SurveyMonkey’s CEO on Creating a Culture of Curiosity

Lurie took the helm at SurveyMonkey in the aftermath of tragedy: Dave Goldberg, the previous CEO and his longtime friend, had died suddenly at the age of 47. As a member of the company’s board, Lurie first aided in the search for a replacement and then, after that person didn’t work out, assumed the role himself. His employees were still in the grip of grief, fear, and anxiety. While continuing to provide them with emotional support, Lurie set about defining the company culture. When customers were asked what they valued most about the company’s offerings, and employees what excited them about coming to work every day, the word that came up most often was “curiosity.” Lurie and his team started encouraging and rewarding curiosity across the organization: celebrating the “question of the week” at town halls; using a peer recognition program to reward people for their candor; hosting the Goldie Speaker Series (named for the deceased CEO) to learn about success in other fields. They believe that when curiosity ebbs, people lapse into routine and complacency, exposing a company to disruption.

In May 2015 I flew to Mexico for a long weekend with a group of friends to celebrate one member’s birthday. We spent Friday afternoon beside the pool at a resort, playing a board game. Dave Goldberg, one of my closest friends, decided to go to the gym. His wife, Sheryl Sandberg, stayed with the rest of us by the pool and dozed off.

After a while, we all went back to our rooms to shower and get ready for dinner. When we reconvened for a drink, Sheryl was looking for Dave. She and Dave’s brother, Rob, found him unconscious in the gym. When I arrived at the hospital, I learned that he’d died. It was horrible and heartbreaking.

Dave was the CEO of SurveyMonkey, a company that was changing the way people gather feedback through online surveys. I served on the board. When I returned to the hotel, after midnight, I called a few senior people at the company to let them know the shocking news. Very early Saturday morning I wrote an e-mail to all 550 employees. The subject line was “Our friend, Dave Goldberg.” I informed everyone that Dave had passed away and that we would have more information on Monday. The board convened with senior management on Sunday morning back at company headquarters. The next morning we held an all-hands meeting. The board and the management team spoke about Dave’s death and the immediate plan for SurveyMonkey, but we were also open about our personal struggles with losing Dave. We had grief counselors in attendance. We said that anyone who didn’t want to stay at work could go home.

There’s no playbook for what to do when your CEO—a beloved guy who’d been responsible for hiring many of the people gathered in that room—dies suddenly at age 47. Everyone was in shock and feeling extremely vulnerable. Still, we had to keep the company operating. It required all of us to partition our brains a bit. After Dave’s death one of the many insightful things Sheryl wrote was “The ability to compartmentalize is healthy.”

In addition to being a board member, I was working full-time in Los Angeles as a senior vice president at GoPro, the action camera company, where I ran the entertainment division. SurveyMonkey’s board asked if I’d be willing to step in as interim executive chairman, with two primary goals: to lead the search for Dave’s successor, and to help the company execute the plan Dave had mapped out. I asked the CEO of GoPro for permission to split my time between GoPro and SurveyMonkey over the summer, and he graciously agreed. I told everyone I wasn’t a candidate to become SurveyMonkey’s CEO, and I held to that. In July, after an extensive search, we hired Dave’s successor.

Within a few months, however, it was clear that the new CEO’s strategy wasn’t aligned with the board’s. He recognized that the fit wasn’t right, so he volunteered to step down. The board asked me to consider taking his place. This time I had to do some difficult thinking. The team at GoPro had been very gracious to me after Dave’s death, and I felt loyal to it. I had hired a lot of people at GoPro, and I was excited about leading them. But SurveyMonkey had shown incredible resiliency, and the company’s continued success was very important to me, because it was part of Dave’s legacy. In the months after his death, employees had taken to wearing T-shirts with the slogan #MakeDaveProud. That summed up how I felt too. I became SurveyMonkey’s CEO in January 2016.

I’d first heard about SurveyMonkey in 2008. Dave, whom I’d known for a decade, had left his job at Yahoo and was talking with a private equity fund about finding a company he could invest in and run. The PE guys referred him to SurveyMonkey, a 10-year-old company in Portland with just under 10 employees that was still run by its founder. Dave invested in the company, became the CEO, and moved it from Portland to Silicon Valley. He asked me to join the board, so I got to ride shotgun and watch him scale the company’s revenue from $25 million to $189 million.

Because I’d been on the board for so long, when I became CEO, I didn’t have the typical honeymoon period. The company had been on a great trajectory, but after Dave’s death it wasn’t certain that would continue. Many people think a CEO’s job is mostly focusing on strategy, but for months I spent a lot of time helping employees process their feelings of grief, fear, and anxiety. I also thought a lot about how to preserve the core of what had made Dave’s leadership special while establishing my own leadership style.

The expectation was that I’d begin making moves immediately in terms of the business strategy. I told people that it seemed to me the company had been playing defense since Dave’s death, and although that was understandable, we needed to get back on offense to remain competitive. Very quickly we decided to change our strategy with a line of business that had been creating a lot of turmoil and suffering significant losses. We laid off 100 people—more than 10% of our workforce. It was hard, but it put the company back on a solid footing.

This move, although right for the business, was another big change for the team. I continued to spend part of each day providing emotional support for employees and maintaining transparency about our strategy. Our employees are talented and have a lot of options, so by early 2016 it was important to show them that working at SurveyMonkey made sense for their careers and their growth.

We needed to find a way to turn the page. We set about defining the company culture: who we are and how we show up for one another. Unsurprisingly, since we’re a tech company that makes it easy to conduct surveys, we sent a survey to ask what our employees thought. The result was a list of five employee values: Be accountable. Trust the team. Prioritize health. Listen to customers. Celebrate the journey. These are aspirational, but it was important that they align with how people at SurveyMonkey actually work together. They had to be more than just slogans we painted on the wall.

With alignment on our values, the team was starting to get back on the horse. We ramped up our recruiting. We updated our product road map. As we looked to bring new solutions to the market and reintroduce ourselves as a company, we decided to ask our customers what they valued most about our offerings and our employees what excited them about coming to work every day.

In these conversations one word came up repeatedly: “curiosity.” Every survey our customers make is driven by their curiosity about what others think. Every product innovation we’ve created has resulted from employees’ asking questions or looking at something differently. Recognizing that curiosity is at the heart of everything we do, we made it our new rallying cry. Today SurveyMonkey’s mission is to “power curious individuals and organizations to measure, benchmark, and act on the opinions that drive success.”

At this point, with established employee values and a new company mission, we didn’t settle. Instead we went deeper. Our customer and employee surveys revealed that the behaviors that define curiosity—asking good questions, listening deeply, being open-minded, valuing new experiences, challenging the status quo, and staying keenly aware that no one has all the answers—were prevalent among SurveyMonkey’s best customers and its best employees. We began to think about how we could increase the curiosity level within our culture to better serve our customers. Enhancing this quality doesn’t happen organically—you have to approach it deliberately.

We moved into a new headquarters building in December 2016, and that provided an opportunity to go all in to increase curiosity. We designed our new HQ, from the chairs to the names of conference rooms, almost entirely on the basis of employee surveys. Our goal was to make the new space open and collaborative to unlock creativity and innovation.

We also started encouraging and rewarding curiosity across the organization. One way is to create the right forums for people to ask good questions. For instance, we conduct town hall meetings at which we celebrate the “question of the week,” chosen from employee surveys. We have a peer recognition program to reward people who dare to be especially candid. In our Slack channels you’ll often see remarks praised with the notation #greatquestion. At SurveyMonkey that’s one of the highest compliments you can pay someone.

To foster a culture where questions are welcome, I need to show that I’m open to asking and answering them. I do that through regular skip-level meetings with people one level below my direct reports, where the conversation is open and nothing is off-limits. On a monthly basis I show my curiosity to the entire team through our Goldie Speaker Series (named for Dave Goldberg). I bring in leaders from various industries and backgrounds to learn about their success—from Serena Williams on what it takes to win, to Electronic Arts’ Andrew Wilson on building a culture of customer centricity. During these meetings I get real-time mentorship from people I admire while showing our team why asking questions is valuable.

Like many tech companies, we sponsor hackathons, where our engineers, product managers, and designers stay up too late, drink too much Red Bull, and quickly pursue new ideas in a competitive, anything-goes environment. Recently one of these hackathons and the curiosity of the team led to an important product breakthrough. Our software makes it easy for anyone to create a survey, but surveys can be improved with help from people who have deep expertise in the methodology. For instance, if the first three questions in your survey require open responses (as opposed to multiple choice), or if the survey has 75 questions, many people will fail to complete it because it seems like too much work. At the hackathon one team created a feature called SurveyMonkey Genius, which helps people avoid these mistakes. It uses artificial intelligence to assess the surveys people are creating and provides expert guidance on how to change the format and structure to get better results.

I believe that a diversity of people leads to better ideas and greater curiosity. Our board of directors consists of five women and five men. Five of the 11 members of our senior executive team are women. Women make up about half the company, including our CTO and many of our engineers.

Sometimes asking people what matters to them—the heart of curiosity—leads to unexpected answers. We recently saw an example of that. Our company spends millions of dollars a year on benefits; to make sure that spending aligns with what employees really value, we do surveys about which benefits matter most to them. In one of those surveys an interesting theme emerged. Like most other companies, we have contractors and vendors—including the people who clean our offices and those who prepare the great food in our dining area. We see them every day, but they aren’t actually SurveyMonkey employees. Some of our employees expressed concern that these team members didn’t have benefits comparable to ours. We began working with the companies that employ them to make their benefits packages more comparable. We wouldn’t have thought to engage on this issue if not for our employees’ curiosity and concern.

Another topic our people were curious about was whether we would become a public company. The management team and I had discussed this too, and we felt it would provide a significant opportunity to highlight our brand, introduce our full product portfolio to a broader audience, and further drive growth. In September 2018, nearly 20 years after its founding, SurveyMonkey went public. For everyone involved, the process served as a reminder of how powerful curiosity can be. We wrote a 250-page S-1 to explain everything there is to know about the company, and we tried to answer any question an investor might conceivably be curious about.

When you’re pursuing an IPO, you put together a road show presentation to tell your story, which you present approximately 75 times over a two-week period. With all that repetition you get pretty good at delivering the presentation—but the real magic happens afterward, when smart people ask questions. For me the road show was an opportunity to learn about would-be investors’ hopes and concerns about our company. What risks did they see that we hadn’t? What opportunities were they curious about? Being a former banker, I recognize that companies play a role in determining what kind of investors own their stock. As George Serafeim, a Harvard Business School professor, has said, “You get the investors you deserve.”

I have three young children. New parents learn a lot about the power of curiosity. Humans are probably at their most curious when they’re young, because they are eager to learn and lack the inhibitions and social pressures that accrue over time. Recently our chief research officer gave a TEDx talk about how curiosity is your superpower. Being curious requires space and time, and it can be pushed to the bottom of your priority list when life gets too busy. But we believe that curiosity helps employees engage more deeply in their work, generate new ideas, and share those ideas with others.

Leaders need to find ways to help employees flex their curiosity. We want people to ask big questions—and we want to celebrate them when they do. We want them to think up experiments that haven’t been done before. If folks aren’t failing, they’re not asking hard enough questions or taking big enough risks. Curiosity can be like a muscle: Its strength will erode if it isn’t used often enough. When curiosity ebbs, people lapse into routine and complacency, which exposes a company to disruption. To prevent that, managers should continually emphasize how important curiosity is—and reward people for developing it.

Zander Lurie is the CEO of SurveyMonkey.

SurveyMonkey’s CEO on Creating a Culture of Curiosity

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