Who is Javier Olivan? Here's what we know about Meta’s new COO

After Sheryl Sandberg announced her departure from Meta, formerly Facebook, after 14 years of service, CEO Mark Zuckerberg named Javier Olivan as the company's new COO. A veteran of Meta platforms who was responsible for most of the company's success over the previous 15 years, Javier Olivan is likely to play a crucial part in the company's recovery, which comes at a time when it is struggling with slowing growth and increased costs.

Growing up in the Pyrenees region of northern Spain, Olivan graduated from the University of Navarra with degrees in electrical and industrial engineering and a master's in business administration from Stanford University. Olivan worked for Japan's NTT and Siemens before joining Facebook in 2007. 

The 44-year-old Spaniard most recently served as the Chief Growth Officer of Facebook, wherein he supervised products and services on Facebook, Instagram, as well as the messaging apps WhatsApp and Messenger. Being a rather young company with only about 40 million users when he joined, Facebook went on to expand to more than 3.6 billion users across platforms today, with Olivan being credited for driving a substantial part of Meta's international expansion.

According to a 2010 interview with VentureBeat, Olivan was largely responsible for pushing Facebook's development into nations including India, Japan, Russia, Indonesia, and Brazil while also monitoring its worldwide movements. However, many have criticized the company’s pursuit of exponential growth without putting necessary safeguards in place to avoid the spread of disinformation, hate speech, and other harmful pieces of content in the emerging markets. 

In his new role as the COO, Olivan will continue to drive infrastructure and corporate growth at Meta, while also overseeing advertising and business products on the platform, as announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook post on Wednesday.

"This role will be different from what Sheryl has done. It will be a more traditional COO role where Javi will be focused internally and operationally, building on his strong track record of making our execution more efficient and rigorous," Zuckerberg added.

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