Name: Sheryl Sandberg on Facebook's mobile growing pains
Uploaded: 2014-10-01
Duration: 4 min 6 s
Description: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg tells Fortune's Alan Murray that if the social network had been formed a few years later, it would have been a mobile-first company.

But I'd, I, I'd really like you to start to talk a little bit about where Facebook is headed. I mean 1. 3 billion users, that's a big number, do you think of it as a mature company, or do you feel like your just getting warmed up? Anyone who's ever been to Facebook will know that we're not a mature company. I see a lot of people nodding. [ LAUGH ] 20 years is the average age of your employee I, I think. Yeah, I know I'm reminded how old I am, all the time [ LAUGH ] at Facebook. People literally walk up to me and say, so you went to college. Before the Internet? [ LAUGH ] I'm like okay. There were no horses and buggies. It wasn't that bad. But it's interesting so we just had ten years. And ten years in the life of so many amazing companies are here is not very long. Ten years for us actually feels, not very long. And the world's changed, just incredibly on us. And the real question for us is you know, how do we scale and grow from here. We're actually small for what we do. So we have over 1. 3 billion users globally, and we have less than 8, 000 employees. And so I think in many ways we're still playing catch up and we're at a. Subscale internally, trying to serve what we think is a scale but the growth continues. And it's up to us to try to grow and achieve some of the things so many of the amazing people in this room have achieved. Which are, you know, P & G and Bank of America and, you know, lasting, lasting brands and companies. We're not there yet and we. Have a lot to learn to get there. Your doing it in a world that is changing very, very rapidly. How do you keep up with the pace of change? I mean the biggest change for us definitely was the shift to mobile because we were started just 10 years ago as a desktop company. And as Mark had said, if we had been started just a few years later. We would've been started as a mobile company, and the shift to mobile is the fastest adoption of a communication technology we've ever seen. The word online is about to be something only your parents say. Because you'll be all only available. I saw data that said that 79 % of Americans will only put down their cell phones for two hours a day. And I saw Ariana Huffington say that. Wait, wait, wait, wait. John Stewart. Wait. Two hours a day. What does that mean? For the rest of the day you have your cell phone. Yes. In your hand. In your hand, using it. And, Ariana Huffington. Wait you said that when you sleep, maybe you put it down? Not sure that To plug it in. I'm assuming it's down for sleeping, but she said that 20 percent of Americans are using their cell phones during sex. [ LAUGH ] What, now I, I, I'm not saying it's true. I, I, I, you know, But I'm just saying. My previous job before this one was a social science research center, the Pugh Research Center. We did not research that particular issue. That, topic. I'm not sure where Arianna's getting the [ LAUGH ] Getting her data. But no matter how you look at it. You know, an enormous percentage of us have our cell phones on all the time. And for Facebook, that was a really traumatic shift because we were built as a desktop company. And you go back two and a half years ago, at the period we were trying to go public. Some of our investors are here tonight, and they, they remember this. I mean, I'm sure that dip has long gone from your memory. but. When this shift was happening it was happening faster than we ever thought. And it's continuing to happen faster than we ever thought. It's not slowing down at all. It's not slowing down so last year was the first year the alliance crossed and the average American watched four and half hours of tv a day. And spent five and a quarter hours on digital, largely [ UNKNOWN ] and mobile. and it's almost six hours today. And so it's massively accelerating, and with that comes some really big changes. Such as? Such as personalization. The thing about your mobile phone is it delivers a personal experience. Yours is different from mine, is different from Wenda's is different from Lisa's. It's different. And, for us, again we had to rebuild our products but I think it has been a good transition once we got there through Facebook. We get one in seven minutes on the desktop. We now get over one in five minutes on a mobile phone.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg tells Fortune's Alan Murray that if the social network had been formed a few years later, it would have been a mobile-first company.