Dave Goldberg, CEO of the online poll service company SurveyMonkey and husband to Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, died Friday night after he fell off a treadmill in Mexico and sustained fatal injuries in the head. Goldberg was 47.
Robert Goldberg, brother to Dave, confirmed his death via a Facebook post on Saturday. A Mexican official also released a statement from the Nayarit state prosecutor's office, saying Goldberg was vacationing at a private, nine-bedroom villa near the Four Seasons Resort in Punta Mita, a beachfront village located on the Mexican west coast near the resort town of Punta Vallarta.
The official says Goldberg started running on a treadmill at the gym in his vacation villa at around 4 p.m. and is believed to have fallen and "cracked his head open." He was later found by his brother Robert at around 7 p.m. still alive but with faltering vital signs and blood spilling from his head injury. Goldberg was later taken to the Hospital San Javier in Nuevo Vallarta, where he died. Mexican officials say no investigation is underway as the death appears to be an accident and no signs of violence were found.
The Goldberg family is planning an invitation-only memorial service to be held at the Stanford Medical Auditorium on Tuesday. Guests are urged not to wear ties "in keeping with Dave's lifelong hatred of ties" and the invitation requests that guests refrain from taking pictures and posting to social media out of respect for the family.
Although much less famous than his wife, Goldberg was known in Silicon Valley's inner circles as one of the champions of the startup, and his death is considered one of the biggest blows to the technology industry's startup culture.
"This is the biggest loss in Silicon Valley since Steve Jobs," Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, tells the Wall Street Journal. "The way that Steve Jobs was very much a visionary in technology, Dave Goldberg was very much a visionary in how to lead a life of all seasons."
After selling his startup Launch music magazine to Yahoo and became head of Yahoo Music until 2007, Benioff left to become part of the venture capital firm Benchmark before becoming CEO of SurveyMonkey in 2009. At the time he joined SurveyMonkey, the online survey service had 14 employees. Today, under Goldberg's leadership, the company has grown to 500 employees and has serviced more than 25 million surveys. SurveyMonkey is now valued at nearly $2 billion and has become one of the leading models for startups in growing a company without having to go public.
Comfortable in his own success, it is not surprising that the low-key, well-loved Goldberg can easily and gracefully give way for his wife to take the limelight. In her book, "Lean In," Sandberg devoted an entire chapter to being able to find the right partner to encourage women in their careers and poured praises on her husband for encouraging her in her high-flying career as second-in-line to Mark Zuckerberg.
Sandberg says it was her husband who convinced her to accept her demanding job at Facebook while their daughter was six months old and negotiate for a higher salary even when she thought it was "fair." And when she had to stay longer at work, her husband had no qualms taking on more responsibility looking out after their children, although the couple made it a point to share responsibilities equally.
Goldberg's wife has chosen not to release a statement. In March, Sandberg shared a photo of her and her husband, calling him "the man I most want to celebrate."
"I met Dave over 15 years ago and we immediately became the best of friends. He was the first person to show me the Internet, the kind of friend who shows up to help you move apartments (read: bad pre-Dave breakup), and always made me feel like I was home no matter where I was," she says. "I wrote in 'Lean In' that the most important decision a woman makes is if she has a life partner and who that life partner will be. The best decision I ever made was to marry Dave."
