Meta veteran Javier Olivan is taking on as the corporate’s chief working officer after enjoying a vital however largely behind-the-scenes function stoking the social media firm’s explosive progress for 15 years.

The Spaniard will change Sheryl Sandberg, who introduced on Wednesday she was stepping down from Meta.

The transfer comes as Meta struggles with slowing progress and rising prices. It is remodeling from a social media firm to 1 centered on constructing the metaverse, a group of digital worlds that may very well be a decade away.

Olivan, who grew up within the Pyrenees area of northern Spain, holds levels in electrical and industrial engineering from the University of Navarra and a grasp’s in enterprise administration from Stanford University.

Before becoming a member of Facebook in late 2007 as head of worldwide progress, Olivan, 44, labored at Japan’s NTT and Siemens.

When he joined, Facebook was a younger firm with about 40 million customers and now has almost 3.6 billion customers throughout Facebook and different apps comparable to Instagram.

While overseeing its worldwide strikes, Olivan pushed Facebook’s growth into nations comparable to India, Japan, Russia, Indonesia and Brazil, in keeping with an interview he gave in 2010 to VentureBeat.

Critics say the corporate pursued this progress with out adequate safeguards in opposition to the unfold of misinformation, hate speech or dangerous content material in rising markets.

Former Facebook product supervisor and whistleblower Frances Haugen final 12 months leaked inside paperwork that she stated confirmed Facebook put income over person security and lacked ample controls to take away dangerous content material in languages aside from English.

Olivan, who in keeping with media stories enjoys paragliding and browsing, has most just lately served as chief progress officer. In that place, he has managed options and features that span Facebook and Instagram in addition to messaging apps WhatsApp and Messenger.

In his new job, he’ll proceed to steer infrastructure and company growth. But his portfolio will even embrace promoting and enterprise merchandise, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a Facebook put up on Wednesday.

One factor is unlikely to vary. Olivan will proceed to remain out of the limelight as he carries out the COO job. This contrasts with Sandberg, who appeared earlier than Congress, wrote a best-selling e-book about girls within the office and sometimes represented Facebook to exterior audiences.

“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,” Zuckerberg stated.

Now that Meta is a mature enterprise with $118 billion (roughly Rs. 9,15,600 crore) in income, Olivan could have much less autonomy than Sandberg did when she joined within the firm’s early years, stated Brian Wieser, international president of enterprise intelligence at advert company GroupM.

A key query is whether or not Olivan will probably be “more attentive,” to points concerning knowledge privateness in addition to defending manufacturers from having their advertisements seem subsequent to unsuitable content material, Wieser stated.

© Thomson Reuters 2022