Build a Unicorn the Right Way with Qualtrics

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] So I want to welcome Ryan, one of my— a founder's founder. Been running Qualtrics since out of his father's basement for 16 years. Crazy story. I met Ryan— a good friend of ours, Lloyd Lobo, does a Traction conference mostly in Vancouver and San Francisco. But like 2 and a half years, he asked me to moderate Ryan. I only knew a little bit about the company. I think it was just after you'd raised a unicorn round, but we'll talk more about it. You'd never raised a dollar in primary capital before that, right? And it was fascinating. I chatted with Ryan. It was one of our most— even though it wasn't really our content, it was one of our most popular videos, and it was one of the most authentic founder conversations on building teams, scaling teams, going upmarket, moving verticals from education to corporate, tough learnings on scaling outside of the Bay Area. So I couldn't be happier that Ryan's back. To tell us what he's learned, and a lot's happened since back then he was only worth $1 billion. Now apparently they're worth $2.5 billion, so an up round it sounds like. Excel, Sequoia, who else is left?

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Now what about SoftBank?

Have they been knocking at your door yet? Would you take $10 billion from SoftBank, or do you think that would muck up the IPO? What are you thinking about that?

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] I have good friends over there. They seem to be doing some interesting things.

Interesting things.

I think what'll be more interesting is how many people, other firms, try to go raise a SoftBank type round.

Well, so I added $8 billion. Yeah, right, right. It can easily top you up for that.

We're gonna see a little craziness, or either that, or they know something we don't know and they're gearing up for a cold, cold winter.

Yes. Well, let's talk about— I think the interesting thing about SoftBank is they have a 30-year investment horizon, so you're, you're only halfway there on Qualtrics, right? So you, you could be a short-term liquidity event for them. Um, so I'm worth $2.5 billion, started in a basement, I want to get a couple other fun things in. Repeatedly Fortune 40 Under 40. It's a little late for me, but it's pretty cool. 35 Under 35 Top CEOs. You got a lot of these awards to keep. Are they all in the office on some sort of a news cycle?

I don't even know where they come from.

You don't know where they come from? Got a couple of cool things going, which we're gonna dig in more. Silicon Slopes, which is a Utah tech conference, in 3 years has gotten to 14,000 people. Pretty cool. A couple celebrities and stuff showed up this year that I saw on Twitter.

We had 14,000 people in Utah. I think it's gonna rival South by Southwest. It's the first week of the Sunday. Sundance Film Festival, so you can come out, watch movies, ski, and I think there's something magical going on in Utah.

[Speaker] It's pretty cool. Yeah, we're gonna talk about Utah on a lot of levels soon, and even things that have changed maybe in the last 24 months in Utah, right? And then Cloud 100, Byron Dieter does the Cloud 100, we're gonna do it again as our last session on Thursday. Number 6 on the Cloud 100 with a bullet. We're looking for number 3 this year, we're going up, but basically best privately, all the great things, but I think in many ways, Ryan's done it maybe not the hardest way, but the hard way, from literally from the basement, founded the company in 2002 when we were still just trying to get these browsers to still work, let alone mobile. A lot has changed, which I want to talk about. But first, talk about what Qualtrics does today as much as you want, and then give us a hint of how it's changed over the years.

Yeah, so we're an experience management platform, and we manage— we built a software that manages the experiences of business, and we believe there's 4 key experiences to manage. There's the product, and you've gotta be at home, and you gotta understand everything that's happening from a product experience standpoint. The customer, which every, most people know. They're doing MPS or something like that. If you're not, jump on Qualtrics. Today, get it done today.

The employee, yeah.

The employee experience, which is in a whole new echelon where we're seeing massive gaps between what organizations think they're providing to employees and what's really happening, and then the brand. which kind of catches all of it, and the brand either goes up or down. And to give you a great example, like, we launched this new category of experience management where those aren't 4 different groups within a company, it's all one last year, which was a huge undertaking, a lot of development. And, you know, a couple months later there was an airline that oversold a flight, so it was a bad product experience. Someone went, an employee let them on the plane, probably the employee had been taking a lot of those all day long. Customer gets ripped off the plane, brand goes down by $2 billion. And so the fact that they're now, it's very visible to see that it's one experience. We're reading a lot about these experience gaps is what we call them. So historically technology's built to line up around operational data and tell you what's going on. But what you always read about and what you always see in the media and where people are surprised is around X data, which is experience data, which the operational data is not telling you. We're seeing a lot of members of boards say, okay, great, here's all your operational financial data and everything that's coming to you, but what about the rest of it? Where are the leading indicators? What are the customers saying? And that was very apparent when we raised our rounds. It was like, okay, here's all your financial, everything's high to the right. Now for the fun part. Let's talk to your customers.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yeah.

[Speaker:BRAD STONE] And they're like, whoa. And then they found out all this stuff that we didn't know. And we're like, was that good or bad? And that was where the kind of the aha moment came is like, are we really as good as we think we are? And fortunately enough, they still wrote a check.

So in 2018, what's the typical— I mean, typical is a tough word. What's the typical Qualtrics customer rough deal size? And with these, with this broad set of capabilities, what's, what's a logo customer doing with Qualtrics today?

Yeah. So they'll either start, they'll either start with the employee or the customer. I mean, we have 160,000 NPS studies running on Qualtrics right now. And like, if I think about like JetBlue Airlines, JetBlue came in, and they actually did their employee engagement and their employee NPS on Qualtrics.

Can we just stop for a minute? So JetBlue came in. Why did they pick you? Why did they find you? What were they— how did they know to find Qualtrics?

Well, I think that they saw—

What were they looking for? Yeah, yeah.

So historically—

What was broken in their existing software stack?

If you actually go back, the experience management side of things used to be outsourced. So it used to be something that you would pay consultants to do if you were good. I think companies woke up and said, "Hey, look, we have to control our experiences. There's things we can outsource. Experiences is not one. We have to be home." JetBlue, in their case, they started using us on the employee side saying, "Hey, look, if we can lower employee attrition or at least know what things we're doing for our employees are resonating, we're going to win." They want a finger on the pulse at all times there. Then they got all the data in Qualtrics and said, "Wow, we can have this core competency internally." Like our team can be better than everyone else in the industry at this. And then they had an option to come up and say, hey, look, we need help on the customer side. They said, hey, we can either use two systems or what if we could put it all on Qualtrics? And what if our employee experience is tied to the customer experience? Well, if you actually take a step back, most of the time when we have a bad experience or a good experience with a brand, there's a human involved. Yeah, right. And so if the employees are happy at an airline, Obviously, the customers are gonna see that. If employee's mad, I don't care how great the plane or the trip is, if someone tells me to sit down or won't help me with my bag, I'm gonna remember that. And so those are tied together, and then they started using us on the product and brand, and it's like, whoa, all this data's in one spot. Now it gets really cool because we just launched IQ, which was all of our machine learning and natural language processing, so we can take all of the data who, that's in Qualtrics and predicting what's going to happen and start showing key drivers and stuff like that. So it's pretty cool.

So let me ask a related question. I have done a bunch of CIO-type sessions, but I hadn't done it in a while. And a theme I'm hearing more is there's so much vendor fatigue that we're almost going back to suites. We want— if Qualtrics can give us 4 offerings, I know you're benefiting from that as you've expanded a bit. Do you see this fatigue where folks that can provide multiple solutions If I have a trusted vendor like Qualtrics, I don't want to go out and find 4 things. I want to buy more for you. Is that—

is that—

you're seeing that too?

It's an absolute real thing. I mean, we were just dealing with one where the CEO was running some employee 360s and engagement, and someone else was running their MPS. And we went in and said, hey, we could put this together. Now, the trick is you can't raise your hand and say, hey, we want to be a suite. Everyone sees through that. You've got to have the number one product in every market. And so at Qualtrics, one of our lessons is We will not go into a market unless we think we can be number one. Because there's probably 20 products that we can go into that we could say, hey, look, look at our resources, we got a ton of cash, got a great go-to-market engine, but we've gotta be able to win. We don't wanna run into a market and then we say, oh, whoa, there's Slack. Right? We wanna make sure that we can actually win in that market. And typically what's interesting is we're normally going into a market that was historically outsourced. It was extremely painful, and the need to have that internal competency is a competitive advantage. That's the cool part. We did this in 2002. We built this survey platform, and our investors are like, "Ah, there's not enough space. I don't know, $300 million." TAM's too small. "$300 million valuation's probably all we can think about this." Those are funny conversations when I remind them how wrong they were. It feels a little good to remind him of that. A little bit, yeah.

Even after all these years, that kind of reminds me of Jason.

If you look at it, everything was research. All data analytics, everything was called research back then. And then all these buzzwords came out, and we always said it was like lipstick on a pig. It's actually research. And everything was handled within the research department over the next 8 years. Anything in marketing, every marketing team had a research team. Our job was to convince organizations not to outsource the research, which was like a $30 billion business, to make it internal, to stand up that team.

Yes.

Get them really good at it. Well, now only 10% of research is even done within that team. It's even gone further. Every department has these statisticians. Everyone's playing Moneyball. Everyone's looking at data. It's becoming a currency. It's actually played into the larger trend. When we go into a new market like employee engagement and 360, we're looking at it and going, "Hey, wow, the employee experience, it looks very much like 2002. We've seen how this movie ends. Let's go." We look at customer experience. Everyone's outsourcing everything. They're not good at NPS. We said, "Hey, how do we make this easy and how do we do what we did for research to customer experience?" And then what if we could put it all together and have a combination of all that data in one?

Let me ask you a slight off point related to it. And if you're deep in them as a customer, take a pass. But what should Wells Fargo do now in the customer experience? What should they do? Do you know? Are they deep? Should we move on to the next topic?

No, we're working. We're working.

I just found out they opened 3 accounts in my name. I've got a car that I didn't buy, a credit card I didn't know. But it's interesting as a case study, right? Because their NPS for me just dropped. What's the lowest NPS can be? Can it be negative 100? Where does it go? And, but what can they do to improve?

Yeah, and we've seen this. And I mean, life's long.

Life is long, right?

And the customer journey is long. But I think the key is, is first they need to measure exactly what the impact is and then figure out how to work their way out of it. And they better be very, very close to close to the customer to realize, hey, who's in a point like you, or actually who's okay, and then keep building out of it. But to sit back and, if they're sitting back in headquarters going, hey, this thing just happened. How do we, getting everyone's ideas? No, they're gonna have to get really close to the customer, really close to the customer. And we've seen companies kinda go through this phase. We've seen it all the time. Airlines are classic for it. And you see them pull their way out.

It's very visceral, right? That customer experience with visceral airplanes and cars and motorcycles.

And when there's a disaster, it should be an incredible opportunity to circle the wagons and have a rallying cry if you're a brand.

Yeah. So I want to talk about creating a category that we were chatting about before, but let me ask a 2018 question and then let's roll back in time. Today, at least publicly, you've said you're at north of $250 million ARR, whatever it is, it's pretty good, right? We don't need to know the specifics for today unless you think it's fun to talk about it. Thank you. But it's pretty good. How much today roughly, how much of your growth, and you got big numbers to hit, right? These next year are like, you're gonna add more revenue next year than like a third of this room collectively, and that's a lot of work. How much comes from the base? Whether it's upsell, retention, or even just brand, second order revenue referral, how much of the next 12 months comes from all the hard work of the last 15 years versus new stuff you gotta go find.

Well, so, you know, if you actually take a step back, it's like you're building a unicorn every quarter, which is kind of daunting.

It is daunting.

Right? When we first started, I remember I was sitting in the basement. We had about 20 employees, which was kind of a cluster on trying to figure out how all that worked. But we had our renewal business and we had our new business. And the way that we got—

Even back in the early days.

Even back in the early days. And we used to— And that's one of the reasons of your success. I used to say, hey, the renewal business is, or actually at the time, we'd say, hey, all of the growth is gonna come from the new business and the renewal business needs to pay the bills. So everything we wanna spend, the current bills, and then everything we're gonna invest forward needs to come from the new business. And I think that that is a decision you make. It would be real easy right now to be sitting back and saying, hey, we kick off cash, we're a high-growth company, Actually, things are going really well. But that's not how we think. We're so hell-bent on seeing what Qualtrics looks like at $1 billion in revenue. When we were in the basement, we used to sit there and say, "Oh my gosh, I cannot wait until the day where people know who we are." How many of you have used Qualtrics before? Or used us in college? Or heard of us?

Lots of hands.

So we used to dream about the day that we were 2018. We used to dream about having money to go to conferences and doing all these things or having engineers and having designers and having salespeople. But then there's this mentality in Silicon Valley and everywhere else in tech that, oh wait, you're 1,600 employees, you're getting too big. Let's go back to the basement and go do something a little smaller. It sucked. I never want to go back to the basement, right? So, so it's like we have this mentality, it's this weird hamster wheel where it's like, okay, you're going to go and you're going to hit some goals and you're going to become somewhat successful. And then you're going to get there and you're going to be like, nah, you know what? I liked it better when we were grinding and we had no resources and we had nothing. No one knew who we were.

It's awful.

And so we've tried to condition a culture where it's like, hey, We all wanted to be here. We all pushed to get to 2018, but the goal was when we got to 2018, we were gonna turn it up. And so that's how I feel like—

So 2018 was literally a goal in terms of—

Yeah, well like everything that makes up where we're at as a company that you just described. And so I'm sitting here going, whoa, like we're here. We're at this amazing point as a company Let's not screw it up. And I just got done with my last board meeting and I asked the board, I was like, hey, what feedback do you have for me? And they were like, don't eff it up. And I was like, don't eff it up? And it's like, no, that's—

We could have done that on a telephone call.

That's encouraging. That's encouraging because it's like, no, you've got to go. We've got to be running faster. And it's a lot more complicated now with so many different levers to pull. We've gotta be extremely focused on new business, relentless on new business.

Yeah.

And now's the time, and we should have some wind behind ourselves to go get that business. We got a great category, we got a great brand, our product's great, like let's go.

So walk me, then let's talk about creating a category. Walk me through that math 'cause I get a little slow. Maybe it doesn't work at today's scale, but reinvent the money that comes from the, I mean use the money from the customers to keep the lights on, use the new revenue to invest. I'm almost getting it backwards. It's more a construct than a reality. The sales team can't bring in the cash quite fast enough to build the product that you want to have in the future, can they? Or what am I missing?

Yeah, but if you actually look at the bets we're making this year, and we sat down all of our employees, we said, OK, we went through the budgeting cycle, and it's like, OK, the budgets came in at like $30 million higher than we were going to spend. So instead of saying, hey, everyone chop it down, Why don't we say, okay, where's our new— how do we go get new business?

Are you making $30 million in bets this year at your scale?

We'll spend $300 and something million.

No, but in terms of bets, how do you think about bets versus support? How much are you betting this year?

They're all bets. They're all bets. I mean, I think we've got to keep them to be bets, but we're betting a lot. I mean, we've got 250 employees in Dublin. We just opened up— we've got Sydney and Melbourne and Singapore.

Are those bets? Are those bets?

Those are bets.

You're not sure though that they'll be ROI positive yet? You don't know for sure?

No, I mean, we set them up.

You have customers there, right?

Yeah, when we set them up, yeah, we got customers. When we set them up, we'd say, "Hey, look, what's the magic number gonna be in 2 years and 3 years?" And it's like a little startup.

What's the payback for a secondary office?

What's your—

2 years to break even?

2 and a half.

2 and a half?

Most 3 years, and most of them paid back in 15, 18 months.

15, 18 months, yeah.

But then what happens, we're like, "Oh, wow, that's successful. Let's throw more people at it." And that's the quickest way to break something. And so it normally goes up and then kind of stops and then we gotta bring— and everyone thinks like the growth's high end of the right and actually if you look at Qualtrics over the years, we start, we grow, and we hit a ceiling like hard. And then we have to slide over and go up until we hit that next ceiling and you gotta reinvent and then go up again. And at the end it's like, wow, that was high end of the right. But there's no straight lines.

Never, it's a little bit of a bend.

We opened up Dublin, it was slow, it didn't work real well.

What was the goal? To be closer to the European customers?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've got to have— we had to have a European headquarters. One of the first things we did in 2013 when we took venture capital, we said, hey, look, because whatever reason we couldn't, we couldn't— we were bootstrapped, even though we had money, we couldn't, we couldn't get ourselves to write a $200 or $300 million or $300 million check personally out of our own bank accounts to go in there, which is kind of weird. So we said, hey, we're gonna go, we're gonna go big, and we're gonna go I remember standing in front of the Dublin Prime Minister, the Taoiseach, and said, "Hey, look, we're going to announce 50 jobs." And there was 2 of us. And I was at least— I remember sitting back in my hotel room at night and seeing myself on Irish television going, "I'm at least 5% sure we can do this and we just committed all these jobs." And nothing was better than cruising back over there and announcing another 150 jobs. Pretty cool, right? And hitting it and saying, whoa, if you throw that flag out there and you plan it, you're going to get there.

On the— we could spend a lot of time talking about bootstrapping, but you chat about it a lot. But one interesting thing for folks here bootstrapping, how long did it take to get your arms around investing more when you went from bootstrapping to— yeah, the first check was decent, but did it take a year to figure out? Did you go too far the other way? I think folks have trouble switching their mindsets. That $3 million check doesn't seem huge today, but at the time it was stress-inducing, probably hive-inducing at the time.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yeah, so if you think about Qualtrics, we've had like 3 different businesses. We had the business where the model was my father and my brother. My brother had left Google. He ran a third of the world's internet search and was at Google for 7 years. And he came back to work with me, and I said, hey, look. This is like 2009. We're totally bootstrapped. And I'm like, hey, I think there's a multibillion-dollar opportunity here. Let's go raise capital. And he's like, hell no. He's like, I didn't leave Google to come work for a boss.

And I was like—

I was like, you're joking me. Like, we've got this huge opportunity. And we went down this road. And he finally said, hey, look, if you can raise $100 million for 20% of the company or whatever it is, I'll listen.

Yeah.

And, you know, we're sitting there in 2011. I think we'd done like I don't know, $6 million in Q2. And under my math, it would have taken us a year and a half to go get the number that he needed. We rallied. We said, hey, look, this is what we're going after. I think we did $9 million in Q4 of '11. Kicked off about—

That's 50% growth. That's pretty good.

Kicked off about $6 million in cash that quarter. So we were running—

Everyone's jaws are allowed to drop at that when you think about it.

It's all folklore at this point. —And then— It can be done.

You can make money in SaaS, can't you? It is entirely possible to generate positive cash flow in software as a service, isn't it?

No matter what TechCrunch says, it can be done. We're all super resilient. We're all super resilient. And when you're given constraints, most founders will actually hit them. They will rise. The problem is, is when they're not, they're only going to bring what they need. That's why we're founders. So we went out in January of 2012. I had 5 term sheets that all fit his and an offer to sell the company for $500 million. I went back and said, "Well, we better have a discussion now." He said, "All right, if we're raising money, I'm going with Brian Schreier from Sequoia because I worked with him at Google." I was like, "Okay." Then I was pretty close with Ryan Sweeney and the Excel guys. We did a deal, and it was the largest Series A since 2008, and that was back then. Then we had to shift to, okay, we're this bootstrap company, everything is resource constrained, to, hey, actually, how do we flip to another model? How did you do that? It's not always easy. No, you have to really focus on what you care about and what you don't care about. When we were bootstrap, I cared about everything. I was in every single detail. And as you start adding hundreds and hundreds of employees, you've got to say, OK, where are the sacred cows? Because you can't dive deep and focus on everything. And then it gets even worse and more complicated as you go. But you've got to be extremely, extremely comfortable saying, that was a model for then. It's all gone. We did that in the academic market. All we did was academia. And then we said, okay, we're going to corporate. We're going to the enterprise. And totally shifted the model. And I think that's a part, and you start to fall in love with the old way of doing things, or, you know, and it's like a band. You won't listen to the new songs because you're so in love with the old ones. And it's like, no, you've gotta go get to know these new albums and fall in love with those.

[Speaker] It is hard, yeah. So let's go back to category creation. We were talking about it This is year 16 for Qualtrics? Where do you count?

15, 16, where is it? It's my 16th year.

Okay, so you're ready to drive, like to that, some sort of bad analogy I'm not gonna get right. As a category creator, where do you feel like you are in terms of innings of the space? It's hard to create a category.

It's really hard. A lot of timing has to be right. I think everyone once again raises their hand and says, hey, we wanna go create this new category, or we don't compete with anyone. When you hear I don't compete with anyone, you compete with anyone? How do you react as a category creator? You're not on to anything if other people aren't kind of in there. I mean, we've always competed with people. Even when we were in the basement, everyone had raised $40 or $50 million and we were competing head to head with them. So I don't worry about that that much. If we can kind of go from where we did to now, I think it's good. But competition is good. It's really hard to go educate a market and be the first one out. A lot of times you're just setting the table for the next person, right? And so if you're gonna go create a category, you better go win it. And so I think that's the way we think about it. Experience management is a huge category. If you look at our journey to get there from a product standpoint, there's no way that someone would have predicted in 2002 that what we were working on would be XM. There's no way. They're like, "Oh, you guys are smart entrepreneurs. You have great—" Yeah, but we're extremely fortunate, extremely lucky to be in this spot. We're extremely lucky that we didn't do anything to the business that hamstrung us. Let's talk about cap tables. That's one of the things. Half of the competitors that we had that were going along hypergrowth, they all made stupid mistakes with their cap table. That's the problem. They took money. They took money too early. They wanted to be a unicorn. They went out there, they got all the press, they raised a bunch of debt, and then it's like, "Oh, we're growing at 16%, my board won't let me do anything." Okay, wow, see ya. Right? And that's the problem that people make is like to be able to go for a long time, and reality is if you're in enterprise software, it's going to take you a long time. Every single one of my friends, every single unicorn CEO that I know in enterprise software, has, I mean, 8, 9, 10, 12 years. You sign these customers up one by one and you grow with them. There's no shortcuts. How did you—

but when you started, you're in your early 20s or maybe even slightly younger, I don't know, but did you know you could do enterprise software for 20 years?

I didn't even know what enterprise software was.

Yeah, well, you knew you weren't making video games. That was clear, right?

I didn't wake up and say, hey, look, I want to create XM and I want to go be in enterprise software. No, I wanted to play in the NBA. That didn't work out. Then I wanted to play on the PGA Tour and that didn't work out.

How'd you steal yourself for 16 years? As a CEO, as a founder, how do you do it?

It's hard because I have massive ADD and I'm always working on different things, but I think it's the challenge. Here's an interesting story. Earlier this month I got back from Dublin where our head, this person that I opened up Dublin with, just passed away of cancer.

I read that, yeah, sorry about that.

And I think he taught us all a lesson, right? He did. I've never been around someone who's about ready to pass away who was so lucid in the way they were talking. He gave one last YouTube— I should send it to y'all because you will all learn something. He did one last video and a talk to the office, and he said, look— and he'd gone through more chemo than anyone I'd ever heard of. He'd taken more treatment. He would take his treatment, he would come into the office, and we're like, hey, Dermot, You don't have to work anymore. You're good. We got you, man. We got you. We got your family. He's like, no, I need to be here. And he talks about in the Q&A, like, what are you going to miss most? He says, I'm going to miss the party. I'm going to miss the party. And like, I was over at his funeral and I was like, you know, and the next day we had sales kickoff and it was kind of somber. And I was like, whoa, this is the party that that he was gonna miss. So I think that you, you know, people don't really spend a lot of time thinking about the journey that they're on, that that's the party, that's what they're chasing. If you get to be at my spot and say, hey, you know, why are you still going? Why are you waking up for 16 years? This is my last job. I'm not going to work after this. This is it. Sorry, I don't want to go invest. I don't want to go VC. VC, no offense.

No, don't do it. I'm barely investing.

If I could start over right now, I would want to go build Qualtrics. And I would hope that Qualtrics— I could get to the spot where Qualtrics is. So to think that you could start something as a junior in college and that you could keep rolling all the way. But I've already gone through my head on how long I'm going to work. I know I'm going to work till I'm 80. I know it. Every one of my friends who checks out early turns into a total prick. No one wants to be around them. They're retired, no one else is retired. Their family doesn't like them, the wife doesn't like them.

Family definitely doesn't like them, that's for sure. Yeah.

And so if you know you're going to work that long, this is what you're working for. This is the party. This is the journey. Enjoy it. And it's hard. It's hard. And it's gonna be the hardest, especially if you're a CEO or you're an executive, you've gotta be the fastest learners in the building. The fastest. And it's daunting when you get humbled where you're like, I suck. And I'll never forget when I recruited my brother back, you know, he's 4 years older than me, we were close but we weren't that close. We're exact opposites. But he sat down the first day with them and I was like, I said, Jared, like we're working together, we gotta figure out how this is gonna go. And he's like, well, it's pretty simple, Ryan. I'm good at these 5 things and I suck at these 5 things. And I was like, whoa, you suck at stuff? Wow, that's weird. I thought I made a bad decision, but how wrong was I? Like, he just knew what he sucked at. And I've had to learn along the way, like I am horrible at these things. If you don't know what you suck at, you've got a long way to go on the journey. You've got to figure that out quickly and then really enjoy the party. I mean, that's why we're here. We're in SaaS. How fun is that, right? We're in tech. We could be doing a lot of other things if we weren't born at this time. I mean, this is an amazing, amazing ride for the whole tech industry to be on and we're super fortunate.

What are, just two things I want to check out on that. The GM you had, the Irish GM, I did read the piece that the guy with cancer, which is tough. But the flip side of that is obviously you've done some very special things on creating a culture where people feel like they're part of this journey. What are any one or two tips of things that you've done that are not obvious, that have made that enduring? Because that, that's the sign of really building something special, right?

What are, what are some actionable tips? If you take what I just said, and you said, hey, it's about the journey. And this is a journey, and you start asking yourself, why don't we do it now? As opposed to, oh, we're gonna do it when we get to this point. I'll give you a great example. I was in San Francisco, I wasn't too far from here, and the Utah Jazz had, I'm a big NBA fan, the Utah Jazz, who smoked the Warriors the other night, by like 30. That was weird. I just had to throw that out there. But they sent us the jersey with like the Qualtrics logo, 'cause you guys have Rakuten and all these things. And I was here, and Mike Mon and I had just started this cancer research thing with Five for the Fight, where it's like, hey, how do we get everyone in the world to give $5 to cancer? And it all started with John Huntsman Sr., who just passed away this week. And John had borrowed $200 million from the bank and donated it to charity. And the bank's like, you can't borrow money from us and donate it to charity. And I'm sitting here interviewing this guy, hearing telling me this story and I was like, whoa, and then he looks at me and he's like, hey Ryan, I love what you're doing with Qualtronics.

You just gotta smile when you hear that, you just gotta smile.

He's like, I love what you're doing with Qualtronics, but what you're doing for cancer is more important than anything you're doing in tech. And it hit me, and I remember Mike and I were driving out of there going, we went and got a Diet Mountain Dew together and I was like, you know, We gotta do something here. So this jersey patch thing came along and the league sets the price on it. It's not cheap, right? And we said, what if we did it? What if we did it for Five for the Fight? What if we didn't put the Q on it, which is hard for me because I want the Q on everything. And what if we put Five for the Fight on it? And so it felt really hard. And it hurt, and I was like, wait, when it hurts, we're onto something right. And so if you look at the Jazz logo, it says Fight for the Fight. And it's a campaign where everyone can do that. We've raised millions of dollars so far. And all the players are behind it, people in the league, all the GMs are behind it. And it's just one example of, hey, when you feel like you should do something, often you feel like someone's blocking you, you have to ask permission. But reality is no one's there. And I learned this the hard way with my father. I remember screaming at my father one day. I'd go into his office and it was just him and I, and I'd be like, look at our competitors, they've raised all this money, look at their websites, look at this. I was really emotional. And he finally turned to me and he's like, hey Ryan, who's stopping you from like going and changing things? It's just me and you. And I was like, whoa, who is stopping me? In reality, at times we're blocking ourselves. It's a mindset. When you feel frustrated, it's because you're stuck on your own. Likely it's not political. Likely it's because you can't get something done. And I try to explain that to our employees. Like, if you're blocked, it's probably not the organization. It's because something is really hard for you or you suck at it. Yeah, because someone else could be in your shoes. And that 12-hour task my brother Jared could do in 30 minutes. It's true. I wanna, yeah. So that's a mindset that we have to make sure that we instill in the corporation, and then that sets a culture that lets us go create.

Hope I can have that energy for 16 years. We're over. I'm only getting through, I'm not even getting through the first page of stuff I wanna talk about, but I wanna hit one last thing at a minimum that we were chatting about behind, 'cause I haven't heard it talked about much, but I thought about it a lot, which is family. And I had a mentor for me between my two startups, and he said something to me that you might disagree with, but it was a bit haunting, I thought about it. He said, "This is so hard, what we're doing as founders. You're gonna get a lot of support from your family, but after 6 months, you have to let them off the hook. It's so hard to get something off the ground that if they have to take that— if you take that weight home for you every day, It's too much. And what are these trade-offs? How can family come first when we have to do these impossible things? What are the learnings?

How do we do it? This is the hard— like when I get together with my groups of other CEOs, it's the number one thing we talk about. We actually don't talk about anything else. It's like, hey, how are you managing? And a lot of founders don't do it well. To scale one aspect of their life, which isn't interesting to me. Like, you go, you go, and you're so focused on something, and then no one wants to show up at your funeral because you left all these bodies behind you, and you don't have relationship with your kids or anything like that. I have 5 little kids. And I'm gone a lot, and it's always the Ryan show. Right? And so I think that I'm constantly trying to figure out, how you balance that. A lot of it's communication about what's going on. But at the same time, when I get home from work, I don't want to talk about Qualtrics.

No, but does your mind stop? No, mind never stops.

Never.

You're, you're playing with your beautiful kids. Yeah. Does your mind stop thinking about the next release?

You've got it. You've got to, you've got to do an incredible job at managing polar opposite emotions. You've gotta care but not care. You've gotta be up there thinking strategically but be able to shut it off in 2 seconds. You've gotta be extremely emotional and wanna grow at all costs, but you've gotta make money. Right? So as an executive, this is what you have to master, and the people who can master them the best are the ones that do the best. You also need to surround yourself by people who have done that. When I look at my mentors, and I have them all over, I'm only looking at mentors who have scaled every aspect of their life. I could give a rip if they've scaled a tech company at all costs. That's not interesting to me. I want nothing to do with it. Oh great, wow, you're cool. You cashed in 1,000% of your hours to go scale the tech company, but look at you now. It's empty, it's lonely, it's this. I want to do it, I want to try to do it together. That's one of the reasons why we're in Utah. There's not a lot of noise. I don't have dinner appointments there. I go to work and when I come home, I come home. I couldn't imagine, like, I come out here and it's just like, even now I'm like trying to get to the airport and it's like I've got 4 stops on the way to go visit people. It's hard. There's a lot of noise. Yeah, right. And so there's something about being there and being able to focus on the customers and focus on growth. And focus is the hardest part. The other thing is I'm a big fan of doubles and triples. So what I mean by this is like I try to think at the beginning of every week like what are, what do I need to do? And my kids are part of it. Like what do I need to do with my kids? So like I've got to teach my 3-year-old how to ride a bike. But I also have to visit my grandmother because I've been traveling and she's getting old. And I've also got to do dinner. So I'll grab the kids, drive through Wendy's, throw the bike in the car, sit at grandmother's house in the driveway, They'll eat Wendy's while we teach the kid how to ride the bike and it's a triple. Right? And so, or I'll be like, hey—

I gotta learn that skill. I gotta learn that skill.

No, no, but you actually don't think that you can integrate those and do 'em together. And I found that the best moments I've had in scaling and try to do it all is when I bring it all together. I think that it's impossible to think, and by the way, as tech, we are the most inclusive of any industry out there for this type of a thing. I know we get a lot of garbage for not being inclusive. We are extremely inclusive on a lot of fronts. I've never had one meeting where I brought my kids to where someone said, "Oh, what are your kids doing here?" I've never seen someone bring their kids to Qualtrics where someone's been like, "Why are your kids around?" Now they'll say that about the dogs, but not the kids. So I think if you actually think about the world that way, we can do it. We can do it all. And actually, I think the reward for that— and once again, if I'm going to be working until I'm 80, I'm going to do it all. I've got to bring it all together. You've got to find a way. Yeah. And I want— my identity isn't Qualtrics. And everyone's like, oh, there's the Qualtrics guy. No. Hey, that's Jet's dad, or that's Ashley's husband. And I think that's probably what's most important, and it's a constant battle to keep that. The other thing is there's always like one wing of the plane that's down. So if we've got our big summit coming up, or I've got a board meeting, or heaven knows what's coming at the end of the year, like you start looking at things The Qualtrics wing's gonna be down and probably the family wing's not gonna get that much of attention. Well, then I better figure out how I'm gonna balance that back out. It's not this smooth—

It can't both be down, can it? No, no.

You can't survive with both of them down. But it's never flat.

That is a good— It is never flat.

Balance is not this way. Something's always down. Then all my kids are sick and then that's down. Oh, yeah. And I'm like running. So you're playing whack-a-mole. You just gotta get really good at it. Everyone's like, "I'm getting out of this right now." No, you gotta find a way if you're gonna do it 17, 20 years. You gotta find a way. When it comes back to category creation, you created a phenomenal category when you sold your company to Adobe, and I think you're seeing how long that's taken to actually happen. I'm watching those commercials. Takes a long time. I'm watching those commercials with the Adobe sign and saying, "Hey, wow, here's a 10-year play." It's happened.

Yeah, you gotta go long. Anyhow, we're over. I only got halfway, but let's give a big hand for Ryan Smith. This is really great.