Tech exec David Goldberg dies at 47

In this Feb. 1, 2013 photo, David Goldberg, the CEO of Survey Monkey, poses at their headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. (Jim Wilson / The New York Times)

SAN FRANCISCO -- David Goldberg, a popular Silicon Valley executive and husband of Facebook second-in-command and "Lean In" author Sheryl Sandberg, has died suddenly at age 47, his company and family members said Saturday.

Goldberg was CEO of online survey questionnaire provider SurveyMonkey. He died Friday night, the company said in a statement on its website.

Family members also reported the death, via postings on Facebook. Neither the company nor family released a cause or other details about his death. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The New York Times that Goldberg died while he was on vacation abroad with his wife.

"Dave Goldberg was an amazing person, and I am glad I got to know him," Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page. "My thoughts and prayers are with Sheryl and her family."

In an interview last month, Goldberg told the news site Business Insider of maxing out his credit cards in the early 1990s to fund one of his first Internet ventures, a music site, before going on to work at other tech companies, including Yahoo.

In 2004, Goldberg married Sandberg, another longtime tech executive who now serves as Facebook's chief operating officer.

Sandberg launched an international conversation about the dearth of women in positions of power with her 2011 book "Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead."

In it, Sandberg wrote of the adjustments she and her husband had to make to manage two high-profile careers while raising two children.

Goldberg was a "true partner," she wrote, and he helped make her career possible.

"I truly believe that the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is," Sandberg wrote.

Goldberg's brother asked on Facebook for friends and families to post their memories on David Goldberg's Facebook page. Tributes rolled in from people who wrote of meeting him during his long tech career.