Meta’s VP on Leadership, Resilience, and Overcoming Challenges While Battling Cancer!

Nicola Mendelsohn traces her path from a confident, questioning Manchester schoolgirl dismissed by teachers to a 20-year advertising career and then a senior leadership role at Facebook/Meta. She speaks candidly about her 2016 diagnosis with follicular lymphoma, an incurable blood cancer, and how she chose to face it openly, keep working, and build a 10,000-member support community. The conversation covers Mark Zuckerberg's leadership through pivots to mobile, video, and the metaverse, plus the trade-offs and guardrails of new technology. She closes with hard-won career advice on knowing your strengths, asking for what you want, bringing your whole self to work, and dismantling biases women face.

• Nicola was diagnosed with follicular lymphoma, an incurable blood cancer, three years into her Facebook career.
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• Telling her four children was the worst conversation of their lives; her husband had to deliver the news because she couldn't get the words out.
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• Her youngest son Zach, then 11, asked if she was going to die.
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• She didn't begin treatment for 18 months due to a 'watch and wait' approach for this cancer.
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• Treatment came when the cancer grew near her kidney; she had six months of chemo and 18 months of immunotherapy reaching 'no evidence of disease.'
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• She sought no formal psychological support, relying instead on openness, telling her story at a company conference and on World Cancer Day.
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• Mendelsohn was on the internal team that learned early that Facebook would rebrand to Meta.
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• Her She Means Business program has trained over 1.5 million women in digital and entrepreneurship skills.
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• At 15 a Latin teacher told her parents she'd never get on in life unless she changed her personality.
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• Despite teachers marking her down, she earned an A in English O level and went on to read English at university.
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• Early in her career she negotiated a four-day work week, taking a 20% salary cut while doing the same job.
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• She deliberately manages expectations to control both good and bad news as a protective mechanism.
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• She practices 'vision writing,' writing a year ahead as if looking back on what she achieved.
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• Zuckerberg stopped taking meetings for two weeks until teams brought him mobile products during the mobile pivot.
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• Meta's avatar system offers over a quintillion different avatar versions for representation.
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• The Rose Review estimated women starting businesses at men's rate would add 250 billion pounds to the UK economy.
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• She forced a senior male leader to take paternity leave so other men would feel able to do the same.
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• The object she associates with her cancer diagnosis is a pair of soft tracksuit bottoms bought for her PET scan.
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