In May 2015 I flew to Mexico for a long weekend with a group of friends. We spent Friday afternoon beside the pool at a resort. Dave Goldberg, one of my closest friends, decided to go to the gym. His wife, Sheryl Sandberg, stayed with the rest of us by the pool.
After a while, we all went back to our rooms. When we reconvened for a drink, Sandberg was looking for Goldberg. She and Goldberg’s brother, Rob, eventually found him unconscious in the gym. When I arrived at the hospital, I learned that he’d died. It was horrible and heartbreaking.
Goldberg was the CEO of SurveyMonkey, a company that was changing the way people gather feedback through online surveys. I served on the board.
There’s no playbook for what to do when your CEO dies suddenly at age 47. Everyone was in shock. Still, we had to keep the company operating.
In addition to being a board member, I was working full-time in Los Angeles as a senior vice president at GoPro, the action camera company. SurveyMonkey’s board asked if I’d be willing to step in as interim executive chairman. I asked the CEO of GoPro for permission to split my time between GoPro and SurveyMonkey over the summer, and he graciously agreed. In July, after an extensive search, we hired Goldberg’s successor.
Within a few months, however, it was clear that the new CEO’s strategy wasn’t aligned with the board’s. He recognized that the fit wasn’t right, so he volunteered to step down. The board asked me to consider taking his place. I had to do some difficult thinking: The team at GoPro had been very gracious to me after Dave’s death, and I felt loyal to it. But SurveyMonkey’s continued success was very important to me. I became its CEO in January 2016.
GETTING BACK ON OFFENSE
I’d first heard about SurveyMonkey in 2008. Goldberg, whom I’d known for a decade, was talking with a private equity fund about finding a company he could invest in and run. The PE guys referred him to SurveyMonkey, a 10-year-old company in Portland with just under 10 employees that was still run by its founder. Goldberg invested in the company, became the CEO and moved it from Portland to Silicon Valley. He asked me to join the board.
Before I became CEO, the company had been on a great trajectory. But after Goldberg’s death it wasn’t certain that would continue. I spent a lot of time helping employees process their feelings of grief, fear and anxiety. I also told people that we needed to get back on offense to remain competitive. Very quickly we decided to change our strategy. We laid off 100 people — more than 10% of our workforce. It was hard, but it put the company back on a solid footing.
DEFINING THE COMPANY CULTURE
I continued to spend part of each day providing emotional support for employees and maintaining transparency about our strategy. We needed to find a way to turn the page. We set about defining the company culture, sending around a survey to ask what our employees thought. The result was a list of five employee values: Be accountable; trust the team; prioritize health; listen to customers; and celebrate the journey.
With alignment on our values, the team was starting to get back on the horse. We ramped up our recruiting. We reintroduce ourselves as a company, we decided to ask our customers what they valued most about our offerings and our employees what excited them about coming to work every day.
In these conversations one word came up repeatedly: “curiosity.” Every survey our customers make is driven by their curiosity about what others think. Every product innovation we’ve created has resulted from employees’ asking questions or looking at something differently. Recognizing that curiosity is at the heart of everything we do, we made it our new rallying cry. Today SurveyMonkey’s mission is to “power curious individuals and organizations to measure, benchmark, and act on the opinions that drive success.”
CELEBRATING CURIOSITY
We moved into a new headquarters building in December 2016, and that provided an opportunity to go all in to increase curiosity. We designed our new HQ, from the chairs to the names of conference rooms, almost entirely on the basis of employee surveys. Our goal was to make the new space open and collaborative to unlock creativity and innovation.
We also started encouraging and rewarding curiosity across the organization. For instance, we conduct town hall meetings at which we celebrate the “question of the week,” chosen from employee surveys. We have a peer recognition program to reward people who dare to be especially candid.
To foster a culture where questions are welcome, I need to show that I’m open to asking and answering them. I do that through regular skip-level meetings with people one level below my direct reports, where the conversation is open and nothing is off-limits.
I believe that a diversity of people leads to better ideas and greater curiosity. Our board of directors consists of five women and five men. Five of the 11 members of our senior executive team are women. Women make up about half the company.
GOING PUBLIC
In September 2018, SurveyMonkey went public. For everyone involved, the process served as a reminder of how powerful curiosity can be. We filed a 250-page registration statement on Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission to explain everything there was to know about the company.
When you’re pursuing an initial public offering, you put together a roadshow presentation to tell your story, which you present to potential stakeholders approximately 75 times over a two-week period. With all that repetition you get pretty good at delivering the presentation — but the real magic happens afterward, when smart people ask questions. For me the roadshow was an opportunity to learn about would-be investors’ hopes and concerns about our company. What risks did they see that we hadn’t? What opportunities were they curious about?
Leaders need to find ways to help employees flex their curiosity. We want people to ask big questions — and we want to celebrate them when they do. We want them to think up experiments that haven’t been done before. If folks aren’t failing, they’re not asking hard enough questions or taking big enough risks. Curiosity can be like a muscle: Its strength will erode if it isn’t used often enough.
