A Conversation with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg

well good afternoon dec members and guests happy tuesday it's a pleasure to have you with us today i'm steve grigorian president ceo of the detroit economic club coming to you from beautiful downtown detroit where the detroit river looks gorgeous in the march sunshine a couple of quick announcements before we get started we do want to take a brief moment to thank the terrific dec sponsors for their continued support of our mission and you are seeing these companies on your screen march and april at the dec has something for everyone so be sure to get your tickets for some upcoming events if you're a march madness fan and who isn't join us next thursday march 25th when we host espn bracketologist joe linardi for some march madness fun in in april we're hosting sunil gupta on his new book backable and former ge ceo jeff immelt on his new book hot seat so we hope you can get those on your calendar and join us if your schedule permits you already know how important it is that you see that high school and college students are included in everything we do and today we want to say welcome to students from all over southeast michigan six universities four high schools too many to name like i normally do but i do have to call out the best and brightest students in all the land and that would be my britons from albion college so it's truly a pleasure to be joined by students from all 10 schools today welcome students the dec has an incredible history of speakers and our speaker today joins a distinguished list of 18 other speakers who in our 87 year history have addressed the dec on this day march 16th and that list includes 1964 world war one flying ace captain eddie rickenbacher and in 1983 u.s secretary of treasury donald reagan and you might recognize the presiding officer today none other than lee iacocca and today we're pleased to add sheryl sandberg as our 19th speaker on this day in dec history so let's get started a very special guest speaker today cheryl sandberg is the chief operating officer at facebook where she over serves overseas the firm's business operations prior to facebook cheryl held c-suite and executive positions at google the u.s treasury department mckinsey and the world bank she holds a ba summa laude from harvard university and an mba with the highest distinction from harvard business school you already know cheryl is also an accomplished best-selling author and the founder of leanin.org and we are so delighted cheryl can join us today from california so let's say hello and welcome sheryl sandberg to detroit steve thank you for having me i first got to visit the detroit economic club when i was a young staffer at the treasury department in the clinton presidency so we know now how old i am um but it's a treat to be back and actually i think the big thing that got cancelled for me when corona virus happened was my trip in person it's taken us now we're rescheduling via zoom but um this marks for me a year of coronavirus and while i'm sad not to be there in person i'm really happy to be with you today and grateful you invited me thank you steve the pleasure is all ours and we are going to have you back in person someday soon so welcome again and our moderator today is a familiar voice to all vicky thomas is the city beat reporter at wwj news radio 950 where she also hosts the black business minute she's the first ever black woman in radio broadcasting in the michigan journalism hall of fame she's a great friend of the dec better friend to me let's say hello to vicky thomas wow thank you so much steve it's a pleasure to be here and i'm really excited to be part of the conversation today well it's great to have you both here we've got a lot to cover so vicky take it away well cheryl welcome to detroit virtually it was definitely great speaking with you last week so i'm excited to continue the dialogue today with the dec group that says joined us virtually and let's jump right into it and i certainly don't have to tell you that this pandemic has devastated small businesses across the country across the globe and certainly here in detroit how has facebook helped small businesses during this challenging time in our history well vicki thank you for interviewing me today and for for being such a strong and supportive voice of business of women of of of all of all things in detroit i mean we're in the middle of an unprecedented uh health crisis an economic crisis a crisis for gender and equality and a crisis for small business you know businesses around the country around the world have been forced to close people have had to completely rethink how they did their business try to keep the lights on keep paying their employees and we know that small businesses are the very heart of their community so when small businesses are hit communities are ahead now at facebook we are a big business but our business is small business we have 200 million small businesses using our free tools 10 million small businesses that rely on our advertising products and so our whole business is helping small businesses now this crisis hit small businesses hard before coronavirus a third of u.s small businesses had no online presence or mobile site at all most small businesses are local they serve customers when everything shut businesses had to pivot online and we're proud of the support we offered you know it's really hard to set up a mobile website or build a mobile app if you're a small business resources are tight you are usually doing what you do you are not a website designer that's not the business you're in you are a baker or a yoga studio or an artist or selling wine any number of small businesses but website design is probably not your thing but on facebook you can set up a facebook page or an instagram business profile in minutes you already know how to do it and it's free and that's what we small saw small businesses did so we focused on helping small businesses get online and stay online we focused on giving training we trained a hundred million small businesses in 20 since 2020 alone we've changed a million small business women through our she means business and then we really focused on giving support to keep the lights on we gave out a hundred million dollars in grants when coronavirus first hit 40 of that was for the united states and it was the cities we call home the cities where our employees are that are part of our community and detroit was certainly a big part of that and one thing that facebook also did cheryl was created programs to assist black-owned small businesses um steve mentioned the black business minute we highlight black businesses three times a week and the reason why i started that is because i heard statistics that said 40 to 50 of black owned small businesses will not survive the pandemic so talk about the programs that you created for those to help throw them a lifeline and why you wanted to do that so vicki you're exactly right black owned small businesses have been closing at two times the rate of other small businesses during coronavirus and those are black owned businesses that serve communities of color black communities are no matter who owns them are also closing at higher rates so in addition to the 100 million dollar grant program we did when coronavirus started we did an additional 100 million dollars for black owned small businesses creators nonprofits in the u.s alone of that 20 million dollars was for community foundations and a million of that went to the community foundation for southeast michigan again this is a community we call home but we tried to do more and our employees really wanted to do more to help black communities and black owned small businesses so two of our employees in our marketing team came up with an idea we loved called buy black friday so i think everyone knows what black friday is right it's the friday after after thanksgiving where people start their holiday shopping this was hashtag buy black friday so buy on black friday from black owned businesses we gave businesses an opportunity to self-identify i'm a black owned business we created a gift guide and we created a black friday show and with 15 million people that tuned in we also have a really deep commitment to train black and latinx small business owners we've committed to reaching a million people but what really matters is what happens on the ground so i started my morning since i wasn't able to be in detroit i met with nine uh local detroit small businesses eight of which are owned by women uh one man we were glad to have him there almost everyone there uh was a person of color a woman of color and i heard the most amazing stories so regina runs the house of purevin she's from detroit regina gaines and her business was very local her wine store was more than a store she created in-store experiences for people to come and then they bought wine and that was how our business worked so when coronavirus hit she couldn't have those in-store experiences that were driving her business so she moved them online she moved them to instagram and she was interviewing winemakers and running cooking classes and giving people those experiences and this is what's amazing her business is up this year business is up this year so what do we believe we believe when we give small businesses the tools when we give small business as the assistant they aren't going to just survive they're going to thrive and that is going to make communities like detroit continue to thrive and can you share a couple of other stories uh we talked to regina gaines she was featured on black business minute this past monday and uh listening to the business owners during your round table this morning was incredible they shared uh some of their challenges and whatnot so talk a little bit more about uh some of the things uh local examples of detroit businesses that facebook has helped some of those stories oh i would love to i mean one of my favorite stories was la asia johnson she runs a local company called elijah essentials um all natural skin care she called it smell goods things that smell good that you want now her story is amazing she was diagnosed with eczema and crohn's disease and all the products didn't work for her she was breaking out they had toxic things in them and so she opened a retail store and it was successful and then coronavirus hit so she had to close so she really pivoted online and she did it in a really creative way she created a facebook community called the garden she has over 1100 people in her community you heard her talk about it this morning she calls them her sunflowers and from those people she gets her product ideas she gets her product name she gets to talk about fragrances and what she said to us vicki was that she's a sole proprietor and that's really lonely she was like do you like this color palette i don't know right so she had those people and she said when she builds the products that are suggested by that group those products are flying off the shelves faster than she can put them on and she replaced all of her income that's what you call listening to your customers right not with our customers and then there are other local examples so todd everett experience he's a local dj he wasn't in our round table this morning but he was one of our grant recipients and he used the money we gave him to keep his employees paid and look his business was weddings and parties talk about a business that's not happened during happening during coronavirus in those situations what he needed was some cash and some assistance and we were glad to provide it he also found a way to do business online he created an online store and launched an online dj academy and so our goal is to work with small businesses in detroit everywhere provide those tools but it's really the entrepreneurs themselves it is regina it is la asia it is todd who say i am not going to let this virus i am not going to let this economic downturn stop me i'm going to pivot online i'm going to find a way to keep going and i think everyone's looking forward to the world and the economy returning to normal you're also bringing a training program to detroit talk a little bit about that that's right we get to announce this with you right now i'm excited to do it with the small business association of michigan michigan we're bringing boost with facebook uh to detroit next week or later this month now at the beginning of last year my team and i had a big meeting on what we were going to do to take our work with small business to the next level and we had this boost program where we traveled around to different cities and we had to set up in local offices so we decided we were going to make it easier we were going to get big trucks we were going to do boost with facebook and drive around and then coronavirus hit and people were not coming into a small space that we brought with the truck so we have pivoted this entirely online it's totally free um on svm's website you can find it so it's facebook.com small business association of michigan please go we are providing free training free tools to small businesses in partnership with them and we're really excited to do it and hopefully we can get that link in the chat box uh also talk to me about your advice for a small business that doesn't have a website has no experience with digital marketing or advertising what would you tell them three things the first thing is you need an online presence and as i said before a third of small businesses didn't have one but you can set it up for free in minutes on facebook and instagram so your customers can find you the second thing is you know learning the basics of how to reach customers it used to be that only big companies could afford advertising and small companies really suffered or they had to literally remember the days you and i are old enough i think passing out flyers right how for very small amounts of money you can target and find exactly the people interested in your products and that is a lifeline for small businesses and then keep iterating and learning and in all of this it's the creativity that matters so i'm gonna share one of my favorite this is the pure detroit and little flower soap company right so this is these are some of the things i bought that i love this is a soy candle my guess is they sold this before coronavirus but i'll tell you what i don't think they sold before corona buyers this box because this is a quarantine kit i don't know if i can show it it's super pretty comes with their branding this is a face mask no one i know had one of these before this happened right right this is all natural uh hand sanitizer this is beautiful hibiscus soap i think this shows the ingenuity of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs in detroit i think they were making soap before they might have been making hand sanitizer but they weren't packaging it up in a box as a quarantine kit that is how small business owners pivot decide what people need from them now and then we can help them find those customers it's a great product congratulations to this company well yeah talk about pivoting and i think you know facebook instagram has really um helped a lot of these companies survive let's talk a little bit more about facebook uh the privacy and digital ads there's been a lot of discussion about that proposed changes by legislators and other tech companies could impact how facebook tracks and uh users and targets ads to them and i was talking to my news director he thought it was amazing how he could search for something and then there's an ad that pops up almost immediately can you talk about this and how that will impact small businesses i'm really glad to because this is so important and what i want to say first is privacy is our top priority always has been now not something people always understand or we've explained very well but are protecting the privacy of the people that use facebook is the most important thing if you send me a message vicky that message is secure it doesn't get shared with everyone if you want to do a post to a small facebook group you're in it only stays in that group or if you want to do a public post you're choosing to share it with everyone and protecting that privacy is the most important thing now with advertising we use data in a very privacy protective way and it is critical for small businesses i'm going to give you an example this morning at my round table i met ita reyes she's started a yoga studio in ann arbor now how does she advertise how does she get customers especially in coronavirus she shows her ad only to people who are yoga or meditation enthusiasts living in detroit we are using data to do that we take that ad we show it to those people and we don't give her back anything we just give her back aggregate stats your ad was shown 100 times 10 people clicked we don't give her back a single person now if she can't do that if she has to advertise to all of detroit she can't afford to do that not everyone in detroit wants yoga yoga and meditation experiences but because she could do that and then when she pivoted online for coronavirus and started outdoor yoga classes she could advertise and build her following it's on us to make sure we protect people's privacy make sure we take that ad we show it and we don't give her back any information it's on us to explain how this works but if that ability of hers goes away it doesn't hurt the biggest gems in the company it doesn't hurt the biggest companies in the company but it does hurt that local yoga studio and so we have to make sure that we've explained personalized ads we're actually launching a marketing campaign uh to try to explain it good ideas deserve to be found so if you are interested in another example in our campaign is goat yoga not everyone is people do yoga with goats they can you can find that and enable that personalized personalized ad experience to happen in a very privacy protective way i think a lot of small businesses are really worried that people are trying to do the right thing and protect privacy but it will inadvertently not actually protect privacy and really hurt local communities all right i want to try to get in a couple more questions as we run out of time but uh you're known as an advocate for women and you've done research on the impact of this pandemic on women-owned businesses talk a little bit about that and any advice you would have for women-owned businesses or women climbing the corporate ladder so we're in a crisis as i said at the beginning it's a health crisis it's an economic crisis and it's a it's a crisis for women um we just put out the next round of the facebook u.s state of small business report and it shows that female-led smbs are closing at higher rates than their male counterparts they're closing at 28 and the male owned smbs are closing at 22 and twice as many business owners say the reason they're closing is household related reasons so this gender divide is compounded and that is part of why we need to support women-owned businesses businesses owned by people of color especially businesses owned by women who are of color because that's where you have all the gender bias you have all the race bias and it comes together and we need to make sure we are protecting and growing the businesses that matter so much all right and uh here's a great and timely question to close it out with it's women's history month tell us about some of the women who've inspired you and the five women that you're spotlighting in your gift guide and we have the link to that gift guide in the chat box yeah so look there's so many women that have inspired me certainly our new vice president kamala harris from my home state justice ruth bader ginsburg i think has been on everyone's mind with that with our loss of her malala who's done so much to show that children uh i go back to gloria steinem who was you know the original one of the original great great but i have to tell you the women the women who i met this morning in detroit i'm going to share uh one more story jennifer lyle runs lush yummies they're pies and it's such a good interesting story about the importance of local business so she makes these delicious pies she went big she got featured twice on oprah's um favorite things and what that did for her is it poured the orders in from all over the country but it turns out that those orders are great and she's happy to have them but they're expensive to fulfill and what she needed to make her business sustainable and profitable were local customers so she used facebook to find pie lovers who were local the people who could come in pick up where she could sell her product without without shipping and after she ran a very targeted privacy protected facebook ad the lines were around the block and i think that comes back to where we start right women who inspire us the importance of local support local businesses and i think people really responded because they wanted to support a local business and because her pies are just delicious excellent and everyone please check out the link to uh cheryl's gift guide that features five local businesses and uh steve i want to turn it back over to you cheryl great conversation and i appreciate the opportunity to chat with you again steve thanks vickie you're a pros pro and thanks to both of you for a thoughtful conversation and now i'd like to share i'll turn our attention to some audience questions that we received from dec members and i want to start with a question we received about social media's role in society this comes from dec member rich the last four years in the recent u.s presidential election shined a bright light on social media's role in elections and democracies i guess there's cheryl there's so many places to go with this question so let's ask you to comment on both truth and power when it comes to social media so you started with elections i'll talk about that and i'll talk about power and i'll be mindful of time because this is a conversation we could have for a long time but elections democracy nothing could be more serious to us to all of us and this was a challenging election we've never been so polarized and then we had a pandemic where people didn't even know how they could vote so i mean it was like the perfect storm and so what did we do we tried to help we really we learned the lessons of protecting our democracy from foreign interference but we really also tried to help people register to vote and we're proud of what we accomplished we registered or helped register 4.5 million people that's the largest efforts of its kind anywhere in the world last time we did 2 million for each of the last two elections we put up a voter information center that 140 million americans visited and what that told you is state by state here's how i vote am i allowed to send it in by mail where do i go answering all those questions so people could have their voice heard on power there is real concern about the size and the power of the tech companies and we understand that um and we really do believe internet regulations need to be rewritten the last time most of the laws governing us were done were 25 years ago and that is a long time ago and they need to be updated at the same time we hope people understand and think about that a lot of the tech companies that are the largest in the world are american companies and that means we exist under american law and that's a pretty good place to be because some of our largest competitors are in china and they exist under chinese law and i think um it is important that we find a way to i think continue american leadership of the tech industry it's been so important make sure that people understand and there are limits to the power we have and make sure that we don't see uh power in a way to other countries that we don't want to thanks cheryl let's stick with roles of social media um what's the role what role does social media have for small businesses what is the importance for them as compared to larger companies well obviously we're used by and important to large companies and small but we're much more important for small businesses we have 200 million small businesses i mentioned that are using our free products around the world and we are why so many small businesses can start thrive and make the pivots they need to online for coronavirus you know when you think about what it used to take to start a small business you used to have to get a storefront get a loan raise a lot of capital that was prohibitively hard for people much harder for women much harder for minorities even harder for women of color this is the great equalizer online anyone can do this on minutes now the role of data and personalized ads is just critical for small businesses and i think not well understood and that's on us but if you take away the ability to target under what i think is an un untrue promise of protecting privacy you hurt small businesses you hurt the local yoga studio the local pie uh bakery that needs to create needs to um find local customers now our job is to make sure we protect people's privacy and make sure we explain that well and i don't think we've explained it well which is part of why we're having this conversation today and our job is to make sure that the 200 million small businesses out there can continue to thrive i think coronavirus has been an acceleration to what is online but that was a move that was happening and so they say you know never waste a good crisis we need to make sure that small businesses come out of this crisis not just surviving but stronger having their local revenue stream their stores back open but also their online ability to reach customers and an ability to thrive we're worried about unemployment in this country and world we should be most people don't know this most job growth comes from small business not large companies and they are the heart of our communities thanks cheryl this question comes from dec member jackie who i know is a huge fan of yours so she says we know it's been a very stressful year for many small business owners maybe you can share how you have dealt with and overcome stress during parts of your career look it's been a hard year for everyone i think um there aren't families out there that haven't been touched with this very early on in the virus my fiance's first cousin passed away of of kuru virus and you know for us it was obviously a shocking loss it was very early it was early april last year and but you know you couldn't even get together to mourn and so we had to find other ways of reaching out and on a work point of view we had to send everyone home and we were able to send everyone home and we took that very seriously we've tried to deal with that by being a company that helps you know hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to small businesses as we talk but also really taking care of our employees letting people work from home giving people additional leave coronavirus leave additional money business has to do its part we have to do our part to protect our employees and the small businesses who would depend on us thanks cheryl and let's wrap this up on a something positive we got about 30 seconds left i'm going to ask you to leave us with something that gives you hope for small businesses as we think we finally see a light at the end of this pandemic this morning the nine businesses and non-profits i met with from detroit i shared some of the stories i'll share two more really quickly an amazing woman named jenny brown she started a non-profit called everybody she had a sister with down syndrome i learned from her that unemployment rates for people with those kind of challenges are above 85 percent she started a local business and non-profit to help people like her sister be gainfully employed and then this amazing woman named mia reed she lost her only son to gun violence when he was just 24 years old and what did she do with that she started something called change happens and she is helping so many people locally i am given hope by the women and the man but the women and the man i met with this morning i'm given hope by the fact that we are hopefully going to help more businesses with boost boost in detroit and i'm given hope by the fact that even when we can't be together and on person like we're supposed to we're all together here thinking about what we can do for the communities of which we're apart i am so grateful you let me pop into detroit uh this morning at least virtually well cheryl a huge huge thank you for spending time with the dec we wish you the best let us know if we could be helpful here in detroit and we look forward to hosting you in person soon thank you and a special thanks to vicky thomas once again it's always great to see you vicky and thank you steve thank you vicky thank you so much can't wait to meet you me too thank you for having us today steve i so appreciate it you're so welcome the pleasure is ours and thank you to cheryl's team who has been terrific to work with and locally to ron fournier from truscott russman and thanks to my team and for all of you for continuing to support the dec your membership is very important to us have a strong week keep the faith hope to see you march 25th when we host espn's joe linardi goodbye everybody thank you steve thank you everyone

Channel: Detroit Economic Club

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Length: 31min 40sec (1900 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021