How Dave Goldberg of SurveyMonkey Built a Billion-Dollar Business and Still Gets Home By 5:30 PM

Meetings. Who Needs ‘Em?

Partly in reaction to his experience at Yahoo!, Goldberg only attends “two and a half” regular scheduled meetings every week. Goldberg said, “I’m probably more anti-meeting than most people in my job. It’s just in my nature.”  Instead, he leaves a few hours open each day for informal discussions. Employees can interrupt him when they need to talk. His personal management style favors these sorts of unscheduled, unmanaged discussions rather than intensive one-on-one meetings. The company’s team structure can do most of the coordination work, without the need for micromanagement from the top. 

Pushing Employees Without Breaking Them 

SurveyMonkey operates on both multi-year product goals and quarterly financial goals. That’s remarkable, considering the often-parodied tendency of startups to pivot into different industries. Holding to aggressive goals requires convincing employees to buy into the strategy, and to develop realistic standards of high performance. Goldberg said, “I have that level of trust with them that we’re doing the right thing against that kind of long term strategy. It’s probably me pushing my team more. I probe at where they’re sandbagging... I’m not looking for 100% success against our goals. I’m looking for 90% to 95%, because I think if we got 100%, then we didn’t shoot high enough. 

If the goals aren’t ambitious enough, everyone becomes complacent. If they’re too extreme, employees lose faith in themselves and their leadership. Knowing Yourself As a CEO. 

The ancient Greek aphorism “Know thyself” remains good advice for CEOs. Every manager has weaknesses. Identify them, and hire people who can compensate for them. Goldberg noted, “I’m not a process person. I know process is important, but it’s not my thing. I don’t like it that much, but I know we need it. I hire people who are good at it. Things seem to work pretty well in that manner.” 

It’s this humility that makes it possible for a company to scale successfully. An executive who’s too full of themselves to acknowledge a company’s need for balance in hiring isn’t going to be capable of scaling the company. Hiring people who are strong where you’re weak is cheaper and more practical than becoming stronger in the weak places. 

The insights that come from this self-awareness inform the rest of the decisions that a CEO makes every day. The leader must demonstrate the values that he or she promotes. 

Employees pay more attention to what the CEO does than what he or she says. The words need to be congruent with the actions. When they are, the company develops a strong culture.

Building a Culture of “Work-Life Balance” is More Than Just Saying It

What’s the matter with commanding the entire company to work 20 hours a day, fueled by microwave pizza, dubstep, and Red Bull? Isn’t that the only way to triumph over the competition in Silicon Valley? 

No. In Goldberg's eyes, scaling a company requires steadily increasing productivity, quarter by quarter and year by year. The reality is, as a company grows in headcount, more senior leaders become necessary. And those senior employees, many of whom are among the most productive, come with family obligations. 

“A family-friendly environment is part of our culture. That’s part of the people we attract. We don’t have kids staying up all night playing video games and sleeping in our conference rooms most of the time.” 

Goldberg leaves work at 5:30 PM every day to spend time with his family. While he does get back online after he puts his children to bed after 8:00 PM, he sets an example that makes it easier for the company to build and maintain its workforce. A CEO who spends time with his family every day demonstrates to other employees who have families that it’s okay to be home for dinner and live a life outside the office. All too often leadership teams say “work-life balance” is important and it’s okay to be home with your family for dinner – but they in fact do just the opposite. If you, as a CEO, want to shape the culture and build a workplace with a diverse team, you need to prove it with your actions. 

This is in the long-term interest of the company. While the death-march pace may work well during the early days of a startup, it’s unsustainable once it grows. Senior employees tend to come with attachments and obligations. 

However, this wasn’t always Goldberg’s approach. When he founded his first startup, LAUNCH Media, in 1994, he followed the typical workaholism commonly associated with startups: 

“I worked seven days a week, probably 14 or 18-hour days, and never took a day off. That’s just what I had to do. It wasn’t particularly productive.” 

Realizing he wanted to build a company for the long-term, Goldberg set out to build SurveyMonkey differently. Early in his tenure, he put culture into action by recruiting the current SVP of Product and Engineering, Selina Tobaccowala, when she was four months pregnant. Making SurveyMonkey a place where team members can actually have a family life made it possible for Goldberg to close the highly sought after recruit, even given the competitive hiring market. 

Counter intuitively, promoting a balanced working environment can drive down the cost of recruiting and your operational costs in general. It opens up access to a larger pool of potential employees. It allows the company to select employees based more on their merit, with less of a need to discriminate against older people with families. It also guards against burnout. In addition, it makes it tougher for rival companies to poach your employees.