Justin Aversano thrived selling photographs as NFTs, and now his startup is helping others sell theirs.
Quantum Art is an NFT marketplace for photographers; here is Shawn Theodore’s work.
Justin Aversano is known for selling one of the highest-grossing photographs ever.
Now he’s going after a much bigger challenge: trying to make photography (and other art) profitable for the many who have felt taken advantage of by the rise of social media and instantly shareable content.
His startup Quantum Art is an NFT marketplace for photographers. The photographs have been moving fast, with about $10 million in total sales so far. The highest price paid was 15 ETH, or more than $47,000.
Bringing offline artists into NFTs so they can pay their bills and live off their work is a striking change for many in the photography world. For the NFT world, which was popularized early on with pixelated, ironic artwork, it means an injection of serious artwork. And for both groups, it’s a striking riposte to the “right-click, save” attitude that’s reflexively dismissive of internet art.
A clear way to sell photography and fight rip-offs is a meaningful change in an industry where photographers typically promote their work on Instagram or other free social media platforms. Aversano sees Quantum as a way to address some of the challenges the internet presents for artists.
“We were getting paid in likes and comments, and all of our works were being devalued because of how scrollable things became, and [we] lost our appreciation for images and made everything disposable,” Aversano said.
Previously, many artists had to pay for their own promotion and hope to get discovered. But now that’s changed, he said.
While NFTs have become popular for speculators, they have especially taken off for certain types of digital art — think Bored Ape Yacht Club or CryptoPunks selling for millions. But for fine artists who aren’t crypto-native, the crypto model can seem inaccessible.
Aversano had proved for himself that NFTs could work for photography. Last year, he sold 100 NFTs from his photography collection “Twin Flames” with help from crypto experts he met, like investor Gmoney. He originally hoped to pay off his debts for creating the series.
The collection of 100 photographs, each of a different pair of twins, is a tribute to and reflection on Aversano’s own twin who passed away in utero. “Twin Flames” was minted in February 2021 and many of its pieces have sold for sky-high prices. Collectors include Gary Vaynerchuk and Snoop Dogg. And one of the NFTs was sold in a live auction at Christie’s along with printed, physical photographs for $1.1 million.
And one of Aversano’s “Twin Flames” NFTs sold in November for 871 ETH, or just more than $4 million at the time — reportedly one of the most expensive photographs ever sold. The sale’s proceeds of 850 ETH went to RAW DAO, a group set up to help photographers.
With NFT experience under his belt, Aversano co-founded Quantum Art with the help of others he had met working on “Twin Flames.” The goal is to make it possible for other photographers to get paid for their work, he said. It’s an outgrowth of work he’s done to help photographers display their work in person through a nonprofit he co-founded, SaveArtSpace.
Quantum, launched in October, started by selecting one photographer each week to release a series of new NFTs, then promoting the series to Quantum’s community of photography enthusiasts and collectors on Discord. A number of the projects have sold for high prices. Quantum seeks photographers with a unique perspective and a cohesive theme or narrative — the styles range from portraits to landscapes to social justice-themed images to the abstract. Buyers don’t get to choose which photo in the collection they purchase (in order to gamify the system, make it more fun and increase trading, Aversano said).
The community that has grown around Quantum is part of what makes the NFTs so popular, Aversano said. In the traditional art or photography world, the artists, collectors and art enthusiasts don’t always interact, except maybe at an art show. But in Quantum’s Discord, artists will join and meet others to talk about their work and develop relationships, he said.
“Artists take time to craft their style and their signature and their eye,” Aversano said. “And that’s why we’re seeing more success in Web3 — because people are slowing down. They’re not scrolling, they’re paying attention to support photographers’ work or all artists’ work, and actually value these images more than in Web 2.0, where we were the ones paying corporations to show our work. Now it’s the other way around.”
Aversano now wants to build that community through a series of in-person art hubs, the first of which is planned in Los Angeles, he said. Quantum, which recently raised $7.5 million in series A funding led by True Ventures, also has plans to expand into other forms of art beyond photography, he said.
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Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.
Christopher Padilla, vice president of Government and Regulatory Affairs at IBM, spoke to Protocol about the global race to onshore semiconductor supply chains.
The U.S. and EU are attempting to strike a complicated balance between national security and domestic goals.
Hirsh Chitkara ( @HirshChitkara) is a reporter at Protocol focused on the intersection of politics, technology and society. Before joining Protocol, he helped write a daily newsletter at Insider that covered all things Big Tech. He’s based in New York and can be reached at hchitkara@protocol.com.
The national race to re-shore chips is slowly ramping up — but the story isn’t as simple as nations just competing against one another to bring factories within their borders. This year’s Trade and Technology Council illustrated that point as the U.S. and EU attempted to strike a complicated balance between advancing collective national security interests and promoting their independent domestic economic goals.
To better understand the dynamics underpinning the chip race, we spoke to Christopher Padilla, vice president of Government and Regulatory Affairs at IBM. Padilla previously served as assistant secretary of Commerce at the U.S. Department of Commerce and as chief of staff and senior adviser to Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick.
Padilla told Protocol why the Chips Act is no sure thing, how national security interests are driving the race to onshore and how the U.S. and Europe might go about avoiding a subsidy race.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
In this year’s TTC, the U.S. and EU agreed they want to collaborate to avoid a subsidy race. Does that scare you?
There’s clearly a global recognition that we need to build up semiconductor supply chain capabilities, particularly in the U.S., Europe and Japan. There’s a recognition that over-reliance on Taiwan is neither economically wise nor prudent from a national security standpoint. The reality is the war in Ukraine, while it has nothing to do with chips in Taiwan, has reminded everybody — as COVID did — that supply chains need to be robust.
The language about “let’s not have a subsidy war” — in a way, it makes me chuckle a little bit, because at the moment, we don’t have anything in the U.S., and prospects for getting the Chips Act are more difficult with every passing day as we get closer to the midterm elections. So in a way, the bigger problem is the U.S. fails to act, rather than that we get into a subsidy war. On the European side, they’re not interested in trying to out-subsidize the U.S. either.
Christopher PadillaPhoto: IBM
Why is the Chips Act in danger? Isn’t it widely popular?
The risk to the Chips Act is not the Chips Act itself; it’s that it’s part of a bigger package that seems to be the only legislative vehicle likely to move before the midterms. The House and Senate have both passed bills, but they’re very different. The House spends [around] $400 billion in total and the Senate spends $250 billion — that’s not a small difference. The Senate has language in its bill calling for removal of some China tariffs; the House doesn’t have that. There is a dispute about outbound investment protections. So none of this has anything to do with chips. But there’s a risk that these other issues become so politically contentious that the thing doesn’t proceed.
With every day that we get closer to the midterms, that risk increases. There’s also a risk that people say: “Ah, this is the only vehicle that’s moving, so I want to attach my immigration provision [or] my spending provision [to it.]” You put too many decorations on the Christmas tree and it falls over. That’s the real risk. Secretary Raimondo is doing a great job of keeping minds focused on the importance of this. And in all the meetings my team does on the Hill, nobody has said, “We’re opposed to the Chips Act.”
Is the onshoring race more about national security or securing adequate supply for economic purposes?
It’s both, obviously. Politicians want both. [But] I have to say, the level of urgency that we’re seeing from government leaders in the U.S., Europe and Japan is driven mostly by the national security concern.
Frankly, the Chinese actions and statements with regard to Taiwan haven’t helped either. It’s gotten a lot more nationalistic. Every government meeting I have, almost the first thing that an official says is, “We cannot rely on just Taiwan for chips. It’s inimical to our economic and national security.” So that’s the first thing, and maybe, you know, later on as the fourth or fifth thing, someone says, “Yeah, I want to create jobs in Ohio or France,” or what have you. But that’s not the No. 1 driving factor in my view. If it were just a jobs thing, I don’t think we would have to get $52 billion in the Chips Act that passed both the House and Senate.
Do you think that sense of urgency means these leaders anticipate a serious escalation in the U.S.-China conflict?
No, I don’t think there’s any sense of imminent threat. But it took a long time to get ourselves into this situation through market forces, where the manufacturing essentially migrated to one place. It’s going to take a while to get ourselves out of it. So I think the sense of urgency is that we need to start today because it takes several years to build a fab or develop the next generation of semiconductor technology. That to me is where the urgency comes from: It’s not that we think China’s going to invade Taiwan tomorrow … It’s more [that], after COVID and after the Ukraine war, we really recognized that supply chains can really affect us.
Are there any advantages to the U.S. taking an ownership model — similar to that of China — since it’s providing so much subsidy to private semiconductor manufacturers?
None. If that were the right model, China would be the world leader in semiconductor technology. They have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into this sector over a decade or more and they can’t make most chips — they’re still reliant on imported chips. The reason for that is that a lot of that money is wasted, a lot of it goes to state-owned enterprises.
The right way to do this is to promote innovation in the private sector and academic university ecosystem, which is what the Chips Act would do. It would, for example, create a national semiconductor technology center that I would envision would include industry [and] academia, as well as government, in a public-private partnership.That’s the right model; the Chinese model failed.
The Europeans who sometimes in the past have taken — certainly not a Chinese approach — but a little bit more of a statist approach on this, they’re not saying we need to create a French National Semiconductor company. The French would like to have more investment in France to do this, but they want it to be private-sector-led. Same with the Japanese: I think the Japanese are likely to create a public-private consortium that will include a fair bit of government money, but will rely on private sector actors, including foreign companies, to help rebuild the Japanese semiconductor ecosystem.
Would those nations want to prop up companies other than TSMC and Samsung, since those two are so far ahead in advanced chipmaking?
I don’t think anybody wants to displace Samsung or TSMC. The administration in the U.S. has worked really hard to get both those companies to invest in the United States, and they’ve been successful. That’s a good thing. I don’t think the concern is so much what flag is flying over the headquarters, as opposed to where things are being made, and can we get access to them in a time of need. And will there be new players created? Yeah, I think there probably will be, [but] not at the scale of Samsung or TSMC.
Hirsh Chitkara ( @HirshChitkara) is a reporter at Protocol focused on the intersection of politics, technology and society. Before joining Protocol, he helped write a daily newsletter at Insider that covered all things Big Tech. He’s based in New York and can be reached at hchitkara@protocol.com.
Internet for Growth, an initiative of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, supports the transformative role the advertising-supported internet plays in empowering America’s small businesses, helping entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life. Supported by a diverse community of over 700 IAB members including marketers, agencies, publishers, platforms and ad tech providers, as well as hundreds of small businesses and creators, Internet for Growth highlights the benefits the internet delivers to local economies, expanding opportunities for innovators to reach markets far beyond their neighborhoods. Their work ensures people understand the limitless opportunity the internet provides for creativity and commerce, fair competition, and connecting with consumers on mutually shared values and interests, no matter the background or geography.
Smaller companies like ours are buckling under the weight of unprecedented price increases, supply chain shortages and rising labor prices. To increase our marketing reach on a slim budget, the internet is our best option. Internet marketing is critical to the survival of our business. It’s one of the most affordable, effective forms of marketing at our disposal.
Limiting our options will only hurt us at a time when we need every opportunity possible to stay in business. Small companies like ours are competing with much larger competitors to reach the same customers in a busy, crowded space.
How many Valpaks, grocery store flyers and random postcards from local businesses have you discarded in the last month? We’re all overloaded with physical junk mail. Even if an offer catches our eye, there’s no instant online access or interactivity. Generational shifts have also impacted marketing. For younger generations, digital media is a part of everyday life. How they shop, date and travel: It’s all digital. For most of our customers, shopping online is the norm, and their payment choices are digital too, including at pop-up and live events. The digital economy is a way of life and here to stay. Congress needs to be careful tampering with digital advertising tools that Pot Pie Factory needs to stay in business.
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Over 100 years in business, Virginia Diner has learned and shifted approaches to advertising through changing times and overcome inevitable hurdles.
The idea that politicians could restrict cost-effective online advertising and marketing is daunting. These laws could potentially cripple the way small companies like ours do business in this ever-evolving digital age.
The recent pandemic was devastating for many brick-and-mortar small businesses relying on in-person transactions, especially those in remote, rural areas like ours in Wakefield, Virginia. E-commerce was a lifeline. As consumers spend more time online, they also demand goods be delivered directly to their doorsteps, quickly. Targeted, tailored advertising has become a critical tool for Virginia Diner to identify and serve customers, maintain growth and stay viable in a rapidly changing marketplace.
Traditionally, our core business had been wholesale, with retailers selling our products in brick-and-mortar stores. But during the pandemic, direct-to-consumer sales (DTC) became our biggest revenue channel, generating enough volume for us to stay at full capacity and keep all our team members employed. Proposed restrictions on data-driven advertising would demolish DTC sales. Our ability to identify and advertise to customers inclined to do business with us is at risk. Speaking as a consumer, I enjoy learning about and purchasing unique brands that meet my tastes, which I might not discover without personalized ads. I hope legislation making it hard to use data responsibly and to personalize ads to serve more customers never gets enacted.
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I founded my small business to help other small businesses grow. Whether they need help amplifying a brand, an artist or selling a product or service, our clients rely on S.S. Creative to connect with more customers, and much of that relies on consumer data.
The last few years have been tremendously difficult for small businesses, especially those I represent. For musicians and artists, live venues where they would typically connect with fans suddenly went dark, halting their ability to grow their brands and promote their work. For many, they could only connect with their audiences using social media and internet advertising.
Consumer data and digital marketing aren’t just nice tools to have: They’ve been essential to my clients’ survival. They range from recording studios and musicians to hair salons and lawyers, and the one thing they all have in common is that during the last two years, every one of them has had to move his or her business online to forge a path to success. The only reason my clients’ businesses are still surviving today is because they can connect with their customers digitally.
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Baby Chick is a digital media company covering everything from pregnancy and birth to postpartum and parenthood, helping parents make the best decisions for their families. My wife Nina and I started the company on Mother’s Day in 2015. Since then, Baby Chick has influenced over 26 million (primarily) women over the past seven years and gained over 81 million pageviews. If we didn’t have internet advertising, it would be challenging for us to continue operating the company.
Internet advertising has enabled us to grow our business to what it is today, but proposed regulations limiting advertisers’ ability to reach target audiences would hurt media publishers like us. With less precise information, advertisers would likely reallocate budgets from programmatic ad-buying or bid less money on digital ads, which would negatively impact Baby Chick’s revenue and our family’s income. The readership experience would suffer if site visitors weren’t seeing ads relevant to their interests and Baby Chick’s unique content. If Congress enacts restrictions on using data for advertising, it would be extremely difficult to deliver the content our customers enjoy and to pay our staff.
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New markets are constantly emerging on the internet. That’s why we see the IBM and AOL of one era replaced by the Google and Spotify of the next. That’s why today direct-to-consumer brands like Madison Reed in hair care are winning market share from giants of the industry, and brands like Allbirds are finding entirely new markets. This pace of innovation is only possible because companies are leveraging data about consumer behavior to create truly customer-centric products, services and media.
When television was the main way brands built their businesses, 200 advertisers were responsible for about 88% of network television revenue in the U.S. TV advertising was the only way to reach most households in a visual medium. It was costly, requiring relationships with big ad agencies and minimum campaign spends.
High barriers made it hard for small firms and startups to advertise at all. By contrast, millions of small businesses today are finding customers on Amazon, Facebook, Google and niche platforms like Marriott and Uber Eats with the help of data-driving advertising. There’s also “earned media.” In the open environment of the internet, millions of times a day social media users are promoting their favorite brands on Instagram and TikTok.
Used responsibly and transparently, data does not harm competition and innovation. It fosters it, as my research for the Interactive Advertising Bureau shows. A healthy economic future depends on fair and creative use of data.
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Internet for Growth, an initiative of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, supports the transformative role the advertising-supported internet plays in empowering America’s small businesses, helping entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life. Supported by a diverse community of over 700 IAB members including marketers, agencies, publishers, platforms and ad tech providers, as well as hundreds of small businesses and creators, Internet for Growth highlights the benefits the internet delivers to local economies, expanding opportunities for innovators to reach markets far beyond their neighborhoods. Their work ensures people understand the limitless opportunity the internet provides for creativity and commerce, fair competition, and connecting with consumers on mutually shared values and interests, no matter the background or geography.
Cast AI uses Kubernetes automation technology to optimize spending and performance for cloud-native apps by matching the right amount of computing power and memory to those apps.
Cast AI was born out of its co-founders’ frustrations with their cloud bills while they operated a prior startup.
Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol’s senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the ‘Big 3’ cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.
Cloud customers pay an average three times more on cloud compute costs for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud than they should, according to Cast AI. Helping them manage those costs is turning into a business itself.
The startup specializes in Kubernetes automation and cost optimization and reporting for cloud-native applications. Its platform uses artificial intelligence to identify which compute resources are needed for specific Kubernetes workloads and automatically selects the best combinations, configuring CPUs and memory to prevent over-provisioning. It continuously adds or removes resources as needed, ensuring customers aren’t overspending without compromising workload availability or performance, according to the company.
“It’s impossible to do this exercise as a human,” co-founder and Chief Product Officer Laurent Gil said. “We decomplexify capabilities. We make Kubernetes or containers serverless by saying we’re going to take care of the servers, and we will make the servers cost-efficient.”
Cast AI was born out of its co-founders’ frustrations with their cloud bills while they operated a prior startup: Zenedge, a cloud-based, AI-driven cybersecurity startup acquired by Oracle in 2018.
“In the beginning of that company, I would spend about $1,000 to $2,000 a month on AWS,” Gil said. “Three years later … that became $2 million dollars — by far the highest cost of the company, and we were very, very frustrated. We had a nice ride with customers, but every time we would add a client, our AWS bill would go through the roof.”
AWS’ answer was for Zenedge to prepay for three years to cut their cloud bill by 40%, but Zenedge didn’t want to be locked in, according to Gil. With Cast AI, they built the spending-management product they wished they had at the time.
Companies using Cast AI’s services can reduce their cloud compute spending by 65% on average, according to Gil. It works with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Kubernetes Operations (kOps) on AWS.
“The engine is instantly going to understand what applications you have … and how much compute and memory they currently consume, and how much they cost to run based on the machine that these applications are installed on,” Gil told Protocol. “Then we are going to give you another number, which is, ‘Hey, considering what this application does and uses, this should really be the cost.’”
While there are no big differences between the Big Three cloud providers’ prices, Gil said, within each cloud itself, there are cost differences when it comes to processors.
“Most … are cheaper with AMD than they are with Intel,” Gil said. “That makes our engine use more AMD sometimes for compute-intensive [workloads]. But the machine has been trained to know this, so we will always select the lowest-cost option.”
Image: Cast AI
Cast AI is currently optimizing about 1,000 applications for hundreds of customers, according to Gil.
“One thing that was very surprising to us … is that the average cost-savings we provide to anybody using us … is 65%,” he said. “Sixty-five percent means you are spending three times more than you should on Amazon. So if you think of this the other way, you say, ‘Well, out of $100 of your cloud bill, $66 of this is for Mr. Bezos, because it does nothing for you … and $33 is what you really use.”
Cast AI says that, on average, its customers weren’t using 37% of the CPUs that they were paying for. They could save an additional 7% by changing one type of virtual machine (VM) for another and another 22% by switching VMs to discounted spot instances.
“We’re not changing anything [with] our customer environment,” Gil said. “It’s like … how you defragment disk drives. We defragment your application by moving the boxes around so that you can fill the machine more [by] using all the empty space.”
It’s a task that’s impossible for developers to tackle on their own, and the cloud providers don’t make it easy, according to Gil.
One of Cast AI’s customers — an adtech company with a large consumer app in India — saw 84% in compute savings after turning on its engine, according to Gil. Another publicly traded company, a SaaS business, saw its cloud compute costs reduced by 72%.
Branch, a late-stage startup specializing in deep linking, mobile analytics and attribution, is a Cast AI customer that sees about 25 billion events per day and is running all of its compute inside Kubernetes clusters.
“Our cloud hosting needs to be very efficient to be able to process all that data in real time to be able to make real-time decisions … as well as to be able to aggregate and show all of the statistics inside of the analytics,” said Mark Weiler, Branch’s head of Engineering.
Branch, which uses AWS as its preferred cloud provider, started a proof of concept with Cast AI in May of 2021 and deployed it across all of its clusters within two months.
“They have saved us on the order of a couple million dollars per year on our AWS cloud bill, which is one of the highest ROI cost-savings projects that we’ve done in the past five or six years,” Weiler said. “The promise was they would allow us to dynamically determine what sorts of optimal spot instances to use based on our workloads without incurring any negative effects on our uptime SLAs [service-level agreements] when Amazon revokes those instances. They came through.”
“Manually configuring all that, keeping that up to date, having all the fallback scenarios set up and up to date, is extremely complicated to do on your own. It’s begging for an automated solution that can monitor the actual spot market and your instances and determine what the optimal reallocation would be,” Weiler said.
Cast AI is currently adding new features for observability and cost-reporting, but Gil sees an opportunity to even further reduce other areas of customers’ cloud bills.
“We’re just scratching the surface,” he said.
Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol’s senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the ‘Big 3’ cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.
The crypto exchange giant is rescinding offers to new hires on top of a hiring pause.
Coinbase is rescinding job offers.
Coinbase announced Thursday that it was rescinding accepted job offers to new hires, in addition to its previously announced hiring freeze, Chief People Officer L.J. Brock wrote in a blog post.
The company seemed to be determined to triple its workforce even after weak first-quarter earnings, which resulted in its stock plummeting. However, it changed its mind almost immediately, announcing a hiring freeze just a week after its analyst call.
Now, two weeks later, Coinbase is taking another step further to “reprioritize [their] hiring needs against [their] highest-priority business goals,” which includes extending the hiring pause for the foreseeable future and rescinding a number of accepted offers for people who have not started yet, via email.
Coinbase also said that it was also establishing a “talent hub” for individuals impacted by its decisions.
The slew of hiring freezes and layoffs aren’t just limited to fintechs; companies across all sectors of tech have been slowing hiring and letting go of staff. Both Twitter and Meta froze hiring last month, and Twitter also rescinded job offers.
From “Lean In” to Jan. 6 and everything in between.
Meta has defined Sheryl Sandberg’s career thus far, but she plans to “write the next chapter of her life” after leaving the company.
Issie Lapowsky ( @issielapowsky) is Protocol’s chief correspondent, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. She also oversees Protocol’s fellowship program. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing.
There was a time early on at Facebook when pretty much every other company in Silicon Valley was on the hunt for its own “Sheryl.” It was shorthand for a female executive who could transform a company from a scrappy, bro-ey startup to a fast-growing business, as Sheryl Sandberg had famously done with Facebook.
But all these years later, as Sandberg prepares to leave the company after 14 years, the mythology surrounding her — and what it means to be a “Sheryl” — has become decidedly more mixed.
She is both responsible for making Meta one of the most valuable companies in the world through its ad business and also responsible for normalizing the vast privacy intrusions that enable that business model. She is the most recognizable female executive in America and an inspiration to innumerable women around the world, as well as the person who has wielded her power behind the scenes to protect Facebook — and her own reputation — at all costs.
The evolution of Sandberg’s legacy can be traced back to key moments in Facebook’s history.
One of the early decisions that would wind up having a domino effect on Facebook’s future was the way Mark Zuckerberg and Sandberg decided to divvy up responsibility. Building products was — and remains — Zuckerberg’s primary passion. Sandberg, by contrast, had always worked on Google’s ad business and had ties to Washington, having worked at the Treasury Department under former Secretary Larry Summers.
In an interview with Steven Levy for the book “Facebook: The Inside Story,” Sandberg described the division of labor as being “very easy — he took product and I took the rest.”
“The rest” wound up including not just the business operations, but Facebook’s communications and relationship with D.C. As Facebook’s public relations and political reputation began to take a beating nearly a decade later, a lot of the blows would wind up landing on Sandberg.
In 2010, Sandberg delivered the TED talk of all TED talks. The kind that makes one of the world’s most intractable issues — bias against women — seem utterly fixable in 15 minutes or less. The talk, titled “Why we have too few women leaders,” urged women to take a seat at the table, get their partners to pitch in and, above all, to lean in to promotions and opportunities and whatever else women sacrifice in anticipation of starting a family.
The talk became the basis of a book released in 2013, which spawned a global movement, with “Lean In” circles — groups of women supporting women — popping up in 188 countries around the world. “Lean In” made Sandberg a household name and, for a time at least, shielded her from some of the scrutiny that would begin to come Facebook’s way.
When Facebook went public in 2012, it made Sandberg, who is now a billionaire, very, very rich. But more than that, it cemented Sandberg’s reputation as a business genius. Facebook went from losing money in 2008, the year Sandberg joined, to making money hand-over-fist, setting the company up for a public-market debut that, despite early stumbles, quickly saw Facebook’s stock price soar.
Sandberg got a lot of the credit for making that happen. (The New York Times quoted one Stanford engineering professor at the time, who called Sandberg the “Justin Bieber of tech.”) Facebook had the product, the fast-growing audience and the buzz, but not the discipline to make money off of it all until she got there.
Sandberg’s life was forever changed in 2015 with the sudden death of her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg. That tragedy not only temporarily affected Sandberg’s day-to-day work at Facebook, but it created a new outlet for her advocacy: this time, focused on dealing with grief.
She wrote at length about how she coped in the days and months after his death, including what helped her and what didn’t, and channeled it all into another self-help book called “Option B,” which deals with lessons on resilience and facing adversity.
Facebook’s fortunes in Washington were already in trouble by the fall of 2017. The 2016 election had started a backlash on the right over alleged censorship of conservatives on the platform. On the left, folks were already starting to blame fake news and targeted ads by the Trump campaign for Hillary Clinton’s loss.
Into this environment came FOSTA/SESTA: a bipartisan package of bills that would whittle away at Section 230 protections for the first time in the name of stopping sex trafficking. The tech industry hated the bill, but Sandberg broke ranks with her fellow Silicon Valley executives, coming out in favor of a modified version of the bill in November 2017. Facebook’s backing is widely viewed as having pushed FOSTA/SESTA over the line. For Sandberg, the moment was also defining, revealing the ways she worked behind the scenes to burnish the company’s reputation in Washington.
Outside of Facebook, Zuckerberg bore most of the blame for allowing so much Facebook user data to be scooped up and sold to Cambridge Analytica for political purposes. It was Zuckerberg who appeared first in front of Congress to apologize for Facebook’s missteps.
But inside the company, Cambridge Analytica was reportedly a turning point in Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s relationship, with Zuckerberg personally blaming his No. 2 for being too slow to address that and other issues at the company, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A November 2018 exposé in The New York Times, published in the aftermath of both the Cambridge Analytica debacle and the Russian troll scandal, focused attention on Sandberg’s alleged misdeeds like never before. According to the Times, Sandberg had tried to limit the amount of detail Facebook shared about Russian intrusion and even reprimanded the company’s then-head of Security for sharing information about it with Facebook’s board.
That story also exposed Facebook’s efforts to push negative coverage of competitors through an opposition research group and investigate ties between George Soros and Facebook’s critics. Sandberg, who initially attempted to distance herself from that work, eventually accepted blame for it, writing, “I want to be clear that I oversee our Comms team and take full responsibility for their work and the PR firms who work with us.”
The story started a new round of rumblings about whether Sandberg’s days at Facebook were numbered.
Through the Trump years, Sandberg, a known Democrat and Clinton supporter, took a less central role in representing Facebook in Washington. But as the company’s second in command, she was still called on to answer for Facebook’s failure to prevent the Stop the Steal movement from spreading before the Jan. 6 riot.
In an interview with Reuters, she pushed blame onto other platforms, saying, “These events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency.”
Sandberg’s reluctance to accept any responsibility for the riot struck people both inside and outside of Facebook as a sign of how little the company and its most senior executives had learned about their impact on the world.
Sandberg’s most recent scandal came to light just months ago, when the Journal reported that she twice intervened in reporting by The Daily Mail on a since-retracted temporary restraining order that had been taken out against her ex-boyfriend Bobby Kotick. The Journal reported that Meta employees had been involved in trying to squash the story and that the ordeal had sparked an internal investigation of Sandberg.
It’s unclear what that investigation found, though a Meta spokesperson told the Journal that Sandberg never “threatened the MailOnline’s business relationship with Facebook in order to influence an editorial decision.”
Meta has defined Sandberg’s career thus far, but she plans to “write the next chapter of her life” after leaving the company this fall. Whether she likes it or not, Facebook will continue to be a main character.
Owen Thomas contributed reporting.
Issie Lapowsky ( @issielapowsky) is Protocol’s chief correspondent, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. She also oversees Protocol’s fellowship program. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing.
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