
Serena Williams Joins SurveyMonkey's Board with Intuit's Smith - rayuela
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-24/serena-williams-joins-surveymonkey-s-board-with-intuit-s-smith
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abakker
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.

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SWGOAT
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

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AndrewKemendo
_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](http://www.economist.com/node/15810608)

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giarc
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.

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colmvp
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.

~~~
giarc
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.

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

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

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serf
What boards _aren 't_ looking to hire top tennis athletes in this day and age?

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valuearb
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.

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jaquetheduck
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.

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

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skewart
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?

~~~
mech4bg
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.

