After the holidays, Zuckerberg e-mailed her, and they had the first of many dinners. [...] So for six weeks they met for dinner once or twice a week at Sandberg’s six-bedroom home. [...] “It was like dating,” says Dave Goldberg, Sandberg’s husband and the C.E.O. of the online company SurveyMonkey.

2. Facebook, however briefly, considered a subscription model:

Sandberg quickly began trying to figure out how to make Facebook a business. Should the company rely on advertising? On e-commerce? Should it charge a subscription fee?

3. Sandberg has the qualifications to do whatever she wants (smarts I was never in doubt. I did not know of her extensive pre-Google experience). Maybe even enough, as I mentioned earlier this week, to be Treasury Secretary.

At the time, the World Bank was deciding whether to bail out Russia. Someone asked, Summers recalls, whether a bailout in 1917 could have saved the country from seventy years of Communism. He posed the question to Sandberg. “What most students would have done,” he says, “is gone off to the library, skimmed some books on Russian history, and said they weren’t sure it was possible. What Sheryl did was call Richard Pipes,” who was a leading historian of the Russian Revolution and a professor at Harvard. “She engaged him for one hour and took detailed notes.” The next day, she reported back to Summers.

4. Part of Sandberg’s personality (and success) is about being drawn to the people and places with the hockey stick growth, with the off-the-charts numbers for growth and potential — just look at how Eric Schmidt pitched her. I think this also impacts her views on women in tech.

When Summers advanced to Treasury Secretary, in 1999, Sandberg became, at twenty-nine, his chief of staff. After the Democrats lost the 2000 election, she decided to move to Silicon Valley to join the technology boom. Google pursued her, and she thought the company was alluring. Like government, to her it “had a higher mission, which is to make the world’s information freely available.” She knew, though, that Google didn’t have a business plan. It was a private company, barely three years old, with no steady revenue stream. Eric Schmidt called her every week. “Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “This is a rocket ship. Get on it.”

5. Media plays a big role in the way we see gender and jobs and sexuality, especially with regards to science and tech ( this is a “duh,” at some level, but the examples in the piece were particularly illustrative).

Several female computer-science majors at Stanford pointed to the depiction of women in films like “The Social Network,” where the boys code and the girls dance around in their underwear. [...] Dina Kaplan, the co-founder of Blip.tv, says that when she met with angel investors to raise funds she dressed nicely, and in a meeting with a potential funder he told her, “Here’s what we do, Dina. We’re going to spend half the meeting with you pitching me, and half the meeting with me hitting on you!”

6. Sandberg in many ways embodies that pure Silicon Valley spirit in her naïveté and her deep belief in the world as a meritocracy. These two things may go hand-in-hand with a charmed life like Sandberg’s (Harvard College and HBS grad, Larry Summers-mentored, Google stock unit-optioned Facebook exec). For someone in her situation, it’s not about being male or female, maybe it’s just about being among the elite.

Some critics, however, note that Sandberg is not exactly a typical working mother. She has a nanny at home and a staff at work. Google made her very rich; Facebook may make her a billionaire. If she and her husband are travelling or are stuck at their desks, there is someone else to feed their kids and read to them. [...] Marie Wilson, the founder of the White House Project, which promotes women for leadership positions, attended Sandberg’s TED speech and knows and admires her. But, Wilson says, “underneath Sheryl’s assessment is the belief that this is a meritocracy. It’s not.” Courage and confidence alone will not compensate when male leaders don’t give women opportunities. She adds, “Women are not dropping out to have a child. They’re dropping out because they have no opportunity.”

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who directs the Gender and Policy program at Columbia, read Sandberg’s speech and took exception. Hewlett agrees with Sandberg that women must be more assertive, but she believes Sandberg simply doesn’t understand that there is a “last glass ceiling,” created not by male sexists but by “the lack of sponsorship,” senior executives who persistently advocate for someone to move up. She believes that Sandberg is insufficiently aware of this problem because she has benefitted from sponsors: “Sandberg, to her great credit, had Larry Summers. She has had sponsors in her life who were very powerful, who went to bat for her. That’s very rare for a woman.”

7. Sandberg does not see things so simply that feminism and the fight for women in technology is an “us-versus-them,” or as simply a matter of the guts and the drive. She notes the structural/social construct of the homemaker for professional women but also sees a second impediment as something inside her: guilt.

“I feel guilty working because of my kids. I do. I feel guilty. In my TED talk, I’m talking to myself, too. I’m not just talking to other people. I have faced every one of those things myself.” Later, I asked her directly about Hewlett’s critique, and she simply said, “I feel really grateful to the people who encouraged me and helped me develop. Nobody can succeed on their own.”

8. Despite the idea that tech is portrayed by the media as especially male-centric (see #5), perhaps the lack of historical hierarchy in high-tech helps women in start-ups and Internet companies. (This might be very well contrasted by Tracy Chou’s well-articulated piece about her experiences as a bad-ass engineer at Stanford and at Quora). Do the perspectives below mean there is hope for a meritocratic and equal-opportunity society, starting in the Bay Area and in tech?

The women in the network seem to agree with Sandberg that sexism in America is mainly a problem that women can fix by being more assertive. Mayer, for example, notes that women have more opportunities in Silicon Valley because there’s no entrenched hierarchy there. Speaking of Silicon Valley, Goler says, sexism is not “a defining characteristic of the workplace today.” She also believes that to raise the issue is debilitating: “For me, that conversation is a complete waste of time. If I spend one hour talking about how I’m excluded, that’s an hour I am not spending solving Facebook’s problems.” Facebook’s director of platform and marketing, Katie Mitic, says that today there is no “glass ceiling but a sunroof.”

Choksi thinks that being a woman actually is “a huge advantage.” She goes on, “My former boss used to call me ‘the velvet hammer.’ What I do is negotiate for a living. I negotiate for everything, whether it’s mangoes in Mumbai or a deal. I love it.” Because there are few women in business development, as she looks across the table at the men on the other side, she says, “I feel like I disarm them a lot.” When I asked Kara Swisher if she’s treated differently by men, she smiled and responded, “They’re scared of me.”

9. Sandberg does not believe in separation between work and personal self. Is this an example of her bringing that stereotypically “female” ethos to the workplace? I think this style is right in line with some of the thoughts in Hanna Rosin’s essay last summer, “The End of Men,” which is also concerned with the issue of gender/sex in the workplace.

Molly Graham, who worked with Sandberg at Google and followed her to Facebook, where she now helps produce mobile Facebook products, says, “With Sheryl, everything is personal. There isn’t a separation with this thing we do at work and everything else.” Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice-president of global communications and public policy, and a close confidant who came over from Google, says, “The people who are her friends at work are her friends outside work.”

Conventional wisdom holds that getting so close to employees can compromise objectivity and the ability to make tough management decisions. “I dramatically disagree with that,” Sandberg says. “I believe in bringing your whole self to work. We are who we are. When you try to have this division between your personal self and your professional self, what you really are is stiff. . . . That doesn’t mean people have to tell me everything about their personal lives. But I’m pretty sharing of mine.” Being open with your employees, she believes, means that nothing is a surprise to them—even if you fire them.

10. If you are a woman out there who wants to see change, Sandberg’s advice for you is much like Wesley Yang’s advice if you are an Asian-American who wants to see change: Be bold. Compare the two.

Sandberg at Barnard graduation:

She described a poster on the wall at Facebook: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” She said that it echoed something the writer Anna Quindlen once said, which was that “she majored in unafraid” at Barnard. Sandberg went on, “Don’t let your fears overwhelm your desire. Let the barriers you face—and there will be barriers—be external, not internal. Fortune does favor the bold. I promise that you will never know what you’re capable of unless you try. You’re going to walk off this stage today and you’re going to start your adult life. Start out by aiming high. . . . Go home tonight and ask yourselves, What would I do if I weren’t afraid? And then go do it! Congratulations.”