ceremony turned into “Dress Like
Fidji Day”; formal attire optional.
It helped that Simo was mak-
ing Facebook money by leading the
product team in charge of building
a mobile ads platform. She also had
powerful internal sponsors, includ-
ing WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart
and, eventually, founder and CEO
Mark Zuckerberg, who both helped
Simo develop her internal voice and
her reputation for delivering blunt
criticism—sometimes to Facebook’s
most senior executives. During a
big day of sales meetings with some
of Facebook’s largest advertising
clients, her bosses started goofing
off, passing notes and ignoring the
clients. So Simo, then a junior prod-
uct manager, pulled aside Andrew
“Boz” Bosworth—Zuckerberg’s close
deputy—and told him to knock
the hijinks off. “He did not take it
the best way in the moment,” Simo
recalls, though Bosworth, soon to be
Facebook’s chief technology officer,
now jokes about the incident.
Simo also stood out at Facebook
for reasons beyond her control. At
times, she was working through acute
physical pain. As a teen, she devel-
oped symptoms of endometriosis, the
painful gynecological tissue disorder
that affects about 10% of U.S. women
and that often complicates their ef-
forts to have children. As she took on
greater responsibility at Facebook,
Simo endured a miscarriage and then
a difficult pregnancy with Willow,
which required five months of bed
rest. After giving birth, a surgery to
treat her endometriosis triggered
a blood-circulation disorder called
POTS, or postural orthostatic tachy-
cardia syndrome, which also made it
hard for her to stand up.
With her health problems impos-
sible to hide—and, she says, against
her gut instinct to stay quiet about
common reproductive-health
problems in a male-dominated
workplace—Simo started speaking
publicly about them. She told her
colleagues why she had to take video
meetings from her bed; she wrote
external blog posts and gave inter-
views about her miscarriage, her
fraught pregnancy, and coping with
POTS. Doing so made her into a
better manager, Simo says, because
her candor encouraged her employ-
ees to open up. “Women’s health
is such a taboo,” she says. “But if
I don’t talk about it, with all the
privilege I have, then no one’s going
to talk about it.” (She’s doing more
than talking: Simo has cofounded a
new women’s health clinic, The Me-
trodora Institute, which is expected
to open next summer.)
Health problems didn’t derail
Simo’s ascent at Facebook, where
she became increasingly respon-
sible for helping the company make
money on mobile ads and embrace
video products. In 2020, the com-
pany posted $84 billion in revenue
from its ads business. Simo helped
figure out how to build ads into
Facebook’s news feed, and she had
a knack for spotting—and nurtur-
ing—opportunities to enhance user
engagement. During the summer
of 2014, millions of people par-
ticipated in the ALS “Ice Bucket
Challenge” by recording videos of
themselves dumping buckets of ice
on their heads and uploading them
to Facebook. Simo, whose team was
working on text-based products for
celebrities to interact with fans, saw
a seed of something stickier in theclips and turned her efforts toward
video. A year later, she oversaw the
resulting launch of Facebook Live,
which lets users broadcast them-
selves on Facebook in real time and
which has now reached more than
10 billion broadcasts.
To get products off the ground at
Facebook, “it’s very important that
someone is that voice that fights for
something, so that it actually sees
the light of day,” says Deborah Liu,
CEO of Ancestry.com and the for-
mer head of Facebook Marketplace.
“She really puts herself out there.”
And during her tenure, Simo
worked to make it easier for other
women to follow her, including by
cofounding the Women in Product
nonprofit with Liu.
Simo also championed less suc-
cessful products, including Face-
book Watch, a struggling bid to
compete with YouTube and other
video-streaming services, and Face-
book’s campaign to woo publish-
ers and media companies onto its
video platform. But Facebook vastly
overestimated user viewership for
video, the company acknowledged
in 2016—to the detriment of many
news organizations that had over-
hauled their newsrooms to produce
more videos. In 2019 the company
agreed to pay $40 million to settle
an advertiser class-action lawsuit
over those inaccurate metrics. The
project’s storytelling “thesis” was
right, Simo says, but it lacked “the
monetization tools that would sup-
port this new media.”
A bigger problem for Simo was
Facebook’s mounting track record
of widely reported scandals and
congressional hearings about how
the company enables the spread
of misinformation online; how it
handles users’ privacy; and whether
it effectively polices how authoritar-
ian governments, violent extremists,
and other bad actors use its plat-
forms—including its app and live
videos. Once she became head ofWomen’s health is
such a taboo. But if
I don’t talk about it,
with all the privilege
I have, then no one’s
going to talk about it.”
Fidji Simo
Instacart CEO