How Did I Get Here?

Marne Levine

Chief operating officer, Instagram
from
  • Education
  • Laurel School, Shaker Heights, Ohio, class of 1988
  • Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, class of 1992
  • Harvard Business School, class of 2005
  • Work Experience
  • 1993–2000
    U.S. Department of the Treasury
  • 2001–03
    Chief of staff for Harvard President Larry Summers
  • 2006–08
    Director of product management, Revolution Money
  • 2009–10
    Chief of staff, National Economic Council, special assistant to the president for economic policy
  • 2010–14
    Vice president for global public policy, Facebook
  • 2015–Present
    COO, Instagram
  • Life Lessons
  • “Say thank you, and say it often—publicly, privately.”
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  • “Be open about mistakes. I often ask people what I did wrong in the last meeting, because then others feel they have permission to own their mistakes, too.”
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  • “Make ‘Why?’ your favorite question. It feeds your curiosity.”
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  • Laurel School graduation
  • “My senior project was about solid-waste management. They nicknamed me Trash Queen.”
  • “I worked under three secretaries. We worked on everything from the Asian financial crisis to low-cost bank accounts to predatory lending.”
  • “I worked on person-to-person online money transfer. One of my first tasks was to prioritize 1,000 bugs after user testing. I didn’t know what a bug was. It was a long night.”
  • “You name a part of the world, I traveled to it.”
  • Speaking at a U.S. Department of Labor news conference, 2011
  • In a photo on her Instagram account, celebrating six years at Facebook, 2016
  • “Freshman year everybody had posters of Prince on the walls. I had a Dukakis-Bentsen poster. I majored in political science and speech communication.”
  • With Summers (center); her father and mother, Mark and Teri (left); and a family friend, mid-’90s
  • “I was supposed to go to business school, and Larry said, ‘You’re already planning to go to Harvard. Why don’t you come and be chief of staff?’ One year turned into two.”
  • “My second child came in September 2008, and I joined the Obama transition team in November. I was part of the group that opened the White House doors on Inauguration Day. And then I basically didn’t leave for two years.”
  • Greeting President Obama with her sons, 2009
  • “Video is just exploding on Instagram—motion is the new filter. We’re going to help people use visuals to tell their stories.”