Ryan Smith

“And we made this crazy list of all of these, you know, people who, you know, who were like, you know, at some point that might be an important relationship for us. And like, 75% of them said yes. And they all made, you know, a ton of money as a result of it.”

“When Ryan Smith sold Qualtrics, I think he made about a billion dollars. After 20 years or so and I believe that billion, most of it went back into the jazz, and it has quadrupled... He's up three billion on the jazz or something like that versus the 20 years …”

“And then I started getting a schedule and like literally like a month later, I was making like a thousand dollars a month is a 17 year old teaching English.”

“When we took money in 2011, Sequoia, I remember, was like, We're only doing this if there's a CEO. Which one of you is the CEO?”

“Our competition had just raised a bunch of money. The product was cheaper than ours. They raised forty million dollars, and their product was better than ours.”

“This is where I've always told our reps, like, do you know your product? I could do the demo on the phone in a car with a link walking them through. Without me looking at the screen. And explain to them every single thing that's going on.”

“You know, the gentleman who was doing it ran a company, I'll just be honest, it was called Survey Monkey at the time.”

“And when Qualtrics sold, it was probably one of the most underwhelming days of my life.”

“I didn't do anything else when I was doing Qualtrics. I didn't invest. I didn't sit on boards. I didn't buy real estate. I was literally like Qualtrics for 20 years heads down.”

“It was literally a meeting where it was like, well, are you serious? Make us an offer. And we pulled up the Forbes valuation on the phone and I said, well, how's this?”

“Not all three, maybe, but like, if I can schedule a call, I'm not doing it in one of those moments.”

“The last round in front, which I think was at six or seven hundred million, was all founders. Okay, it was Ryan Smith from Qualtrics, I forget who else, the other billion, our friends, the billionaires of SaaS, but they all, I think, led that round instead of …”

“With Qualtrics, I don't think there's ever really been an aha moment. There hasn't been this tipping point where it like all worked. It's been what I would call probably more push than pull the whole way.”

“Because the basement sucked. It was like the worst time I've ever had, like, running a business”

“I'm doing this for 35 years. The last person who ran the team had it for 35 years. I'm doing this for 35 years, and really, that's my thought. Like, we're doing it for that long.”

“I had two hours to decide whether we're selling to SAP for eight billion dollars cash.”

“In 2011, someone offered us five hundred million dollars cash to sell our business. And we were at this point where we turned it down.”

“We actually raised venture capital because we turned down an offer, and we wanted to be able to live with ourselves.”

“The day that the wires hit, I remember sitting, we were at a president's club, so we were at a sales retreat with all of our people, and you could kind of look around, and you could see everyone's phones, right? Like, people were, like, with their spouses, lik…”

“You'll always see me doubling up everything I do. Like, if I have a meeting that I need to go do, I'll just bring them with me to the next meeting. If I've got to go to a game, I've always got people with me that I was supposed to meet with, and we just do it …”

“Ryan Smith from Qualtrics, and he told the amazing story of going from zero to five hundred million of revenue And not requiring any primary capital. Five hundred million in recurring revenue, and they never raised any money that went to the balance sheet.”

“The backstory here is we turned down an acquisition offer for five hundred million dollars in 2012. And I had done, I mean, we were about a fifty million dollar sales run rate, but I'd never done a media interview.”

“It was the most brilliant thing that we did, and everywhere I go, and we were on the road show and everything, it was, wow, that was the most brilliant model I've ever seen because, you know, millions of academics used Qualtrics and then took it with them into…”

“From 2009, 10 and 11, Every year we waited, our valuation went up a hundred million dollars back then.”

“I was not running a dual track. I invited 300 of my closest friends to take mortgages on their house to go buy into the friends and family, and then I was like, oh, J slash K, it was like a pump fake, and everyone went flying by, and then we laid it.”

“If you're not building a company that can stand up and go public, Then you're probably going to be, no one's going to want it anyways. And you, there's going to be an outlier or two where you're going to point to and say that, but no one ever really, I mean, S…”

“I wouldn't even invest in a company if a founder didn't own, if we're raising a series A, if they didn't own 20% or more.”

“Well 15, it's got to be the new, it's got to be the new number. I mean as market caps keep increasing, then I think the number goes up.”

“The interviews I do with people that are at your level get almost three times the downloads as when I have Ryan on from Qualtrics and they're about to IPO.”

“And the most successful SAS companies I've ever seen all came out of agencies. Qualtrics with Ryan Smith Ryan Holmes at Hootsuite. I mean, the most successful SaaS company started as agencies.”

“Yeah, paying customers, and these are brands. These are, I mean, we have a lot more customers in the brands, but they, you know, if you look at 9000, then you look at, you know, they're paying anywhere from 12,000 all the way up to, You know, five, six millio…”

“I think we already have. Good. I asked that question very specifically. What I found is if I underestimate a little, a founder feels much more comfortable going, we just broke that versus. We're good. That's in the rear of your view mirror.”

“Makeup that we have at Qualtrics where we're cashflow positive. We've always been, it was really nice to be able to say, Hey here's an opportunity to have some liquidity and, you know, kind of get acclimated a little bit to what life is going to be like for a…”

“I mean, in our series A, we raised, you know, seventy million dollars. We took, we left a hundred million extra valuation on the table from a credible party because we care about, you know, who we're going to battle with, and I think that's what we've always …”

“We operated it with a hundred percent growth and being profitable through 2006, seven, eight, nine.”

“Qualtrics, is a good example of that. Hiding in Salt Lake, you didn't think that there was going to be a multi-billion dollar company in the area of market research surveys, but we were lucky enough to find that company relatively early on and spend the time b…”

“We're trying to build something that's going to be around for the next 40 years, 50 years, and if you're building that way, it's actually a totally different playbook than if you're building something that it's got to work for you.”

“We were close to coming up on fifty million dollars in, in sales and, you know, 50% profit margins, a hundred percent bootstrap.”

“The idea of transparency is that everyone's basically an insider and we've gone from 600 employees to 1200 employees in one year. We've gone from one office to eight offices”

“Companies fail for two reasons. They either get internally focused on each other, Or they get externally focused in a million different directions and can't execute.”

“My job as CEO changes every three months. And so does the way I go about the job. What used to work for me two or three years ago does not work for me now.”

“One of the things that I believe in is, is, is complete escalation where if someone's talking to me about someone else, we're doing it in the room together.”

“Most people only have three or four productive hours in the day where they're actually getting stuff done.”

“I mean, we had fifty million dollars in revenue kicking off thirty million dollars in cash, which is very counterintuitive to what we see today. Very profitable before we took any outside funding.”

“First of all, if you don't own the academic market or you're not indoctrinating academics with the product, it's going to be very difficult because they're leading.”

“I can't stand when you go visit a website and something pops up. Hey, how was your experience? It's like, leave me alone. I just got here. This is the worst user experience of all time. Right? And everyone's like, well, no, this is statistically significant. I…”