The man married to Sheryl Sandberg pulled a 'Sheryl Sandberg laundry' prank
And for married couple Dave Goldberg and Sheryl Sandberg one rule is to "try not to talk about each other's stuff," Goldberg recently told Business Insider.
Goldberg is CEO of SurveyMonkey and Sheryl Sandberg is COO of Facebook. Sandberg is also the woman who brought back feminism with her best-selling book "Lean In."
So Goldberg had to make one big fat exception in 2013 when "Lean In" published and "60 Minutes" called to do a profile on it.
"Obviously with her book, I was sort of parts of her book so it made sense that I did this "60 Minutes" interview," he told us.
It became a thing called "Sheryl Sandberg laundry," she later explained during an on-stage interview with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff:
A friend of mine told me that she asked her husband to do a load of laundry. He turned around and asked her, 'Is this Sheryl Sandberg laundry? Is this foreplay? Because if this is foreplay, I'm in. But if this is just laundry, there's a game on.'
Goldberg, as it turns out, has a sort of wicked sense of humor. When the laundry thing went viral, he pranked his vice president of marketing Bennett Porter.
"I told her that Procter and Gamble, who is one of our clients, reached out to me to see if I'd be willing to help them, that they wanted to create a version of Tide that was targeted towards men. They wanted to do a thing that was "Lean-In with Tide" and would I be willing to talk to them in the context of this, and go onto TV?" he told us."I wrote a pretty good description."
Porter was apparently appalled, "She wrote back this whole long email about why this wasn't a good idea, why this was going a bridge too far, and it really wasn't going to help Sheryl," he said.
But she never checked the date of the email. "April 1."
Later that day, "I told her I was joking," he confessed. But the story still makes him laugh.