MONKEY SURVEY, MONKEY DO
Startup designs San Mateo HQ with everything its employees could ask for. Because they did.
At SurveyMonkey’s sprawling new San Mateo headquarters, droves of tech workers spilling out of the adjacent Caltrain station, hopping off commuter bikes and walking to work are greeted by a 900-square-foot interactive light installation that casts a warm glow from the lobby of the three-story building’s curved glass facade at 1 Curiosity Way.
Created by San Francisco’s Future Cities Lab, the wall-mounted artwork, reminiscent of a simple dot matrix, alternates between animated visualizations of live data feeds from the online survey company’s worldwide database — and a giant rotating monkey head.
Named Goldie, to memorialize former CEO David Goldberg who died suddenly in 2015, the quirky mascot can be spotted in a multitude of incarnations throughout the sleek and colorful space, from an oversized stuffed monkey perched in front of an elevator bank to a smattering of monkey-head ornaments that employees placed around the building when the company moved from Palo Alto nearly a year ago.
“When you work here,” says Bennett Porter, SurveyMonkey’s senior vice president of marketing communications, “you have to embrace the monkey.”
Designed by Tim Murphy Design Associates and SurveyMonkey’s internal brand creative experience team, the first corporate anchor in the burgeoning Bay Meadows development has all the classic markings of a Silicon Valley tech start-up.
The wide-open, office-less facility built by Novo Construction has the requisite on-site gym and yoga studio, game room and free gourmet cafeteria with a state-of-the-art espresso machine, ensuring employees are always caffeinated and well fed.
But unlike other tech firms, the modern 20,000-square-foot interior that houses 400 of its 700 global employees was designed almost entirely using employee survey feedback. Every detail, from the office chairs and wood finishes to the unconventional conferenceroom names and the height of the restroom stall dividers, says Porter, were gleaned from surveys.
“The philosophy was to make the new space super open and super collaborative,” says Porter of the headquarters for the company founded in 1999. “We wanted it to reflect the openness, inclusion and transparency of our culture.”