The New Face Of Facebook

The head of Facebook’s app, Fidji Simo, is on a mission to change the way the company operates. Can she help Facebook win back the public’s trust?

- Genevieve Field

Outside, it’s 101 degrees, a “new normal” summer day in Silicon Valley, but inside a glass-walled conference room at Facebook’s sprawling Menlo Park compound, the air is goose-bump brisk. Fidji Simo, 33, strides into the room in rainbow-striped Kurt Geiger stilettos and a bright-purple sheath dress. Since being promoted to head up the Facebook mobile app in March, Simo has become one of the most powerful women at the company, responsible for just about everything Facebook’s nearly 2.4 billion users interact with on mobile. “I read an article that says women perform better in warm rooms,” she declares with a disarming French accent as she punches the thermostat up five degrees. “If women are spending all our energy trying to get warm, we’re not spending our energy thinking! I’m always walking into rooms full of men and cranking it up.”

Facebook is known for its egalitarian floor plan, where everyone—from interns to founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg— works side by side at desks out in the open. But first dibs on a handful of conference rooms go to top executives like Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Simo, now in her eighth year at the social-media giant. Simo named her conference room Joie de Vivre because, she says, “the only way to create products that bring joy is by being joyful building them. It also describes a very French way of living.”