Smith: Qualtrics had seven term sheets and an acquisition offer in 2011
Ryan Smith · 931 Qualtrics "Well Past" $250m in ARR, When Will The Go Public? · Feb 10, 2018 · at 16:39
Ryan Smith, co-founder of Qualtrics, describes fundraising in Silicon Valley as a profitable, high-growth bootstrapped company with a buyout offer on the table.
0:00 / 0:14exact quote · 14.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 didn't even really meet when we had seven term sheets and an offer to sell the company.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ryan Smith
Smith: Qualtrics is and has always been cash-flow positive
“Makeup that we have at Qualtrics where we're cashflow positive.
We've always been, it was really nice to be able to say, Hey here's an opportunity to have some liquidity and, you know, kind of get acclimated a little bit to what life is going to be like for a…”
Smith: Qualtrics left $100M valuation on table during Series A
“I mean, in our series A, we raised, you know, seventy million dollars.
We took, we left a hundred million extra valuation on the table from a credible party because we care about, you know, who we're going to battle with, and I think that's what we've always …”
Smith: Seeding universities as early customers drove massive enterprise sales
“We started with the worst economically driven customer base that you could in academics, but we have every single major university in the world on Qualtrics, and the value came when their students graduated and went to Expedia or went to You know, Heineken and…”
Smith: Major tech incumbents are currently out-executing agile startups
“What's happening in tech is you're watching for the first time ever the biggest companies execute better than the smaller companies in a lot of different ways with Amazon and everything else where we haven't seen this kind of juice since probably the Microsoft…”
Smith: Qualtrics has 9,000 brand customers paying up to $6M annually
“Yeah, paying customers, and these are brands. These are, I mean, we have a lot more customers in the brands, but they, you know, if you look at 9000, then you look at, you know, they're paying anywhere from 12,000 all the way up to,
You know, five, six millio…”