The Ledger, every show

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

“SAP's not buying anything for a while. We took all their powder.”

“We didn't give away stock till 2012.”

“It's just not a good business model, but if you look at it now, every single academic higher ed institution in the world uses Qualtrics.”

“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.”

“For the first 10 years we didn't do one media interview and we got to fifty million in sales. Think about that. Right? Not, not one media interview, not one press release.”

“We've had two of our competitors sunset all of their technology and move everything over to Qualtrics”

“There's eight billion dollars, and only Thirty million dollars of it went to people who weren't in the building at the time of the transaction.”

“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…”

“We started with the worst economically driven customer base that you could in academics, but we have every single major university in the world on Qualtrics, and the value came when their students graduated and went to Expedia or went to You know, Heineken and…”

“We have a million academic users that are popping out annually, and throughout the course of time, everyone's getting trained on our product and our platform.”

“In about 2007, 2008, 2009, when the economy went this way, our business quadrupled.”

“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?”

“We've taken this money from Excel, this is the largest Series A raised in 2000, in 12, since 2008, in all of tech, it's outside of the Bay Area”

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

“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?”

“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.”

“We had 20% of our employees come in and be like, hey, I didn't sign up for this.”

“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.”

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

“I mean, we grew up 47% last year, five hundred million in sales.”

“Outside of about six or seven people, every single person in the company will make more money over the next five years than they did the prior 17.”

“And a 122% net retention, and then the enterprise, it's a 140. That, that means that you've got a solid foundation, a solid engine, where people are living and it's mission critical to them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And it was the largest series a or first time investment since 2008.”

“The mobile respondents feel totally different than the people taking it through, you know, their PC.”

“And he had been assigned to go run China for Google. So he was living in Beijing. He was working with Kai-Fu Lee and like running Google China.”

“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.”

“He started working at WordPerfect as a product guy at 16, and he had to, you know, he had to figure it out. Like, he was a whiz kid. He was managing a team of eight executives at 18 years old”

“Yeah, it went from a hundred percent of the business to 10% of one.”

“Sears was in bankruptcy and in Kmart, they were all using Qualtrics even up to the last couple days, and I was like, wow, this is phenomenal.”

“And, you know, we wake up in 2011 after a bunch of hard work with [309] Ryan Smith: You know, 2012 with 160,000 net promoter studies or NPS studies running on Qualtrics and people being able to metric and kind of power their business of experienced data.”

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

“When someone rolls into the valley in 2011 with a pretty high run rate kicking off that kind of cash, you don't need leverage, right? I mean, we didn't even really meet when we had seven term sheets and an offer to sell the company.”

“We power all the feedback for healthcare.gov and, you know, thousands of brands.”

“We, we've been cashflow positive from the beginning”

“Currently we power nine different airlines. We power all the feedback for healthcare.gov. And, you know, we have 160,000 net promoter score studied NPS studies running on Qualtrics.”

“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”

“Now where we have a million academic users out there coming out, you know, with a portion coming out every single year and taking Qualtrics with them”

“So we have a 138,000 different projects going on right now on Qualtrics around net promoter score and how likely someone is to recommend.”

“Deep just flat out says he's the best hire he's ever made”

“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.”