You're going to hear a lot about Sheryl Sandberg

Facebook's COO made $31 million last year, but that's chicken feed compared with what else she might pick up as a result of the company's IPO. She holds 1.9 million shares of Facebook common stock, plus 39.3 million options and restricted stock units. Once everything gets fully vested, Sandberg can cash out for about $2 billion - and that doesn't even include what she made as a senior executive at Google. Ken Auletta, who profiled Sandberg last summer in the New Yorker, describes her first meetings with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg:

After the holidays in 2007, Zuckerberg e-mailed her, and they had the first of many dinners. They met at the Flea Street Café, around the corner from her home in Atherton, but then decided that they needed more privacy. His tiny Palo Alto apartment--which had almost no furniture--wouldn't work. So for six weeks they met for dinner once or twice a week at Sandberg's six-bedroom home. Sandberg, who goes to bed early and starts e-mailing at 5 A.M., often had to usher the nocturnal Zuckerberg out at midnight. "It was like dating," says Dave Goldberg, Sandberg's husband and the C.E.O. of the online company SurveyMonkey. Sandberg says they asked each other, "What do you believe? What do you care about? What's the mission? It was very philosophical."

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Last December, Sandberg spoke at the TEDWomen conference. Her black hair framed her angular face and reached her shoulders. She looked a bit like the actress Patricia Neal when she was young. Sandberg began by celebrating the progress women have made: "For any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky. We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited." More women than men graduate from college and graduate school, and receive doctoral degrees. Yet, she went on, "women are not making it to the top. A hundred and ninety heads of state; nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, thirteen per cent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top--C-level jobs, board seats--tops out at fifteen, sixteen per cent."