Qualtrics co-founder and CEO Ryan Smith discusses the company's financial discipline and pre-IPO secondary liquidity.
Disclosure
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 …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Supported
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…”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”