Dave Goldberg Quotes

I am a data hound and so I usually end up working on whatever things I can find good data on. The rise of Internet commerce completely altered the amount of information you could gather on company behavior so I naturally drifted toward it.

Bobby and I went through some old questionnaires about customer requirements for languages, then we compiled a new one and sent it out to a few dozen people we knew.

A great deal of creativity is about pattern recognition, and what you need to discern patterns is tons of data. Your mind collects that data by taking note of random details and anomalies easily seen every day: quirks and changes that, eventually, add up to insights.

Knowledge created a new culture of business derived from the information gathering and analysis capabilities of first the mainframe and then the PC.

We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions.

We saw that our customers required help beyond the data sets they had and that they could benefit from a wider opinion. So we built SurveyMonkey Audience, and we've now got 4 million users who signed up to take surveys. Our clients can choose the demographic they want to hear from, and we can provide that sample.

My business is the analytical framework.

During the early 1960s, I decided to supplement research support for quantitative economic studies at Pennsylvania by selling econometric forecasts to private and public sector buyers.

I don't have any focus groups on talent and programming. If I need five people in a mall to be paid $40 to tell me how to do my job, I shouldn't do my job.

Go out and collect data and, instead of having the answer, just look at the data and see if the data tells you anything. When we're allowed to do this with companies, it's almost magical.

A great many decisions just can’t be made with confidence because the data just doesn’t exist …. [however] just because we don’t have the information doesn’t mean that we can’t get it.

I can't ever remember being struck by lightning when making a big decision. It's always about taking in more and more data points and making tack adjustments as you figure it out. I call customers, suppliers, industry analysts and try to get as much information as possible.

Our polling methodology has gotten outdated, and, in fact, it's not really telling us what it needs to be telling us.

In order to create predictive algorithms, you need to have a training set. So, that training set is created through our quantitative surveys. Those surveys need to include either basic market research questions or basic political polling questions, which might be added to get your opinion on a brand or an issue or a candidate.

You can't make good decisions without knowing the business.

It's the business that you guys are in too. We try to get as much information as we can and make the best decisions that we can for the football team.

It amazes me how people are often more willing to act based on little or no data than to use data that is a challenge to assemble.

No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data

Tell the people what they want and decide what they need.

The ultimate purpose of collecting the data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation.

Analytical software enables you to shift human resources from rote data collection to value-added customer service and support where the human touch makes a profound difference.

I am an analyst; my job is to analyze.

Data is not intelligence.

It takes some experimentation to figure out what people like and don't like.

The best research you can do is to talk to people.