Qualtrics

“If we would have had capital, we would have never gone after the academic market.”

“There's this whole rationale of fundraising and marketing that you're going out there so people will know who you are. They're not gonna know who you are. So just go build a good business.”

“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.”

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

“We actually learned to develop great products in that phase because, you know, if you've got to develop a product where a PhD or researcher calls in, Imagine the support system you've got to have on the other side to support Dan Ariely, who is a behavioral eco…”

“We raised at four hundred million dollars, three hundred fifty million dollars with Sequoia and Excel.”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“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…”

“And I think Excel and Sequoia totally shorted our TAM.”

“Brand and marketing are different where I see a lot of companies raising around and plugging their cap table into the marketing engine. Yeah, which is like, okay, that campaign was worth five percent of your company. When's that ever been effective?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

“If we would have just bought our way through, I don't think we would have had that confidence or DNA to pivot the whole company and create this new category of experience management, which is really what SAP wanted.”

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

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

“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 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 …”

“Qualtrics went public, and also before they went public, they sold to SAP for eight billion dollars, and, you know, when they, when you look at their S-one they were about to go public before they got bought. They actually had a third of the revenue was servic…”

“Somewhere between 10 and twenty million in revenue, depending on your sales motion, the models converge. The models converge. So, if you have twenty million in revenue and you're bootstrapped, and you're willing to spend all 20, right, you can basically hire a…”

“Viva went public, which is at thirty billion. 7030. Qualtrics was like 8020.”

“VCs love bootstrap companies. If you talk to Excel partners, one of the top VCs at all times, they'll say our favorite investments were Atlassian, right, which I think they bought 20% of, bootstrapped. Qualtrics, bootstrapped, on and on. Why do VCs like bootst…”