Smith: Major tech incumbents are currently out-executing agile startups
Ryan Smith · 931 Qualtrics "Well Past" $250m in ARR, When Will The Go Public? · Feb 10, 2018 · at 26:03
Ryan Smith, co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics, discusses how modern enterprise and consumer tech giants sustain execution speed at unprecedented scale.
0:00 / 0:26exact quote · 26.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 heyday where you have Facebook, Google, Apple Amazon executing at a level that, you know, typically those, that's when you would become slower and you wouldn't get things done. Salesforce is included in that.”
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: 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…”
Smith: Qualtrics has already surpassed $250M in ARR
“I think we already have.
Good.
I asked that question very specifically.
What I found is if I underestimate a little, a founder feels much more comfortable going, we just broke that versus.
We're good.
That's in the rear of your view mirror.”
Smith: Qualtrics had 160,000 NPS studies running by 2012
“And, you know, we wake up in 2011 after a bunch of hard work with
[309] Ryan Smith: 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.”