PALO ALTO — SurveyMonkey, the tech firm that lost CEO Dave Goldberg in May when he suffered a fatal head injury, announced Tuesday that it has hired a new chief executive to steer the company through its grieving and into a new chapter of growth.
Bill Veghte, a longtime tech professional with stints at tech giants Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, and a friend and confidant of Goldberg’s for three decades, will take the reins as SurveyMonkey CEO beginning Aug. 1, the company said. He has large shoes to fill: Goldberg, who died at 47 when he fell and hit his head while running on a treadmill at a resort in Mexico during a family vacation, was beloved by his employees and admired throughout the tech industry for his kindness and compassion, as well as his leadership of SurveyMonkey.
But in Veghte, tech industry analysts and SurveyMonkey board members said, the company found a close match. Veghte is not only a proven tech executive, but shares many of Goldberg’s values, knows what Goldberg wanted to accomplish at SurveyMonkey and has the chops to get it done.
“The new company is getting a very able leader, and he’s moving to a company that should be a very interesting fit for him,” said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT in Hayward. “Veghte is a guy with a lengthy experience and deep knowledge of the enterprise IT industry in a variety of markets. He’s done terrific work in most of the positions he’s had in the past.”
After becoming fast friends at Harvard University in the late 1980s, Goldberg and Veghte remained in touch. Veghte often traveled to Silicon Valley from his home in Seattle to stay with Goldberg and his wife, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. In 2009, after Goldberg took the reins at SurveyMonkey, a Palo Alto company that makes Web survey technology, he turned to his old friend for advice and brainstorming.
“I was just a sounding board to compare notes with him,” Veghte said in an interview Tuesday. “He and I see the opportunities very similarly. He and I are very similar in our culture and in approach, and in concepts and experiences.”
In January, after Goldberg’s many requests, Veghte agreed to sit on SurveyMonkey’s board. But Veghte never got to join his friend in the boardroom — the first meeting was scheduled for the week of Goldberg’s funeral.
So Veghte, 48, comes to SurveyMonkey not only to lead the company, but also to share in the grief of its 550 employees.
“The reality is that I share in their loss,” he said. “We lost not only a great leader but a great friend. He was an amazing person.”
Veghte, who has a degree in East Asian studies from Harvard, worked at Microsoft on Windows and in other executive roles from 2001 to 2010. He went on to join HP in various management positions, most recently as executive vice president of HP’s enterprise group. Before that, he was HP’s chief operating officer, tasked with improving the company’s financial performance as it was shedding tens of thousands of employees in layoffs.
“I think he’ll do better at SurveyMonkey than he did at HP,” said longtime tech industry analyst Rob Enderle, based in San Jose. “The match to Bill’s skill set should be much higher and his experiences at Microsoft and HP both give him the executive chops to run a small company if he has a strong CFO backing him up. Given how hostile the HP environment has become, SurveyMonkey should seem like a breath of fresh air for him, and he has a good reputation with regard to employee care.”
SurveyMonkey declined to disclose Veghte’s compensation. In 2013, while at HP, he received $15.6 million in cash and options, according to company filings.
Veghte’s appointment comes a day after SurveyMonkey announced it would add Sandberg and David Ebersman, the CEO of Lyra Health and former chief financial officer at Facebook, to its board. GoPro executive Zander Lurie will remain executive chairman.
SurveyMonkey launched in 1999 and flourished under Goldberg’s leadership. After releasing an iOS app in 2014, its mobile traffic exploded, and Goldberg had his sights set on broadening sales to Asian markets. Veghte, however, said his immediate focus is on building out SurveyMonkey’s new analytics service that aims to help employers learn more about their employees and companies better understand their customers.
Contact Heather Somerville at 510-208-6413. Follow her at Twitter.com/heathersomervil.
