Apr 2, 2015 · 33m · mad
Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
At a Data Driven NYC event, Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith discusses how the company bootstrapped from a Utah basement into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise by leveraging grassroots academic adoption, bottom-up enterprise expansion, and rapid data collection across customer and employee experience management.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Matt holds 12.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Matt as informed peer 2.3 Guest teaching 2.7 Guest disagreement 1.1 Matt pushing back 0.9
speaking balance: gold is Matt, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 23:45 Rejection of intrusive survey popups
Ryan forcefully rejects bad survey practices, calling immediate popup feedback prompts the 'worst user experience of all time' and dismissing statistical significance claims.
Hardest push from Matt ▶ 4:49 Challenging academic beachhead strategyMatt directly challenges Ryan's strategy, pointing out that the academic market is notorious for having no money and being exceptionally hard to sell to.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 7:29 Reframing enterprise software purchasingRyan reframes Matt's question about traditional CIO sales, educating the audience on how modern software buying relies on bottom-up employee champions rather than top-down executive mandates.
Matt holds his own ▶ 13:49 Demonstrating research knowledge on fast dataMatt demonstrates preparation and domain understanding by referencing Ryan's specific quote contrasting fast data with big data and asking for concrete execution timelines.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Matt as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Matt pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Founding Qualtrics and Bootstrapping in Utah | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Matt opens with detailed background stats on Qualtrics' valuation, funding, and survey volume, though Ryan gently corrects his survey count numbers. Matt then asks Ryan to share the company's origin story from Provo, Utah. | |
| Grassroots Academic Growth to Enterprise Adoption | 3 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Matt challenges the premise of using the academic market as an initial strategy, noting academics are notoriously difficult to sell to. Ryan explains how student users eventually carried the product into enterprise roles at companies like Heineken and Expedia. | |
| The Shift in Enterprise Software Buying | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Matt asks if Qualtrics used a land-and-expand sales model targeting CIOs. Ryan reframes the discussion, arguing that top-down enterprise software purchasing is becoming obsolete in favor of employee-driven adoption. | |
| Core Use Cases: Customer, Employee, and Market Insights | 4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Matt probes customer retention tactics and data network effects. Ryan pivots to outline Qualtrics' three main use cases: customer experience, employee feedback, and market research. | |
| Fast Data vs. Big Data and Practical Applications | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Matt references Ryan's past quote about 'fast data vs big data' to ask about speed of implementation. Ryan expands with real-world examples ranging from healthcare.gov to viral research on 'the dress'. | |
| Mobile Strategy and Cross-Device Optimization | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Matt asks about mobile as a data collection tool. Ryan explains why building a standalone mobile app was foolish and details how cross-device dynamic formatting and mobile spell-checking solved the issue. | |
| Audience Q&A: Collecting Offline Feedback in Remote Locations | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Matt facilitates questions from Twitter/Meerkat and the room regarding offline data collection and third-party integrations like Tableau. | |
| Audience Q&A: Combating Survey Fatigue with Intelligent Intercepts | 0 | 3 | 1 | 0 | An audience member asks about survey fatigue and annoying consumers. Ryan agrees strongly with the frustration regarding poorly timed popups and details Qualtrics' Site Intercept feature. | |
| Audience Q&A: Recruiting Jared Smith from Google to Scale Qualtrics | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | An audience member asks how Ryan recruited his brother Jared from Google. Ryan commends the questioner's research and describes Jared's technical impact as a product leader. | |
| Audience Q&A: Maintaining Product Discipline and Event Conclusion | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 | A Carnegie Mellon graduate asks how Qualtrics avoids product bloat while expanding feature sets. Ryan explains their hardline philosophy on code discipline and modular extensions before Matt wraps up. |
Statements from this episode (12)
Ryan Smith: Qualtrics hit $50M revenue and $30M cash flow before raising capital
“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.”
Ryan Smith: Qualtrics business quadrupled during the 2007–2009 recession
“In about 2007, 2008, 2009, when the economy went this way, our business quadrupled.”
Ryan Smith: Qualtrics grew to one million academic users
“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”
Ryan Smith: Enterprise software startups must win academics to drive adoption
“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.”
Qualtrics has 138,000 active projects tracking Net Promoter Scores
“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.”
Ryan Smith: Qualtrics powers user feedback for Healthcare.gov
“We're powering all the feedback right now for healthcare.gov, right?”
Ryan Smith: Surveys are fundamentally forms with workflows around them
“That's surveys, it's just a form with a workflow around it”
Ryan Smith: Mobile survey respondents answer significantly differently than PC users
“The mobile respondents feel totally different than the people taking it through, you know, their PC.”
Ryan Smith: Corporate research data needs to live longer in one place
“Typically research has had a really short shelf life, and we think for as much as organizations are spending on this, that data needs to live a lot longer, and part of that is to get in one simple spot in the right language for people to use.”
Ryan Smith calls immediate pop-up website surveys the worst user experience
“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…”
Deep Nishar called Qualtrics co-founder Jared Smith his best hire ever
“Deep just flat out says he's the best hire he's ever made”
Smith: Qualtrics turned down early revenue to avoid building non-scalable custom features
“One of the early disciplines we had is that if we can't hard code it, and it can't be point and click functionality, we're not going to develop it. And we had to turn down a lot of revenue which is part of the bootstrapping.”