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Comment by jcampbell1 | Hacker News Reader

The company was "built" by Ryan Finley, and completely profitable before Dave Goldberg even heard of the company. Survey Monkey was 10 years old before Dave Goldberg was even hired.

Let's not rewrite history here. Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg both go home at 5:30, but neither are even close to founders.

I don't mean to diminish their accomplishments, but "built a billion dollar business" is misleading.

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It's a lot easier to go home at 5:30 when someone else is doing the work that gets done after 5:30.

It's a lot easier to have children when you treat young, single, nonparent co-workers like cogs that can work late and do your work.

For what it's worth, this isn't the case at SurveyMonkey.

agree, is Survey Monkey really a worth a billion plus dollars?

Yes, it is. They do $100M in revenue, and it all pretty much flows to the bottom line. They have less than 200 employees and no matter what you assume for compensation, they are tremendously profitable.

I remember being on a mailing list [evolt] with Ryan when Survey Monkey was still very young. It's incredible to think that something I considered "Some guy's little survey side-project" is a $1b gorilla now. Kinda jealous, TBH!

To me, its an astonishing achievement. People, we are talking here about a simple two-pages PHP script that stores information from users input into database. Something a junior programmer can knock off in less than 4 hours, easily. Why on earth somebody, anybody, would paid monthly a hard dollar for that, no idea! Their exec team should go sell sand on African deserts; they would came back trilionaires.

I've never used Surveymonkey nor do I have any affiliation with them but this is such a crass and insulting comment.

Pretty much every web app is a "take input and stick it into a database".

Could a rough prototype of a survey system be made in 4 hours? Possibly, but to state that the entire app could be built in 4 hours by a "junior programmer" and claim their executive team is selling BS is offensive and asinine.

Every time I've worked anywhere, no matter how simple the problem domain seemed, it always turned out to be far more complicated than I thought at first. Eventually you'll learn that too.

The company I work for makes good money from several clients who came to us in desperation after a junior programmer knocked out a "simple two-pages PHP script that stores information from users input into a database" that were not in any way fit for purpose.

In one case we quoted for a job, were told someone else offered to do it for half the amount, and had the client come to us 6 months later and beg us to redo it from scratch.

Underestimating complexity is extremely easy.

E.g. your "two pages PHP script" that can be done in four hours is not going to be account for hosting it, for templates for various design needs, for proper analytics afterwards. If you have to spend 4 hours every time recreating it, and then additional time afterwards for analytics, that very quickly becomes worth paying for.

Four hours, huh? And here they've wasted 14 years working on it. They must be some kind of dumb.

They just did a financing that put them at something like $1.3B - and not a typical VC round of monopoly money - they borrowed money to swap out investors and buy out employees - sort of an exit, but not really. A home run by any standard.

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