Remembering David Goldberg: In His Own Words

On Friday night, David Goldberg, the CEO of SurveyMonkey and husband of Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg died. He was 47. As soon as the news broke, loving remembrances of him and anecdotes about his giving nature started blanketing the world.

Of all of the nice things being said, the one he might have been proudest of was his lifelong advocacy for women. Jodi Kantor of The New York Times said it best, eulogizing Goldberg as "perhaps the signature male feminist of his era."

It's a phrase that, if Goldberg's work keeps spreading, should at some point lose all meaning. One day, gender equality will become the boring norm  — heralded in no small party by the Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

As the father of a young daughter, let me confirm: The world needs more David
Goldbergs. Men need to be feminists because power shifts best when it is ceded

rather than crumbles. So, powerful men have to be part of the solution and not just among those not getting in the way.

Goldberg was that kind of leader, but hardly a one-note hero. I didn't know Goldberg personally, but loved following his writing and media appearances. He was generous about spreading his voice and I thought others might want to re-read some of his work.

Writing about LAUNCH Media, a CD-ROM service he and a partner eventually sold to Yahoo, Goldberg imported that it's crucial to listen to the naysayers — "If for no other reason than to be able to prove them wrong!"

Your detractors can be blessings in disguise: they are an unlikely source of inspiration and motivation, and they just might speak some truth. Listen carefully, take what you can use and leave what you can’t. I still remember all the people who told me that no one would ever listen to music or watch ads on a computer.

Unlimited personal time off (PTO) is now a bleeding edge benefit, but there was a time when even flextime was considered foolhardy. Goldberg was an early advocate, he wrote, when he ran Yahoo music, and carried on the tradition as he moved on.

"When I became CEO of SurveyMonkey four years ago, I used this lesson in flexibility to help attract outstanding senior executives," he wrote. Today, 40 percent of our senior executives are women with children, an unusually high number in the technology industry."

The dreaded performance review was the subject of another Goldberg piece, How Do You Help Employees Thrive? Just Ask. Showing interest in your employees more than once a year is a given, he wrote, but it requires knowing what not to ask.

Don’t ask about things you’re not willing to change. Ignoring feedback is a sure way to disillusion a workforce. So, if you can’t change something, don’t ask. What you can change, involve employees. It will help build a healthy, thriving culture where everyone feels engaged and assured that their feedback has meaningful impact. So be wise. Stop talking. Ask and listen.

In a bit of poetic justice Goldberg's final post might have been the one he would have chosen to close with anyway. In What We Learned After School Goldberg

talked about a survey he and 434 other members of the Harvard class of 1989 took last summer. The answers were "funny" and "serious" and "revealing." But his takeaway are words to live by:

What we’d tell our younger self shows that as much time as we spend hitting the books or burning the midnight oil — or worrying about our future — the real lessons about who we are and what’s important happen after school and work. So get out. Live a little. Take it all in. Survey says you’ll learn more than you expect.