities. After founder Mark Zuckerberg, Ms. Sandberg has been the most visible face of the social networking company. In his post, Mr. Zuckerberg called her “a superstar who defined the COO role in her own unique way”.
Her successor doesn’t anticipate his role to have “the same public-facing aspect”. As the COO, the low-profile Mr. Olivan will continue to work with growth, integrity, infrastructure, and other teams. Mr. Olivan, 44, followed up on an engineering degree with an MBA from Stanford, and worked at Siemens Mobile as product manager before joining Facebook. He has been the behind-the-scenes man working on scaling products and projects ever since.
In an interview with Venture Beat 12 years ago, Mr. Olivan, then just three years into his job at Facebook (when MySpace was still the bigger platform), spoke about how the social media platform hopes to touch a billion users, doubling from its count at that time. As head of international growth, Mr. Olivan’s mandate then was to tap emerging markets such as India, Indonesia, and Russia, among others. In other words, the target then was a market heavy on feature phones and low on bandwidth.
Growth challenge
In 2010, Facebook wasn’t the social media leader that it is today — it was trailing Mixi and Twitter in Japan, yet to catch up with Orkut in India and Brazil, and was far behind Vkontakte in Russia. Cut to now: as per the 2022 first quarter results of Meta, TextEditor3.64 billion users are using at least one of its products (Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram) every month.
By the time Facebook crossed the one-billion mark, it was faced with another growth challenge. This time, the subject was the Messenger app, which evolved as a separate product in 2011 especially after the company acquired a service called Beluga. When the going got slow, it was Mr. Olivan who was tapped to speed it up. He, as detailed by a report in Wired.com, figured out that those using the standalone app messaged more than those who used Facebook’s messaging feature.
Mr. Olivan was also a key part of the organisation’s push for internet.org, a free service promoted by Facebook and a few partners so as to give a taste of the internet to those who can’t afford it. It was criticised as Facebook became the internet gatekeeper for those who signed up for it. In a 2014 Time magazine report, Mr. Olivan spoke about how Facebook worked with networking companies such as Ericsson to recreate the conditions in regions such as rural India. “Then we brought in some phones, like very low-end Android, and we invited guys from the Valley here — the eBay guys, the Apple guys. It’s like, Hey, come and test your applications in these conditions! Nothing worked,” he was quoted as saying.
He has also been acknowledged as the one who pushed Mr. Zuckerberg to consider key acquisitions, including that of WhatsApp. It has been reported that, at one point, the company was in a way alarmed by WhatsApp’s growing popularity, and that there was a feeling that it could eventually eclipse Facebook as a social networking option. Also reported was the fact that some of the company’s leaders felt it would get worse if one of Facebook’s rivals manages to buy WhatsApp. Mr. Zuckerberg did eventually close that deal at a whopping $19 billion.
Mr. Olivan’s appointment comes at a time when the company faces pressure to keep its daily active users from falling. New challenges such as privacy-related tweaks to Apple’s operating system seem to be impacting Meta. New platforms also pose challenges. But then there’s also a long-term opportunity that it wants to build and scale. It goes by the name metaverse. As Mr. Zuckerberg said in a recent analyst call, referring to metaverse, “I think it’s important to build the foundation for the next era of social technology as well”.
