Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg will funnel her SurveyMonkey shares to her family foundation, according to the Form S-1 SurveyMonkey filed yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. SurveyMonkey is about to go public.
The form says, “Ms. Sandberg plans to donate all shares beneficially owned by her (or the proceeds from the sale thereof) to the Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg Family Foundation as part of fulfilling their philanthropic commitment to the Giving Pledge.”
SurveyMonkey, founded in 1999, is a survivor from the previous tech boom. In 2013, its then-CEO and husband of Sheryl Sandberg, Dave Goldberg, told Coins2Day it was too soon to consider an IPO. The company funded its expansion with $800 million in private debt instead. Goldberg died in 2015, leaving Sandberg his more than 10.3 million shares, which constitute about 9.9% of the company.
After Goldberg died, Sandberg added a second focus to the Lean In Foundation and renamed it the Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg Family Foundation. It now works on empowering women and on helping people build resilience to overcome tragedies such as the death of a partner.
The new foundation reported over $5 million in income and $2 million in assets in 2016. It is also the beneficiary of Sandberg’s popular book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.
It is difficult to estimate what value the shares will have after the IPO, the Wall Street Journal reports, because private capital raises, such as the 2013 one, are sometimes larger than the subsequent public raise. In its filing, SurveyMonkey reports annual revenues around $200 million in the last couple of years, but it is not currently profitable. It claims it has more than 600,000 paying users.
