StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Ryan Smith

Executive Chairman & Co-Founder, Qualtrics · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestor@RyanQualtrics ↗LinkedIn ↗qualtrics.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Ryan Smith is the co-founder and executive chairman of Qualtrics, which he bootstrapped and later sold to SAP for $8 billion. He also serves as chairman and CEO of Smith Entertainment Group, through which he owns the Utah Jazz.

12statements → 5claims → 0claims resolved → 4.5/5average certainty → 1.83/5average debate potential → 3said about them ↓

5 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 assertions · 1 opinion · 3 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Ryan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

250 words/min while actually speaking · 15 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Ryan Smith: only 1 usable question→answer exchange on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,998 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Ryan Smith said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Disclosure
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 Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 4:05 Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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 Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 5:58 Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Insight
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.”
Ryan Smith Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 9:07 Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Opinion
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…”
Ryan Smith Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 24:21 Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
Ryan Smith: Qualtrics powers user feedback for Healthcare.gov
“We're powering all the feedback right now for healthcare.gov, right?”
Ryan Smith Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 14:59 Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Insight
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 Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 18:15 Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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 Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 19:26 Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Insight
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 Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 22:33 Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
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.”
Ryan Smith Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 31:37 Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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 Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 6:24 Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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 Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 11:52 Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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”
Ryan Smith Apr 2, 2015 ▶ 29:40 Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)

The other half of the tape: Ryan Smith's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 1 episode on the MAD Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Matt Turck 3

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0021312016episodesmentions
0112016episodes it came up in
001.50.5312016episodesmentions per episode
2016 3 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Ryan Smith, Qualtrics // The Qualtrics Story // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital) Apr 2, 2015 24m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 400 conversations transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more