Google Loses Top Exec To Facebook! wtf?

Google veteran Sheryl Sandberg has taken the job of chief operating officer at Facebook, a move that deals a blow to the search king. Shares of Google fell about $12, or 2.6%, to $445 in late Tuesday afternoon trading.

As vice president of global online sales and operations at Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), Sandberg built and managed the company's blockbuster online advertising programs, AdWords and AdSense, which accounted for 99% of its $16.6 billion revenues in 2007. Google said Sandberg will be replaced by her deputy, David Fischer.

Sandberg starts at Facebook later this month. As COO of the popular Palo Alto, Calif.-based social networking site, she will help Facebook scale its operations and expand internationally. "The challenges Facebook faces are scale," Sandberg says. "Facebook is in the process of scaling operationally, geographically and scaling monetization."

Sandberg was coy about discussing more detailed goals that she has in mind for Facebook. "I'm currently a Google executive, so I can't answer questions about Facebook," she told Forbes.com.

In her new role, Sandberg will oversee the company's sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, privacy and communications. Sandberg will report directly to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. In a statement, Zuckerberg said that Sandberg has "a track record of scaling business operations and building new kinds of advertising networks."

At Facebook, Sandberg says she will draw on her experience helping Google grow rapidly. She started at Google in 2001 when it had only 300 employees. By the end of 2007, the Mountain View, Calif., company had 16,805 employees worldwide. Despite its rapid growth, Sandberg says Google has managed to maintain a culture of openness, creativity and innovation. "As companies get big, they get bureaucratic and stifle innovation," she says. Google, she notes, proves that big companies "can still be bold and be creative."

Facebook has about 500 employees but plans to double its head count by the end of the year.

At Google, Sandberg also helped launched Google.org, the company's philanthropic arm. Prior to Google, Sandberg had been chief of staff to the U.S. Treasury Secretary during the Clinton Administration, a management consultant at McKinsey & Co. and an economist at the World Bank.

Sandberg's departure deals a blow to Google, which has had a complicated relationship with Facebook, losing some mid-level executives and engineers to the site in the past year. It also lost a bidding war with Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) in 2007 for a stake in Facebook. To counter that, Google launched a program last year to spur the development of a universal social networking platform, "OpenSocial," outside the Facebook system. ( Editor's note: Elevation Partners, which holds a minority stake in Forbes, was also an early investor in Facebook.)

Sandberg's appointment as chief operating officer at Facebook comes a month after the company announced that Owen Van Natta, its chief revenue officer and former COO, would be leaving. Van Natta reportedly left because he wanted to be chief executive of Facebook, but Zuckerberg, who is only 23, doesn't appear to be stepping down anytime soon.

Asked whether she had also been interested in the CEO spot at Facebook, Sandberg, who is 38 and has more experience than Zuckerberg, said the COO job suited her just fine. "I think part of the attraction for this job is to work with and for Mark," she says. "He's extraordinary. He has a very broad vision of what Facebook can be to people."