Serena Williams Joins SurveyMonkey's Board with Intuit's Smith | Hacker News Reader

Serena Williams Joins SurveyMonkey's Board with Intuit's Smith

bloomberg.com

21 pointsrayuela20 comments

As someone who has been a customer of SurveyMoneky for years (paying for top tier membership) I have very few complaints about their technology. It works well, and their service is good when it doesn't. However, I'd really love it if they could up their ambitions to unseat the SPSS hegemony in handling survey data correctly. Our company maintains a license of SPSS just for handling the output of surveys from survey monkey, because there are no faster ways to aggregate surveys results from multiple languages. SurveyMonkey still lacks true multilingual support. Meanwhile, I would love to get away from SPSS, but I haven't found a good workflow in any other GUI-ish tool that allows me to do what I need to do faster.

If Serena Williams is reading this, I hope that as a board member she can push SM to focus more on the higher end product roadmap.

Hi there:

Serena here.

In my first board meeting, a SurveyMonkey engineer working on multilingual features in the core product brought this post to my attention.

Every global brand needs to handle survey data across languages and geographies. I just reviewed the roadmap with the internal team and i am confident SurveyMonkey is investing in this direction - stay tuned!"

Serena

Serena’s voice on the board sends a strong message to our company, investors, and the industry

What message is that exactly?

Serena is an activist, marketer, brand builder, and greatest athlete of our time

I laud her accomplishments in Tennis and from what I understand she may be the greatest tennis player of all time. How that translates into being the best person to sit on a board of directors is unclear to me.

Putting celebrities on professional boards isn't anything new, and the Economist covered this in 2010 [1], showing that it has a positive affect on share value.

I guess it's kind of like how rich celebrities never pay for anything (comped meals, free valet parking etc...) because their mere presence is payment enough.

[1]http://www.economist.com/node/15810608

When Jay-Z bought into the Brooklyn Nets NBA team it was discussed quite a bit. Turns out he owned something like 0.5% but the media exposure was big for the team.

Sure but there's a strong intersection between a sport like basketball, and entertainment and rap/hip hop.

I would imagine a much more relevant person as a board member for a survey company would be someone like Andrew Ng or Nate Silver. But I recognize that I might be overly pragmatic and missing some imagination. Or conflating the role of a board member.

That's very true. I guess on the surface people assume Serena was asked to be on the board for the celebrity factor, which I would argue having Serena on the board probably doesn't bring in a ton of business. However, she has been involved in international sports business and marketing since she was very young, therefore probably does bring a lot to the table besides being the tennis GOAT.

I'd have to think her husband, Alexis Ohanian, had something to do with this.

Imagine a woman could get a job on her own merits...

She did. It was tennis.

What boards aren't looking to hire top tennis athletes in this day and age?

I think it's more the other way around. How did SurveyMonkey convince Serena Williams to be on their board? Her husband may well have played a role. (Sure, it's not a huge time commitment, but it's not zero either, and I would imagine she has plenty of other organizations and people competing for her attention.)

I was thinking the exact same thing!

Reddit probably needs some way to process all the personal information they have gathered over the years into something they can sell. Survey monkey can probably do that maybe?

I am pretty sure she is way more famous than him.

It looks like Sheryl Sandberg and Serena Williams are close: http://time.com/4147487/serena-williams-sheryl-sandberg/

Looks like SurveyMonkey is going public. As a public company it's important for the CEO to have a pliable board made up of people who owe their seats to you. That's how the big comp packages are awarded.

This seems totally out of left-field move that only provides PR for SurveyMonkey. And while that may be somewhat true, this decision actually makes more sense if you dive into Serena's more recent endeavors.

Aside from being one of the world's greatest tennis players, she is clearly an accomplished business woman. She has started her own clothing line, owns a portion of the Miami Dolphins, and has started several successful charities. Most importantly, she knows how to market herself really really well.

Board members don't always have to have directly related experience to the companies they advise. A progressive company like SurveyMonkey that puts a lot of effort into supporting charities and positive social changes could really use the insight of someone like Serena.

Does it really matter who is on the board of a privately held company?

SurveyMonkey has 650 employees?! Do they just have big customer support and sales teams? Or are they working on a much more ambitious roadmap than simply maintaining their classic survey tool?

Every time there is an article about SurveyMonkey someone makes this comment. SurveyMonkey has hugely expanded what they offer from their original core product and has also scaled dramatically. It also has many subsidiary offerings (Fluid Review, Wufoo, Audience, TechValidate).

The answer to both your questions is - yes.

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