Remembering Dave Goldberg: 1967-2015

Dave Goldberg, the CEO of SurveyMonkey and husband of Sheryl Sandberg, died on Friday following a treadmill accident. He was 47.

Our hearts are with Sandberg and her two young children; it’s a devastating loss for them. It’s a tremendous loss for the gender equality movement as well. The New York Times called Goldberg “perhaps the signature male feminist of his era”: here was a man who realized that his wife’s astronomic success didn’t diminish his own, who urged her to negotiate for what she was worth, who was committed to striving towards a “fifty-fifty split” in their division of household labor. Dave and Sheryl were showing us all how this whole equal-partnership thing could work, and we all thought they would get many more years to do that. Now that he’s gone, the world is truly “poorer for his loss,” as Chelsea Clinton put it.

To the men who are reading this: you can honor Dave by resolving to be more like him, so that eventually, the qualities that made him such an extraordinary man become much more ordinary. There are beautiful tributes to Dave at Re/Code and Fortune, and on Facebook from President Obama.

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