The SurveyMonkey claim portrays the evolution of the business from its founding in 1999 through to 2014. A young computer science graduate,Ryan Finley from the University of Wisconsin-Madison,established SurveyMonkey to address the dearth of simple-to-use, affordable online survey instruments out there. Finley sold the company in 2009,to Spectrum Equity and Bain Capital Ventures, having understood the demand for a partner to assist the company achieve its full potential.
David Goldberg, former Yahoo! executive and an entrepreneur, instantly took the helm as CEO his strategy to establish the company on course to scale at a consistent and accelerated rate of growth. Reconstructing the complete technology platform Goldberg's principal initiatives in the early days were to hire a management team that is solid, and could expand globally.
As it made considerable progress on those fronts, SurveyMonkey completed several acquisitions and began to expand its feature set and product offerings to contain SurveyMonkey Audience (panels of survey respondents) and survey templates, amongst others. The organization finished an $800 million secondary funding raise in the year 2012 to supply liquidity to investors and workers in lieu of an IPO and put forward its efforts to transform its survey tool to a full blown platform.
Having attained tremendous growth in its 15-year history, the majority of which happened since the 2009 acquisition, as Goldberg and his team looked forward to 2014, they faced the critical question of just how to prioritize SurveyMonkey's paths for growth-international expansion, quality initiatives, enterprise, and platform increase-so as to best position the company to attain its optimum potential.
SurveyMonkey in 2014 case study solution
PUBLICATION DATE: September 16, 2014 PRODUCT #: E524-HCB-ENG
This is just an excerpt. This case is about TECHNOLOGY & OPERATIONS