My small window into Dave Goldberg's amazing world

I’m saddened by the death Dave Goldberg, the CEO of SurveyMonkey who passed away over the weekend at age 47. I’m sad for his wife, Facebook (FB) COO Sheryl Sandberg, for his two young children, for his extended family, friends and everyone who worked with him. I knew Dave a little bit and even though we weren’t that close, because we had been introduced by a couple of unusual mutual acquaintances, every time we saw each other we had a reason to smile.

I don’t know how Dave died (reports now say he collapsed while exercising), but I do know how he lived. He was a much-loved guy wherever he went, from his high school in Minnesota, at Harvard and throughout his career. Good natured and even-keeled, Dave seemed secure in himself. He was a super-smart, very successful entrepreneur who earned the respect and deep friendship of a who’s who of Silicon Valley. He also was in the unusual position of being married to an even more high-powered wife, and that didn’t seem to bother him. This was true even as Sandberg launched her "Lean In" movement and buzz about a potential political career for her elevated. Maybe you didn’t want to call him Mr. Sandberg, (the L.A. Times says he bristled about that), but Dave appeared to be fine with all of it. That made him highly singular in a most positive way.

After all, Dave was building his own not-so-small company, SurveyMonkey, which as you probably know is the big player in online surveys. The company, which had 19 employees when he joined in 2009, now has 500 employees with reportedly 25 million users completing millions of surveys a month on everything from politics to market research to live events. Reports say SurveyMonkey has revenues well north of $100 million and a valuation of some $2 billion. Dave and his team could have taken the company public by now, but had opted to stay private to continue to grow the business outside the glare and relentless pressure of quarterly earnings.

Before SurveyMonkey, Dave founded Launch Media in 1994, a company that delivered music online. Dave sold the business to Yahoo (YHOO) (parent of Yahoo Finance) in 2001, and became head of Yahoo Music and built it into an industry powerhouse. Yahoo continues to build on his work to this day. Dave left Yahoo in 2007 and worked as a venture capitalist at Benchmark until he joined SurveyMonkey.

I first met Dave when he was running Launch in LA in 2000 (four years before he married Sheryl). The tech bubble had already peaked, and that was in the air a bit, but mostly times were still flush. I was a writer at Fortune Magazine working on a story about a company called LivePlanet, a new media venture that was supposed to combine Silicon Valley tech expertise with L.A. content creation. Dave was a minority investor in LivePlanet along with ex-Disney studio chief Joe Roth.

Did I mention LivePlanet’s co-founders were Matt Damon and Ben Affleck? It was a memorable assignment, as I spent one reporting weekend driving around L.A. in Affleck’s late-model Cadillac, with the actor behind the wheel, Damon riding shotgun and me in the backseat with a notebook. One of our stops was to visit Dave Goldberg at Launch headquarters and I remember the four of us there, talking about Launch and LivePlanet. So yes, I was introduced to Dave by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and every time Dave and I saw each other after that, I’d always ask him how the guys were, and he’d grin that big grin of his about it. (LivePlanet had some success with its "Project Greenlight" show, which aired on HBO and Showtime. After that it labored along for a number of years and has been quiet recently.)

Now I won’t be able to share that inside moment with Dave any more, but that’s not really important anyway. It was just my tiny window into Dave’s pretty amazing world.

We will all miss him.

Andy Serwer is Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo Finance.