As Olivan takes on new responsibility as the COO, we take a look at his early life and career at Meta.
Javier Olivan will be the new chief operating officer (COO) at Meta (formerly Facebook). The announcement was confirmed after Sheryl Sandberg announced she was stepping down as the COO after 14 years at the top role. “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,” Olivan wrote on Facebook after the announcement post by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Sandberg was the second-in-command after Zuckerberg. She was responsible for driving changes in Facebook and its apps such as Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. She will leave the company by the fall of this year and plans to focus more on her foundation and philanthropic work. However, she will continue to serve on Meta’s board of directors. As Olivan takes on new responsibility as the COO, we take a look at his early life and career at Meta.
Early life
Originally from the Pyrenees mountains in Spain, Olivan studied electrical and industrial engineering at the University of Navarra. He moved to the US to pursue an MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
In an interview with the Alumni Society, he talks about his childhood when he would paraglide in the Pyrenees mountains. Interestingly, reports have also mentioned how he still has a surfboard leaning against the wall in his office.
Before joining Facebook, he worked with several companies such as Siemens, NTT Data, etc. In 2005, when he enrolled at Stanford, he was also an early user of Facebook, back at the time when Facebook required a college email address to create an account. During that time, Olivan had decided to create a Spanish version of Facebook, but when Zuckerberg got to know, he immediately reached out and asked him to head international growth back in 2007.
Olivan has been an avid angel investor, like many other Facebook employees. He has invested in a range of services including Yaba, a brand amplifier startup, payment API startup Reloadly and tutoring tool GoPeer.
Career at Facebook
He joined Facebook in 2007, even before Sheryl Sandberg officially came on board. It should be noted that the company only had 40 million users at that time—and the majority of them were from the US only. Olivan was quick in scaling up Facebook’s membership base.
According to The Verge, the growth team quickly became a powerful operation within the company, this let Olivan accumulate power within the company. In 2013, Olivan worked on Internet.org, an effort Facebook and other companies launched to connect people to internet services in less developed countries. By 2015, Internet.org had brought free internet to more than 500 million people and connected 7 million.
He was also quick to expand the base in Latin America. “Extroverted and social by nature, Latin Americans have embraced our site to the point that in many places, Facebook is synonymous with the internet,” Olivan wrote in a blog post.
The growth team that Olivan heads has a heavy influence on Facebook as per The Verge.
According to CNN, Facebook’s acquisition of Snaptu, an Israeli startup that made a social networking platform like Facebook that could run on older phones and didn’t require a high-speed network can be credited to the efforts of the team Oliver headed. The tech eventually became Facebook Lite, which was a major push in terms of growth in second and third world countries.
The multi-language support was pioneered by Olivan’s efforts. Along with his team, he focused on remaking Facebook for tier-2 and tier-3 markets in their local languages and ensuring that Facebook works on slower and basic smartphones and slower. “I force a lot of the guys to use low-end phones now,” Olivan told Time magazine in 2014. “You need to feel the pain.”
Prior to his promotion as COO, Olivan’s designation was chief growth officer. With more power comes more responsibility. It will be interesting to see how Meta grows under his leadership.
Source:indianexpress.com