The best journeys in life rarely have a final destination—rather a series of key milestones. Today, SurveyMonkey’s first official day as a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: SVMK), is one such milestone that we’re excited to share with you.
The last 19 years have made for quite the journey, and we know the best parts are yet to come. As we ring the opening bell on the Nasdaq Stock Market to welcome public shareholders, I want to pause and thank the people who made this day a reality. We wouldn’t be in Times Square today without the valuable contributions and support of our leadership team, employees and their families (including SurveyMonkey alumni), Board of Directors, and partners.
I’m inspired every day by our customers whose curiosity leads them to listen to the diverse voices and opinions of the people who are important to their organizations. Whether you are a scrappy startup testing your ads or a multinational corporation looking for ways to foster inclusiveness in your employee base, we are proud to help you collect the People Powered Data you need to make the right call.
SurveyMonkey fundamentally changed the way many organizations gather feedback. We created the category for survey software in 1999. We are a leader in this growing category today. We have a simple mission that inspires our employees: ‘Power the Curious.’ Our products help curious individuals and organizations measure, benchmark, and act on the opinions that drive success. We now have over 16 million active users across more than 300,000 organizational domains, including 95% of the Fortune 500 companies. Our customers, spanning 190 countries and territories, collect 20 million answers a day to help them improve their customer service, employee engagement, patient satisfaction, market research and more. Across our line of individual, team, and enterprise software products, our platform turns curiosity into action.
A big part of what makes SurveyMonkey different is our people. The strength of our company culture and our dynamic employee base is a tribute, in part, to my late friend Dave Goldberg’s leadership. SurveyMonkey embodies who Dave was as a person—curious, helpful, approachable, and at the same time powerful.
SurveyMonkey is a place where the curious come to grow, where we strive to create a supportive work environment that empowers employees to challenge the status quo, be authentic, fulfill their passions, and balance work goals with life goals. We believe the best way for leaders to win in these competitive times is to ask questions, listen, and relentlessly self-improve. We bring this ethos to our product development process, our focus on customer operations, employee culture, and business performance.
Becoming a public company represents a significant opportunity to highlight our brand and the expertise we’ve built into our platform over the years. Today, we are showcasing the power of unique, timely, and engaging data by partnering with key influencers.
Thanks to Draymond Green, Arianna Huffington, Jeff Weiner, and Serena Williams for letting us power their curiosity on important topics such as what motivates employees, managing demands of work and life, dream jobs (by the way, we’re hiring), and the struggles and joys of being a working parent.
Going public also affords us a special opportunity to introduce SurveyMonkey for Good, our corporate social responsibility program, which will amplify our impact in our industry and the communities in which we work. As we often do, we used our own products to find out what would be the most meaningful way we could give back. The answer sits squarely with who we are as a company: SurveyMonkey for Good’s mission is to speak up for those without a voice to advance equality and make a positive impact on society.
We are confident we have the team, the strategy, and the operational rigor to continue our successful journey and deliver for all our stakeholders. We don’t have all the answers, but as Warren Buffett says, you just have to “keep asking questions.”
Stay Curious,
Zander Lurie
CEO, SurveyMonkey
