About Us & Mission Video Script (673 words)

I’m Ryan Finley and the founder of SurveyMonkey.

I started SurveyMonkey in Madison, Wisconsin in 1999. At the time I was working at a company called Sonic Foundry  -Sonic Foundry what is that?-

I was contacted by the marketing department, they tasked me to create a survey, send it out to the user base and I looked at some of the tools out there and they’re frustrating, disappointing.

I wanted to create something that I myself would want to use so I decided to start working on the very first iteration of SurveyMonkey. We didn’t have any marketing budget, it really parted us to have a name that could really resonate people’s minds.

-Al took issue with SurveyMonkey-  -Ain’t an issue. I just think it’s a funny name-

The logo was kind of a weird-looking monkey with a check mark for its mouth.

The website itself was incredibly easy to use while being powerful at the same time.

We needed to hire a another person and we were like we don’t want to stay here in Wisconsin. We started looking around different cities, figured out we really wanted to move to the west coast.

The closer I looked at Portland I realized it had the kind of culture that really attracted me it so in 2004 my brother and I we moved out there.

SurveyMonkey just started the kind of snowball you didn’t know how to transition from that kind of small company to something bigger.

We needed to preserve the original simple but powerful at most of the website and when we talked to Dave like he kind of got that, we immediately knew that he would be the the perfect fit to literally hand over my baby and allow SurveyMonkey to really grow and fulfill its potential.

-Goldberg is building the business by going global and convincing people to ditch pencils and paper-

-Dave: we’re sort of at the early stages of disruption here with this business.-

-Becky Cantieri: Dave was a visionary, not only in his vision of SurveyMonkey the business but also in the type of company and culture he wanted to create here.

He cared deeply about the mission of SurveyMonkey to power the curious, he cared equally about the people of SurveyMonkey too.

-Many of the tech industry’s brightest remembered David Goldberg today.-

-Becky Cantieri: Dave’s passing was tragic and very unexpected for us and while we lost an amazing leader we were left with Dave’s amazing legacy.

We learned a lot about resilience and how we could continue to build SurveyMonkey and create a SurveyMonkey of the future.

There was really no better person than Zander to join as our new CEO at SurveyMonkey, he has been a board member since 2009 and he had an understanding and familiarity of our culture, our business and really what we were hoping to achieve in the future.

-Zander Lurie: our business at SurveyMonkey has evolved since 1999 when we were founded as a web-based survey tool. When you look at the platform that we have today, what started as a survey tool has emerged into a family of products, not just domestically but globally.

We have solutions that help you measure and engage your employee information, your customer information and then the market information.

When you look at SurveyMonkey and TechValidate and our new emerging offering like CX and engage in our audience products, all of these products are meant to help curious individuals get the feedback they need from their customers, their employees,  those people who you are duty-bound to serve the best way you can help them is by asking.

We’re 18 year into this journey and we continue to evolve and grow our business every single year. Today our employee base is 750 people based here in California and the site has been translated to over 40 languages.

We serve over 99% of Fortune 500 companies here in the US. We will continue to invest in all functions globally so that we can better serve our customers.