The Exchanges

Q there. So by the way, coming up, I want to talk more about a new product. You released the XM platform. Uh, you've been pretty public about, Hey, we just raised capital. We're thinking about going public. We'll talk about that later, but take us back and give us some of the backstory here. 2002. Your dad's at Brigham Young. You have obviously family involved. Why'd you launch the company?

A We, we had this goal of being able to collect data online and, and run real time analytics on it. And it was, it was interesting. It was a time where no one was interested in doing this. Um, I specifically remember the only people that would listen were our academic market. So we started only targeting academics, which is a horrible business model because they have no money and they're extremely demanding and they can sit in and play with your product all day long with nowhere to go. And, you know, What was great was we, we catered to them and we ended up building an enterprise level platform with thousands and thousands of features and functionality, um, which cascaded, um, as people graduated college right into the enterprise and enterprise folks started to say, Hey, wait a minute. Um, I can actually understand what our customers want. I don't need to guess anymore and I can get it in real time. And, you know, we wake up in 2011 after a bunch of hard work with 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 work really hard to get operational data, which is our financial data and other data, but we're most surprised with our experienced data, which is kind of what we don't know. And, you know, only the last couple of years has technology been in a spot…

AI assessment note: “We had this goal of being able to collect data online and, and run real time analytics”

Q very effective to use a hard LOI in terms of someone wanting to buy you for five hundred million. Using that as significant leverage against a VC wanting to invest to make sure you minimize dilution and keep your, you know, your employees that have equity, like not as diluted and basically create competition there. How were you able to effectively do that? Would you recommend that as a strategy?

A Look, 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, we, we didn't even really meet when we had seven term sheets and an offer to sell the company. We're at a different time now, so I think it's hard to compare. Um, for some people, I think that's a great strategy, but ultimately, these are your partners. I mean, you want to choose people you want to go to battle with, and who care about the business as much as you do, and I really think that's what is missing from a lot of the VC and Tech company relationships is they just don't treat it as an extension of the team and the partner and get the whole weight of the firm behind it. And I think if you did that, I think you would have probably a lot more, um, success or a little bit more of a better relationship where, you know, it's not an us versus them. That's a really weird thing. You know, you're starting a company to be an entrepreneur. You get to write your own story and then you're signing up for a relationship where it's an us versus them. And basically you do have a boss if you're not structuring it right. Or actually you want to partner. And that's when you look back and you say, Hey, well, what an amazing ride. And I, I feel like I truly have that with my board, my VCs and, and because of maybe some of the leverage, if you …

AI assessment note: “for some people, I think that's a great strategy, but ultimately, these are your partners”

Q Yep. Let's talk real quick products for a couple of minutes before we wrap up. So what is the XM platform and how do you see your roadmap going more towards kind of Salesforce workday space?

A Yeah. So if I think you think about it historically, if you go into an organization, you've got one product, if they're even doing anything to handle their NPS and understand all of their customers and close the loop and, and mine all the texts to say, Hey, look, while we're sleeping, we're providing an experience. Is it going well? You, you don't need to look further than the airlines or other things like that, where we believe that, especially as we're seeing with Amazon and other companies, all we're going to be competing on in the future likely is going to be experience. The experience someone has, because we all have smart developers and a lot of money right now, right? So it's the experience that's going to separate it, but we're not good at listening to that. So that's one key of the platform is around the customer experience. The next key is around the employee experience. You know, if I look at every CEO, every CEO you interview, half the time they're spending is basically on the internal side of their employee and recruiting, and it's getting very, very difficult. They don't understand why they're winning or losing. And there's a gap. There's a gap on both sides. Historically, those have been two separate platforms where in, in, in no one's really happy with one or the other. We've said, Hey, wait a minute. You could actually combine those onto one platform. And now w…

AI assessment note: “one key of the platform is around the customer experience. The next key is”

Q Yep. All right. Give us the back. So for people that don't know your product set, what do you do and what's your general business model? How do you make money?

A Yeah, we, we have an experience management platform and we view that everything and where the world's going is around the experience economy. We care about experiences. We, we behave with experiences in mind, our habits around experiences, but companies historically are really bad at understanding experiences, not from their employees, from their customers and the market. So a lot of times they'll be surprised when employee leaves and they don't understand, you know, the experience gap. They thought they were providing something to the employee, but they weren't. Or when the customers leave, everyone was trying to create a good experience. So we've created a platform where people can actually listen to Their customers and their employees in the market in real time and have all that data being managed, um, in one, one location. And that's, uh, the, the experience management platform. We believe every organization we're seeing it is going to have, uh, an experience management platform the same way they have a CRM. And, um, it's a different kind of data. It's a new data. It's, it's, it's, it's data that they're creating on their own, not data that they're just getting sent to them. Which is pretty cool.

AI assessment note: “we've created a platform where people can actually listen to Their customers”