Dave Goldberg, technology entrepreneur, 1967-2015

Best known as the husband of Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, Dave Goldberg - who died on Friday aged 47 - was Silicon Valley royalty in his own right.

He sold a music streaming business to Yahoo at the age of 33 and raised more than $1bn in funding for online polling company SurveyMonkey, which he led at the time of his death.

"One of the truly great people on the planet, Dave was of almost unimaginably remarkable character," said Dick Costolo, Twitter's chief executive. Dozens of other tributes were posted on Goldberg's Facebook page, which was opened to well-wishers by his family.

According to news reports, Mr Goldberg died while on holiday in Mexico with Ms Sandberg. He is said to have fallen and hit his head while using exercise equipment in a hotel gym.

At SurveyMonkey, Goldberg pioneered the now-widespread approach of raising late-stage capital from private investors instead of going public. His marriage with Ms Sandberg also became a case study in how couples could balance their career ambitions alongside family life, particularly childcare.

Born on 2 October 1967 in Minnesota, he studied history and government at Harvard University. "Harvard teaches you humility," he later wrote in the New York Times. "People heading there think they're the best at something, but there's always someone smarter."

Like many of Silicon Valley's brightest talents, he sighed with disillusion at politics, saying that a brief spell working on Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign in 1988 had shown the system "is not about changing the world or having an impact, it's about raising money".

Instead Goldberg began his career as a consultant at Bain & Company, before working in marketing and business development at Capitol Records, the storied label whose acts included Frank Sinatra and Coldplay. He had considered joining Microsoft, but was partly dissuaded by the rain in Seattle, where the company is based.

In 1994, at the age of 26, Goldberg founded Launch Media - which allowed consumers to listen to music online. As record labels fought file-sharing service Napster in the courts, he aimed to build a viable alternative for consumers and ultimately to replace traditional radio.

Launch floated on the stock market in 1999. Two years later, as the dotcom bubble deflated, it was acquired for $12m by Yahoo, where Mr Goldberg led a challenge to Apple's music service iTunes. He remained in Los Angeles until 2007, then spent two years with venture capital firm Benchmark Capital, involved with investments such as Ancestry.com.

In 2009, he joined SurveyMonkey, which then had fewer than 20 employees. In 2013 the company joined Silicon Valley's "$1bn club" when it raised $800m. Last year, it raised another $250m from investors including T Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley and Google Capital. The company has more than 400 employees in its Palo Alto headquarters and around the world.

Although SurveyMonkey was consistently profitable, Goldberg argued against an initial public offering, saying that it would instil an unhealthy focus on quarterly earnings. Raising $800m, part of it in debt, to allow early investors and employees to cash out without an initial public offering, was a huge sum for a private internet company in 2013, at a time when Zynga, Groupon and even Facebook had suffered a rocky start to public life.

It was the sort of approach that made Goldberg, in the words of Airbnb chief Brian Chesky, a "great mentor and role model" to many young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Goldberg married Ms Sandberg, then a Google executive, in 2004. In Lean In, her bestselling book about women in the workplace, she praised how he had gone further than many men in sharing domestic responsibilities.

Their division of household chores was "actually pretty traditional", Ms Sandberg wrote, but because "I would rather plan a Dora the Explorer party than pay an insurance bill and since Dave feels the exact opposite, this arrangement works for us".

Their family responsibilities were never split 50-50 at any one moment. Instead the couple allowed "the pendulum to swing back and forth between us". Goldberg is survived by Ms Sandberg, their two children, his mother Paula and his brother Robert.

"Dave's genius, courage and leadership were overshadowed only by his compassion, friendship and heart," SurveyMonkey said in a statement following his death.

That sentiment was echoed by many others in Silicon Valley this weekend. Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's chief executive, said in a tweet that Goldberg was the "kindest, most generous, loving father, loyal husband, great CEO and sweetest friend".

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