X

SurveyMonkey taps new CEO, adds Sheryl Sandberg to board

High-profile HP exec Bill Veghte becomes the online polling company's new chief executive, while Facebook COO Sandberg takes a seat at the company her late husband ran for six years.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
Expertise I have more than 30 years' experience in journalism in the heart of the Silicon Valley.
Steven Musil
2 min read

Bill Veghte, a former HP executive and Microsoft veteran, has been named CEO of SurveyMonkey. Simpson Yiu

Bill Veghte, who oversaw Hewlett-Packard's software business, will take over the chief executive role at Survey Monkey on August 3, the online polling and survey company said Tuesday.

Veghte, who was among HP's highest-level executives, said last week he was leaving the company "to pursue a new opportunity."

"The board found in Bill Veghte an insightful and energetic leader who will leverage SurveyMonkey's global scale and profitability into a much larger business," SurveyMonkey said in a statement. Veghte also will join the company's board. Before joining HP in 2010, Veghte spent 20 years at Microsoft.

SurveyMonkey on Monday also said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, has taken a seat on the board. Sandberg's late husband, David Goldberg, had served as the company's CEO for six years, building the startup to a $2 billion valuation. He died in May at the age of 47, after collapsing while exercising on vacation.

"Ever since Dave joined SurveyMonkey six years ago, I watched him and his team execute on their mission to help people make better decisions," Sandberg wrote in a statement Monday. "I'm looking forward to working with the board and this amazing team and help to realize Dave's vision of building a lasting company that will impact the way we all do business for years to come."

Sheryl Sandberg has joined the board at MonkeySurvey, the company run by her late husband for six years. Scott Olson/ Getty Images

Goldberg had a long, varied career, which spanned companies like Capitol Records and Yahoo before he became chief of SurveyMonkey. As CEO there, Goldberg oversaw a company with about 500 employees, which has grown to become a recognizable Web-based survey platform. The service is used by more than 20 million people worldwide and receives 2.8 million survey responses every day, with 473,000 surveys deployed every month.

He began dating Sandberg in 2002, and they married two years later. Though both had successful careers, Sandberg often discussed how they divvied up household responsibilities. Their partnership was key to her successful career, she has said.

The Palo Alto, California-based startup also announced the appointment of David Ebersman, chief executive officer of Lyra Health, to the company's board. Ebersman served as Facebook's chief financial officer from 2009 to 2014, ushering the social-networking giant through its difficult initial public offering in 2012.

SurveyMonkey also named temporary executive chairman Zander Lurie as its permanent chairman. Lurie, who will continue to serve as an executive vice president at GoPro, has also served as chief financial officer of CBS Interactive, the publisher of CNET.

Update, July 7 at 7:42 a.m. PT: Added information about the appointment of Bill Veghte as SurveyMonkey CEO.