Silicon Valley was reeling Saturday from news that Dave Goldberg, the husband of Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg and a well-known and well-liked valley executive, had died the night before.
The 47-year-old Goldberg “passed away suddenly” Friday night, his brother Robert announced in a Facebook post. The cause of death was not immediately announced.
The New York Times reported late Saturday that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said that Goldberg died while vacationing abroad with his wife.
“Dave Goldberg was an amazing person and I am glad I got to know him,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post Saturday. “My thoughts and prayers are with Sheryl and her family. I hope friends will join me in celebrating his life by sharing your memories of Dave on his profile, as his brother Rob suggests.”
While not having the name recognition of his wife, Goldberg nevertheless was a popular and experienced veteran of the valley, founding online music and media outfit Launch Media in 1994 before it was sold to Yahoo in 2001. Since 2009, he was CEO of SurveyMonkey, an online survey company based in Palo Alto.
In addition to his wife — who is the chief operating officer at Facebook and author of the bestseller “Lean In” — Goldberg is also survived by his mother, a son and a daughter.
Word of his death spread rapidly through the tech world Saturday and was met with an outpouring of sadness.
“Dave’s genius, courage and leadership were overshadowed only be his compassion, friendship and heart,” SurveyMonkey said in a statement. “His greatest love was for his family. Our sympathy goes out to them and to all who were touched by this extraordinary man. We are all heartbroken.”
A quick-witted, poker-playing raconteur who could be self-deprecating about playing the sidekick role to his famous wife, Goldberg told the Los Angeles Times in a 2013 interview that he and Sandberg made it a point to leave work in time to have dinner with their two children: “We made the decision on this particular thing, that we are going to be home with our kids. I am at home with my kids from 6 to 8. If I have a work dinner, I’ll schedule to have dinner after 8. But we’re working at night. You’ll get plenty of emails from me post-8 p.m. when my kids go to bed.”
Raised in Minneapolis, the son of a law school professor, Goldberg told Business Insider last month that he was “a lifelong, pathetic Vikings fan. I made my kids into Viking fans, so they will carry their misery with them, too.”
He graduated in 1989 from Harvard with a B.A. in history and government, then thought about a career in law. Instead Goldberg — a big music fan with an impressive record collection — went to work at Capitol Records in Los Angeles, where he reportedly persuaded the company to sell its Beatles catalog on CD and got in early on the record industry’s move to sell CDs at Starbucks.
In the early ’90s, he and a high school buddy founded Launch Media, whose online music site was designed to help people discover new music. The company went public in 1999 and was purchased by Yahoo, where he was instrumental in building “the world’s largest music site at that period of time,” he said, “60 million unique users. We were doing, in 2006, over 5 billion music videos a year.”
As CEO of Survey Monkey, Goldberg espoused a kindlier management philosophy than did most valley executives: “You want to hire great people and give them the opportunity to fail,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “You need to let them figure things out as they go along. If they fail repeatedly, then you probably have to find a different person, but if you don’t let people have that opportunity to fail, they don’t get to learn and grow and try things.”
Goldberg and Sandberg met in Los Angeles in 1996: “We went out to dinner and a movie and hit it off. She fell asleep on my shoulder, which I thought was great,” he said in the interview. “Turns out, I learned much later, she sleeps through every movie, on any shoulder that is available, but it worked on me at that moment of time.”
They became good friends and started dating six years later.
Writing on recode.net Saturday, tech blogger Kara Swisher called Goldberg “a much-admired and beloved figure” in the valley, adding:
“He was also my friend and the news of his loss is simply devastating. His unfailing kindness toward everyone, endless generosity with his time, insights and advice and basic great-guy personality made Dave — no one called him David, really — the heart and also soul of the tech and media community.”
Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689 or follow him at Twitter.com/patmaymerc
