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.
Sometimes the things you decide not to do are actually the biggest things to do in your career.
I go home, I have dinner with my wife and kids, and after my kids go to bed, I'm back online doing stuff.
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.
Things are bad in 2001 at Yahoo. There's been layoffs, restructuring, lots of people left.
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.
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.
My closest adviser is my wife. It's nice to have one of the smartest people in business as your life partner, and someone you have dinner with and breakfast with.
In general, you don't want competitors to understand your business outside of telling people your revenue and profitability numbers.
There's not a whole lot of advantage for a company to be public.
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.
I really like the mission at SurveyMonkey, which is, we help people make better decisions. It's just a great thing.
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.
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 started my business with my best friend from high school.
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.
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.
For me, going home at 5:30 is as much about my own choices, but also giving my team those choices, too.
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.
