The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 10 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Smith: Acquirers will not move without a compelling event like an IPO
“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…”
Smith: SAP will pause M&A after $8B Qualtrics deal
“SAP's not buying anything for a while. We took all their powder.”
Smith: Venture funding would have prevented Qualtrics from pivoting to XM
“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.”
Ryan Smith: Qualtrics was fully committed to an IPO, not dual-tracking
“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.”
Ryan Smith: Only $30M of $8B acquisition went to former employees
“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.”
Dholakia: Accenture made $3 for every $1 of SAP software sold
“Accenture made three dollars for every dollar that SAP sold in software because there was so much to do around change management.”
Nottebohm: Top-down sales drove most software companies to $5B revenue
“By the way, this is how SAP and Salesforce made it all the way up and over to the five billion mark, and if you remember that list, the majority of the companies who got to five billion actually got there this way.”
Smith: Qualtrics grew 47% to $500M in sales prior to SAP deal
“I mean, we grew up 47% last year, five hundred million in sales.”
Ryan Smith: Qualtrics staff will earn more post-acquisition than prior 17 years
“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.”
Qualtrics had one-third services revenue in its $8B SAP acquisition
“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…”