Having spearheaded much of the strategy behind cleaving Hewlett-Packard Co. in two, Bill Veght will face a very different challenge in his new role: Pulling together a company that’s coping with grief.

SurveyMonkey, Inc., a fast-growing provider of online research tools, today announced that Veghte would become its new CEO, filling the void left when former CEO David Goldberg died in an accident in May. The move has particular poignancy for Veghte and the SurveyMonkey staff, since Veghte and Goldberg were longtime friends dating back to their time at Harvard, according to a New York Times account.

SurveyMonkey employees have reportedly been struggling with the loss of their much-respected CEO, a fact that prompted his widow, Sheryl Sandberg, to join the board early this week. Sandberg is also the chief operating officer of Facebook.

SurveyMonkey Chairman Zander Lurie told Re/code that the company looked at 75 candidates for the job and interviewed a dozen potential CEOs before settling on Veghte. Goldberg had personally courted Veghte for board membership for several years, and the former HP executive was reportedly set to sign on when Goldberg died. With the details of the HP split now all but finalized, the time was apparently right to make the move.

The appointment will probably come as a bit of a surprise to many people, since Veghte has spent the last 25 years working for two large companies – Microsoft and HP. However, it’s worth noting that the Microsoft he joined in 1990 was barely a $1 billion company that had only just released Windows 3.0, the product that would vault it to the top of the industry.

SurveyMonkey has similar ambitions in its niche. Under Goldberg, it grew from 14 to its current 550 employees and is now valued at $2 billion. Veghte told the Times that the company’s technology for rapidly sampling customer sentiment was compatible with the new speed of doing business.