Dave Goldberg was the signature male feminist of his era

New York

EVEN as a high school student, Dave Goldberg was urging female classmates to speak up. As a young dotcom executive, he had one girlfriend after another, but fell hard for a driven friend named Sheryl Sandberg, pining after her for years. After they wed, Mr Goldberg pushed her to negotiate hard for high compensation and arranged his schedule so that he could be home with their children when she was travelling for work.

Mr Goldberg, who died unexpectedly on Friday, was a genial, 47-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur who built his latest company, SurveyMonkey, from a modest enterprise to one recently valued by investors at US$2 billion.

But he was also perhaps the signature male feminist of his era: the first major chief executive in memory to spur his wife to become as successful in business as he was, and an essential figure in Lean In, Facebook COO Ms Sandberg's blockbuster guide to female achievement.

Over the weekend, even strangers were shocked at his death, both because of his relatively young age and because they knew of him as the living, breathing, car-pooling centre of a new philosophy of two-career marriage.

"They were very much the role models for what this next generation wants to grapple with," said Debora Spar, the president of Barnard College. In a 2011 commencement speech there, Ms Sandberg told the graduates that whom they married would be their most important career decision.

In the play The Heidi Chronicles, revived on Broadway this spring, a male character who is the founder of a media company says that "I don't want to come home to an A-plus," explaining that his ambitions require him to marry an unthreatening helpmeet.

Mr Goldberg grew up to hold the opposite view, starting with his upbringing in progressive Minneapolis circles where "there was woman power in every aspect of our lives", Jeffrey Dachis, a childhood friend, said in an interview.

The Goldberg parents read The Feminine Mystique together. In fact, Mr Goldberg's father introduced it to his wife, according to Ms Sandberg's book. In 1976, Paula Goldberg - Dave Goldberg's mother - helped found a non-profit to aid children with disabilities. Her husband, Mel, a law professor who taught at night, made the family breakfast at home.

Later, when Dave Goldberg was in high school and his prom date, Jill Chessen, stayed silent in a politics class, he chastised her afterward. He said: "You need to speak up," Ms Chessen recalled in an interview. "They need to hear your voice."

Years later, when Karin Gilford, an early employee at Launch Media, Mr Goldberg's digital music company, became a mother, he knew exactly what to do. He kept giving her challenging assignments, she recalled, but also let her work from home one day a week. After Yahoo acquired Launch, Mr Goldberg became known for distributing roses to all the women in the office on Valentine's Day.

Ms Sandberg, who often describes herself as bossy-in-a-good-way, enchanted him when they became friendly in the mid-1990s. He "was smitten with her, even when she was engaged and married to someone else", Ms Chessen remembered.

After Ms Sandberg's marriage ended, she dated other people, but Mr Goldberg still hung around, even helping her and her then-boyfriend move, recalled Bob Roback, a friend and co-founder of Launch.

When they finally married in 2004, friends remember thinking how similar the two were, and that the qualities that might have made Ms Sandberg intimidating to some men drew Mr Goldberg to her even more. Over the next decade, Mr Goldberg and Ms Sandberg pioneered new ways of capturing information online, had a son and then a daughter, became immensely wealthy, and hashed out their who-does-what-in-this-marriage issues.

Mr Goldberg's commute from the Bay Area to Los Angeles became a strain, so he relocated, later joking that he "lost the coin flip" of where they would live. He paid the bills, she planned the birthday parties, and both often left their offices at 5:30pm, so they could eat dinner with their children before resuming work afterwards.

When Mellody Hobson, a friend and finance executive, wrote a chapter of Lean In about women of colour for the college edition of the book, Mr Goldberg gave her feedback on the draft, a clue to his deep involvement. He joked with Ms Hobson that she was too long-winded, like Ms Sandberg, but aside from that, he said he loved the chapter, she said in an interview.

By then, Mr Goldberg was a figure of fascination who inspired a "where can I get one of those?" reaction among many of the women who had read the best-seller Lean In. Some lamented that Ms Sandberg's advice hinged too much on marrying a Dave Goldberg, who was humble enough to plan around his wife, attentive enough to worry about which shoes his young daughter would wear, and rich enough to help pay for the help that made the family's balancing act manageable.

Now that he is gone, and Ms Sandberg goes from being half of a celebrated partnership to perhaps the business world's most prominent single mother, the pages of Lean In carry a new sting of loss.

"We are never at 50-50 at any given moment - perfect equality is hard to define or sustain - but we allow the pendulum to swing back and forth between us," she wrote in 2013, adding that they were looking forward to raising teenagers together. "Fortunately, I have Dave to figure it out with me," she wrote. NYT