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How Surveymonkey Is Coping After Death of Dave Goldberg

How Surveymonkey Is Coping After Death of Dave Goldberg

By Quentin Hardy, The New York Times | Updated: 22 June 2015 16:48 IST

On the first day back to work after the death of Dave Goldberg, the chief executive of SurveyMonkey, employees at the Silicon Valley company gathered to mourn.

"Let's be up front," Bennett Porter, the head of marketing communications, said at the hastily called companywide meeting. "This is going to hurt. Everyone is going to cry. It is only the start."

Since that meeting May 4, SurveyMonkey's leadership has had to navigate the process of replacing Goldberg, while running a company on the cusp of significant growth - and managing the emotions of the 550 people who work there.

Goldberg, 47, who had led SurveyMonkey since 2009, had died the previous weekend while on vacation with friends in Mexico. Married to Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, he was a popular figure in Silicon Valley who had gained national celebrity through his wife's best-selling book, "Lean In."

Along the way, he also built SurveyMonkey into a company valued at $2 billion (roughly Rs. 12,707 crores) that was expected to double its number of workers in the next two years.

And although employees and friends of Goldberg may have wanted to pause after his death, the rest of Silicon Valley was not waiting. Within days, recruiters for other tech companies were calling employees to see if they were interested in leaving.

"I hate to acknowledge it, but it's a fact," said Becky Cantieri, the head of human resources at SurveyMonkey. "We've all gotten them," she said, referring to the calls.

There has been an intense effort to keep employees focused on their jobs, aided by the good will Goldberg had engendered over the years.

Zander Lurie, a longtime friend and executive at the sports camera company GoPro, has stood in as temporary executive chairman. Donald E. Graham, the former owner of The Washington Post and a friend of Goldberg, spoke to the staff for two hours about managing loss and his mother's experience taking over the newspaper after her husband's suicide.

"I told them how proud he was of them, of the team," said Graham, referring to Goldberg. "My mom's story is unique, but I talked about making success out of tragedy. It was two hours of people who were very emotional, but knew they had a hell of a business."

Eighteen other executives, including the top leaders of GoPro, LinkedIn and Twitter, agreed to be matched with senior SurveyMonkey employees for a few hours of mentoring. A week of companywide volunteering has been planned for late August, followed by a final celebration of Goldberg. And there have been regular staff surveys to see how people are coping.

SurveyMonkey's top executives have had to avoid "strategic paralysis from a culture of mourning, and emotional revolt from telling people 'get over it,'" said Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management. "There is a way to take a loss and make it into strength."

SurveyMonkey was started in 1999 and remained small for a decade, offering online and email surveys on various topics. In 2009, private equity investors acquired it, and Goldberg, who had sold a small music company to Yahoo for $12 million in 2001, was brought in soon after to run it. Starting with just 14 employees, Goldberg began his recruiting.

"My first reaction was the same as everybody else: 'Surveys? You're kidding, right?'" said Selina Tobaccowala, SurveyMonkey's president and chief technical officer, who in 2009 oversaw technology for Ticketmaster in London. "He talked about ways this kind of information could be used by parents to evaluate education, or hospitals to manage patient care. It would be a way to understand data."

Today, SurveyMonkey receives 3 million survey responses, with an average of 29 million questions answered, in 55 languages every day. The product, which is available for free or as a paid version, takes payments in 28 different currencies.

Corporations use SurveyMonkey to gauge employee happiness, retailers to sell new products and private equity firms to judge whether to buy companies. Shortly before Goldberg's death, SurveyMonkey had been polling the British elections. It was one of the few pollsters to call the election correctly.

The outside world has seen little of the grief inside the company, Porter said.

"We kept the business normal," she said.

No memorial, for example, is on the company's website.

"Dave wouldn't want us to make our problem into everyone's problem," she said. Besides, she added, "we need to keep everyone on track."

Inside, things have been hard.

Lurie had known Goldberg for 16 years and was among the friends with him the day he died. A day after he and others had spoken at the all-hands meeting, Lurie was one of Goldberg's pallbearers. More than 200 SurveyMonkey employees attended the service.

At that first big companywide meeting after his death, all eight speakers broke down at some point. It ended with Goldberg's favorite song, "California (There Is No End to Love)," from U2's most recent album. Still, updates to the survey software were released two days later.

Inside the three working floors of SurveyMonkey's headquarters, conference rooms are named for what the company sees as its three stages of gaining insight. At the base is survey creation, and rooms are named after Miles Davis and Frida Kahlo, among other creators. Next is information collection, which earned room names after James Bond and Catwoman. Finally comes analysis, with rooms named after Sherlock Holmes and Veronica Mars.

Goldberg worked in the open, like everyone else. His preferred conference room, a glass box in the middle of the top floor, was called Inspector Clouseau. For the first week after his death, its shades were drawn halfway down.

On May 11, the shades were raised, and a vase with white flowers was set in the middle of the table. In the following days, people began using the room again.

At the company's first regularly scheduled all-hands meeting May 12, Tim Maly, the chief financial and operating officer, discussed quarterly financial results, while Tobaccowala talked about strategy, topics Goldberg would have broached. Others told about important new customers, internal milestones and the British election polling. At the end of the meeting, Maly took off his fleece to show a T-shirt that read "#makedaveproud." It is now standard Friday clothing for many employees.

According to Maly, in 2009, SurveyMonkey had $28 million in revenue and close to $25 million in earnings before taxes and other costs. In a funding round in February 2013 that valued SurveyMonkey at $1.35 billion, the company had about $113 million in revenue and $62 million in pretax earnings, with a relative drop in profitability because of expansion costs.

The board is expected to name a new chief executive within two months.

Lurie said they were reviewing several insiders along with "more than a dozen" outside prospects. Lurie, who is also the head of media at GoPro, is not a candidate.

For inside candidates, who are grieving together while gunning for the top job, "it's weird," Maly said. "We've had direct conversations about the awkwardness of the situation, the uncertainty we feel."

Lurie said the board had only "a broad strokes" succession plan in the event Goldberg died. One reason was the fast-growing nature of the company. Another may be human nature - Lurie said that he still had not mentioned succession planning to Nick Woodman, the founder and chief executive of GoPro.

"I haven't talked to Nick about it, and he's 38, and kite surfs and mountain bikes," he said. "It's a weird conversation to have with somebody."

Joseph A. Grundfest, a corporate governance specialist at Stanford Law School, warned against trying to find another version of Goldberg.

"Tim Cook can't be Steve Jobs, and Jobs didn't want him to be," when Cook became chief of Apple, Grundfest said. "Whoever becomes CEO can't be David Goldberg, and shouldn't try to be. That person needs to try and figure out what SurveyMonkey was succeeding at, and try to maintain the essence of Goldberg's strategy in their own way."

After the quarterly all-hands meeting, management sent employees surveys seeking feedback on what had been valuable in moving the company forward. Employees responded that they liked the updates about wins, and wanted even more communication. So Lurie has been sending weekly emails with updates about the search, more customer wins and product milestones.

So far, said Cantieri of human resources, no one has been hired away, nor have prospective employees turned down job offers.

"Many of them asked how they could help," she said. "We've hired 140 people so far this year; we need to keep hiring."

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