Carolyn Everson has one of the biggest—and maybe one of the coolest—jobs in corporate America.
Everson, 43, who grew up on Long Island and graduated from Villanova and Harvard Business School, has been leading this effort since 2011, a period in which sales have more than tripled. While CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg get most of the headlines when it comes to building the amazing growth machine that is Facebook, Everson (pronounced E-vehr-son) deserves some credit too.
One of Facebook's biggest successes of late has been transitioning to mobile. You may remember that only a few years ago, analysts were suggesting that Facebook "couldn't do mobile." Now the company is in the mobile driver's seat. (Sorry, Twitter [TWTR].) It was a huge change for Facebook, Everson said to me in a recent interview, reminding me that while its Instagram platform was mobile first, the rest of the company wasn't.
Today, Everson says some 2.5 million advertisers are now using Facebook, mobile and desktop, to connect to the company's mind-blowing 1.55 billion users.
And speaking of those 1.55 billion users, some people suggest that Facebook has become so big that there is nowhere left to for the business to grow. But Everson says the company has room to grow in several ways, pointing out that WhatsApp, a messaging app that's hugely popular overseas with some 900 million users, carries no advertising as of yet. The company is testing potential ways Facebook Messenger, which the company took out of it main app last year—and its 700 million plus users—could be monetized in the future by experimenting with messages between users and companies.
Even with such a massive audience, Facebookers insist there are still plenty more potential users out there.
"Getting more people connected to the Internet is a huge priority for us. Today only 40 percent of the world's population is connected to the Internet. So while we are proud of the fact that we do get a billion people a day [users on the site], there are still over 4 billion people that do not have access to the Internet," she says.
And what about China? "Well Mark [ Zuckerberg] has been incredibly inspirational with the fact that he's first and foremost learned the language," she says. "Look, we want to connect the world, and China is very important, so we're going to continue to try to work on that objective, but we have no news to report that that's happening anytime soon. But we do have marketers and advertisers based in greater China that actually want to reach consumers outside of China, particularly in e-commerce."
Not unlike Google (GOOGL), Facebook also has some over-the-horizon projects it hopes to capitalize on.
"Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We have a variety of different strategies to achieve that objective," Everson says. "[We are] exploring some really forward-thinking [ideas] in technology. In 2016, we will be putting up a satellite to provide connectivity to sub-Saharan Africa. We have been working on an unmanned aircraft vehicle named Aquila, the Latin word for 'eagle,' and that should be going up for a test flight. It flies 60,000 to 90,000 feet above commercial airspace, and it will be able to beam connectivity down 11 miles away and stay up for 3 months."
Update: A previous version of this story said that 'ads are just beginning to come to Facebook Messenger...' The story now reads. 'The company is testing potential ways Facebook Messenger, which the company took out of it main app last year—and its 700 million plus users---could be monetized in the future by experimenting with messages between users and companies.