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Dave Goldberg, who died unexpectedly, was a pioneer male feminist

 
Dave Goldberg, 47, who died Friday, was married to Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg.
Dave Goldberg, 47, who died Friday, was married to Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg.
Published May 5, 2015

Even as a high school student, Dave Goldberg was urging female classmates to speak up. As a young dot-com executive, he had one girlfriend after another, but got serious about a driven friend named Sheryl Sandberg, pining after her for years. After they wed, Goldberg pushed her to negotiate hard for high compensation and arranged his schedule so that he could be home with their children when she was traveling for work.

Goldberg, 47, who a Mexican government official said died of head trauma Friday night after he collapsed at the gym at a private resort in Mexico, was a genial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who built his latest company, SurveyMonkey, from a modest enterprise to one recently valued by investors at $2 billion. But he was also perhaps the signature male feminist of his era: the first major chief executive in memory to spur his wife, a Facebook executive, to become as successful in business as he was, and an essential figure in Lean In, Sandberg's blockbuster guide to female achievement.

Goldberg's parents read The Feminine Mystique together — in fact, Goldberg's father introduced it to his wife, according to Sandberg's book. In 1976, Paula Goldberg helped found a nonprofit to aid children with disabilities. Her husband, Mel, a law professor who taught at night, made the family breakfast at home.

Later, when Dave Goldberg was in high school and his prom date, Jill Chessen, stayed silent in a politics class, he chastised her afterward. He said, "You need to speak up," Chessen recalled in an interview. "They need to hear your voice."

Sandberg, who often describes herself as bossy-in-a-good-way, enchanted him when they became friendly in the mid 1990s. He "was smitten with her," Chessen remembered. When they finally married in 2004, friends remember thinking how similar the two were, and that the qualities that might have made Sandberg intimidating to some men drew Goldberg to her even more.

Over the next decade, Goldberg and Sandberg pioneered new ways of capturing information online, had a son and then a daughter, became immensely wealthy, and hashed out their who-does-what-in-this-marriage issues.

Friends in Silicon Valley say they were careful to conduct their careers separately, politely refusing when outsiders would ask one about the other's work: Sandberg's role in building Facebook into an information and advertising powerhouse, and Goldberg at SurveyMonkey, which made polling faster and cheaper. But privately, their work was intertwined.

While his wife grew increasingly outspoken about women's advancement, Goldberg quietly advised the men in the office on family and partnership matters, an associate said. Six out of 16 members of SurveyMonkey's management team are women, an almost unheard-of ratio among Silicon Valley "unicorns," or companies valued at more than $1 billion.

Goldberg was a figure of fascination who inspired a "where can I get one of those?" reaction among many of the women who had read the bestseller Lean In.

Now that he is gone, and Sandberg goes from being half of a celebrated partnership to perhaps the business world's most prominent single mother, the pages of Lean In carry a new sting of loss.

"We are never at 50-50 at any given moment — perfect equality is hard to define or sustain — but we allow the pendulum to swing back and forth between us," she wrote in 2013, adding that they were looking forward to raising teenagers together.