It is highly unusual for an accomplished executive to be remembered first as a spouse. But that was the case for Dave Goldberg, the chief executive of SurveyMonkey, who died unexpectedly Friday in Mexico at the age of 47, evidently sustaining severe head injuries after falling off a treadmill while on vacation.
The manner of death was reported by the Associated Press on Monday. Goldberg was the husband of Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer and author of the women’s empowerment book “Lean In.” Their marriage was an object of admiration for two-career couples and those who aspire to have such a bond.
That partnership was a central theme of Sandberg’s best-selling, support-group-generating book, in which she tells women that their most important career move is choosing the right life partner.
“Dave taught me how to change a diaper when our son was eight days old,” she wrote, highlighting the even footing of their marriage.
As Sandberg became a female icon, Goldberg boasted about her success and echoed her mantras, often telling reporters how he, too, left work at 5:30 p.m. to have dinner with their two children — but was working again by 8 p.m., when they were in bed.
His work alone would be reason for attention to be paid to his early death, especially within Silicon Valley. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard and spending a few years at consulting firm Bain & Company and Capitol Records, Goldberg struck out on his own in the early ’90s.
He founded Launch Media, one of the first companies to venture into streaming music online. Goldberg could envision the future, said Jimmy Pitaro, who worked a cubicle away from him at Launch (which was acquired by Yahoo) and is now president of Disney Interactive.
“If you think about what Launch was doing as early as 1998, it’s everything that is popular today,” Pitaro said in an interview. “Video on demand, there’s Vevo. Personalized music, there’s Pandora. Subscription music, there’s Spotify.”
Goldberg’s key to success, as he moved to Yahoo, the venture capital firm Benchmark and SurveyMonkey? He seemed to stay calm and organized no matter how busy he was, Pitaro said.
“His desk was always very messy. But he would call me from the road and say, ‘Hey, I need that document,’ and I would walk over to his desk, and he would know exactly where it was,” Pitaro said.
Goldberg became chief executive of SurveyMonkey in 2009 and is credited with taking it from a 12-employee company to a 500-employee enterprise valued at $2 billion. Those who depended on him for advice say his personality was as helpful as his business savvy.
“For someone who was involved in so many things, there was never a time that I felt a call or e-mail to Dave was an inconvenience to him,” said Tim Sullivan, chief executive of Ancestry.com, where Goldberg was a board member. (And according to Sullivan, Goldberg was a user long before he joined the company. He liked to explore his family history with his mother, Paula.)
Goldberg also served on the board of The Washington Post Co. before it was sold to Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos. Don Graham, the chairman of that board and The Post’s former publisher, said he felt that in knowing Goldberg, he knew a great secret: Goldberg was one of the most brilliant people in Silicon Valley.
And Graham couldn’t help but be impressed with Goldberg’s marriage, too. As the son of Katharine Graham, the paper’s longtime publisher and chairman, “I’ve been in a good position to watch the reactions of men to very successful women,” Graham said.
“As Sheryl succeeded, Dave was simply so secure about his worth that he was able to take pride in everything she did and be unaffected in his love for her.”
Perhaps he would not have minded that even in his death, it was his marriage that many admired most.
Notable deaths of 2015 and 2016
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A look at those who have died.
