Sandberg on Facebook: 'We are our own biggest risk'

Sheryl Sandberg, Fortune Brainstorm Tech marketing dinner New York 2014 (Credit: Photograph by Rebecca Greenfield/Fortune Brainstorm Tech)

Near the top of Facebook's most recent annual report—which, I should warn you, runs nearly 100 pages long—the social networking company (FB) outlines its biggest business risks. The first is a tenet of any firm that dares to describe itself with the "s" word. "If we fail to retain existing users or add new users, or if our users decrease their level of engagement with Facebook," it reads, "our revenue, financial results, and business may be significantly harmed." Read a bit further and you'll come across the second biggest risk to Facebook's business. It reads: "We generate a substantial majority of our revenue from advertising. The loss of marketers, or reduction in spending by marketers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business." Substantial, if you're wondering, is 89% of the almost $8 billion it took in last year. It is this reason why Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, was in New York this week. Sandberg, of Lean In fame, was in town for the city's annual Advertising Week. On Sunday, her company announced that it had rebuilt Atlas, an advertising software suite it bought from Microsoft

Fortune Brainstorm Tech marketing dinner

ElloFortune Saturday Night Livedid that skit years agoGoogleEditor's note: Though Sandberg didn't reprise her Lean In talk, she did remark that there were many women present in the room of marketing executives, and took a moment to conduct an experiment in which she first asked the men in the room to raise their hands if they had ever been told that they were "bossy" at work. (A small handful did.) Then she asked the women. (About four times as many hands went up.) "If you go to most business dinners in New York or San Francisco, most of the women in this room are used to being the only women in the room," she said. "That’s what I want to change. That’s what we all want to change." Joking that a bossy little girl has executive leadership skills isn't something to chuckle about, she said. There should be as little humor in the thought as there would be for a bossy little boy. "That bias exists in all of us," she said, "in men, in women, in me.”