SurveyMonkey names former HomeAway COO Tom Hale president

SurveyMonkey is currently undergoing a transition, shifting from being a generator of surveys to being a full-fledged data platform. In order to secure its future, the company has brought on board someone it thinks will help CEO Zander Lurie accomplish this. Today, SurveyMonkey named former HomeAway chief operating officer Tom Hale as its president.

An industry veteran, Hale spent the past five years at HomeAway, where he was responsible for product, customer experience, and platform strategy for the home-sharing service. But following the company’s acquisition by Expedia for $3.9 billion in 2015, he went in search of something more “stimulating” that offered an intellectual challenge. This search led him to SurveyMonkey.

“The internet has been about conversations at scale,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “SurveyMonkey’s a leader at structuring the conversations and extracting meaning from them. It allows you to analyze and turn [them] into insights and action.”

Although he was pursued by Lurie, Hale has a personal connection to SurveyMonkey, as he’s been a long-time user of the service. He sees it evolving “from a product well-loved and universally adopted” to a platform for data. “It’s a continuation of what I’ve been passionate about,”Hale shared.

Beyond working at HomeAway, he’s also led product at Linden Lab — the creator of “Second Life” — and he served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) at Redpoint Ventures and held leadership roles while at Macromedia/Adobe. Lurie said that these credentials fit the mold of who he wanted: an individual with experience in both the enterprise and consumer spaces with a strong background in product, both on desktop and on mobile.

In his role at SurveyMonkey, Hale will be responsible for engineering, product, product marketing, user experience, and growth. He says that what’s compelling about working at the company is its “breadth,” the “massive install base of SurveyMonkey’s apps.” This will allow the company to expand beyond its core and into new areas, though Hale declined to provide specifics. However, he remarked that there was “a huge range of opportunities with consumers, enterprises, teams, and organizations.”

For Lurie, who is relatively new at SurveyMonkey, having been named CEO in January, this transformation is a continuation of the vision of long-time CEO Dave Goldberg, who passed away last year. “Dave was an icon of a human being and CEO, as well. He deserves all the credit for building the culture of the leadership team. [SurveyMonkey] has a resilient culture and people that want to carry on his mission,” he told us.

Lurie felt that he needed to bring on a “world-class executive to partner with” as he helps the company transform from being a utilitarian tool to becoming a platform — one that’s for not only individual consumers, but for those inside organizations and for global enterprises, and one which is mobile-friendly. Hale seemed the perfect person for the job.

The company’s efforts have already began to show, with the debut of political polling and the launch of a mobile app insight product to take on App Annie. Hale didn’t discount the possibility of more vertical-specific features in future, perhaps for the healthcare, legal, or media and entertainment spaces. “All of those are possible and many are contemplated,” he said.

“You really have to think about what’s unique about SurveyMonkey. It’s so broad and covers every industry vertical and has an incredible user base that’s a flywheel to attract more users. In turn, it creates a data asset, and the value that’s being tied up into that is enormous. SurveyMonkey has barely scratched the surface.”