Sheryl Sandberg Joins SurveyMonkey's Board
Sheryl Sandberg is taking a seat on the board of SurveyMonkey, her late husband's online survey and polling company. — Ms. Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and author of the book “Lean In,” unexpectedly lost her husband, Dave Goldberg, while on vacation in May.
Context & Ripple Effects
SurveyMonkey has been without its chief since Dave Goldberg's sudden death in May, with GoPro executive Zander Lurie stepping in only as a temporary fix — an explicitly three-month executive-chairman stint. Sandberg taking a board seat two months later is the company's first structural answer to the vacancy.
The move also ties SurveyMonkey's governance directly to Facebook, where Sandberg runs the ad business and where, per later reporting on her expanding role after the Cambridge Analytica fallout, her influence would only grow. A part-time director with a full-time COO job raises real questions about how much attention either company gets.
First-order effects
- SurveyMonkey gains a high-profile director with unmatched Silicon Valley reach just as it needs permanent leadership, while Zander Lurie's stopgap chairmanship now has a board anchor behind it.
- Sandberg takes on a second public governance commitment alongside her Facebook COO role, splitting her formal oversight duties between two companies.
Second-order effects
- SurveyMonkey's next CEO search now happens under a board that includes the widow of its late chief, making succession decisions both more personally weighted and more visible.
- Facebook effectively gains informal visibility into a private survey-and-polling platform through its own COO — adjacency worth watching given how central polling and feedback data became to social platforms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, closely held consumer-internet companies respond to founder-level shocks by pulling in the founder's network rather than running conventional outside searches — governance continuity through relationships instead of process.
- The arrangement previews the broader tension in Sandberg's career that later coverage would document: one person holding operational power at Facebook while accumulating external commitments, with accountability diffused across both.
The trend: Silicon Valley boards increasingly absorb founder-loss shocks by installing the founder's closest personal and professional network rather than defaulting to outsider hires.