DAVE GOLDBERG

When you're friends with someone, you can't just go out to dinner and say 'O.K., now this is a date.' You've got to do something very different.

I run the largest survey company in the world. It just so happens to be the second-largest company run by someone in my house.

Sometimes the things you decide not to do are actually the biggest things to do in your career.

In general, you don't want competitors to understand your business outside of telling people your revenue and profitability numbers.

We saw that our customers required help beyond the data sets they had and that they could benefit from a wider opinion. So we built SurveyMonkey Audience, and we've now got 4 million users who signed up to take surveys. Our clients can choose the demographic they want to hear from, and we can provide that sample.

I started my business with my best friend from high school.

Most of what we've done at SurveyMonkey is create a market, which I would say is much harder than trying to enter a market that already exists. But if you get it right, it can become a great business.

For me, going home at 5:30 is as much about my own choices, but also giving my team those choices, too.

There's not a whole lot of advantage for a company to be public.

I really like the mission at SurveyMonkey, which is, we help people make better decisions. It's just a great thing.

Outlets are turning away from phone polling, which can be problematic. For example, we did a poll for NBC around the Ebola crisis; we provided results in 24 hours. Their traditional phone poll would have taken a week to turn around. We're showing people we can do high-quality work: we've proved that with the work we do with the media.

Things are bad in 2001 at Yahoo. There's been layoffs, restructuring, lots of people left.

I go home, I have dinner with my wife and kids, and after my kids go to bed, I'm back online doing stuff.

One of the most talented, smartest people happens to be my wife, so I can get great advice from her. She obviously knows me incredibly well and what I'm going through. I don't know that I've been as helpful to her as she has been to me.

I just find that people can waste a lot of time in meetings, so I try to restrict meetings to the minimum that they need to be. But I have lots of time in my day where I am available to have informal conversations, where I grab someone to talk, and people can just walk up to my desk and talk to me.

The NBC using us on air is a great endorsement of quality.

If you use your old business models to restrict people, they're going to find ways to get that content the way they want it.

I want to go public because I have the right reason to go public - because the benefits outweigh the costs.

I save everything up until Sunday night because if I start sending emails on Saturday afternoon, then people have to start responding to me on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.

If you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a company, I think the first thing you do is you go and talk to a bunch of people. But then the next thing you probably should do is figure out if there's a broader demand than just people you know. That's where I think SurveyMonkey is pretty valuable to people.

I think Salesforce, going public very early on before they were profitable, it made a lot of sense for them because it got customers comfortable that these guys were going to have capital and be transparent about their business.

You want to hire great people and give them the opportunity to fail. You need to let them figure things out as they go along. If they fail repeatedly, then you probably have to find a different person, but if you don't let people have that opportunity to fail, they don't get to learn and grow and try things.

I am at home with my kids from 6 to 8. If I have a work dinner, I'll schedule to have dinner after 8. But we're working at night. You'll get plenty of emails from me post-8 P.M. when my kids go to bed.

'Cosmopolitan' used to publish five covers across the U.S. so that if one was unpopular, it wouldn't tank their entire sales.

I made my kids into Viking fans, so they will carry their misery with them, too. A little disappointment in life goes a long way.