From Basement to Billions - How Qualtrics Did It

I think founders and tech folks sometimes think that, all right, I've got this great product, I got a bunch of users, I'm going to go into the enterprise, some head of sales is going to come in and take me through there, and this person on this white horse is just going to go get all of this. And it doesn't work that way. If anyone's starting a company or they're starting to get into some of these problems, if you can't sell this yourself, probably no one else is going to be able to. If I can't walk in and grab your budget as a CEO, you even if I'm not technical or salesy, that's not an excuse because no one else is going to be able to do that. I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

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In the room will know of Qualtrics and it's a huge success, but it's not a consumer brand like Dropbox or something. So tell us a little bit about the company, when you got started, how many employees you have today, where they're distributed, that kind of stuff.

So cool. First, thanks for having me. This is great. It worked out well. I was in the city, so Qualtrics is something we started when I was a junior in college. I was in the basement of my parents house and we stayed there for five years. Our goal was to make sophisticated research simple. So my father's an academic scientist, he's a professor and he was always fiddling around with technology and we said, hey, look, could we develop a technology for research with a survey based platform that we could launch to the world of academia? And he said, cool, let's go do this. I'll partner with you. I have no money to pay you, but no venture capital. So that's the only rule. So we stayed in the base.

Did dads have scar tissue on venture capital or.

Yeah, yeah, he had a little bit in the past being an academic and they're great folks, but they're a little, they think a little differently about the world. So it was great. We targeted the academic world. We signed up 250 universities to start with and we thought, hey, if we got every business school in the country using Qualtrics, then maybe the faculty would share with their students and hopefully someday that would carry on out into the corporate and the enterprise. What we didn't know at the time was that would actually be like the entire go to market model for Qualtrics because you can't really predict virality, but it actually started happening. So someone would leave Kellogg and go use us at Heineken or in this model. So that was a great model. And then about 2007, 2008, the downturn of the economy as a bootstrap company, we were in a basement making $100,000 a month.

And my father how many companies do you have? How many employees do you have?

We had about 25 people.

25 all in dad's Facebook.

Yeah, dad's Facebook. He didn't think we should move out.

So you're doing a millionaire 100k a month.

And we were profitable. It was great because we had to be profitable from the beginning. Eat what you kill. Which isn't very popular right now. He took a Fulbright to Moldova and he was a Fulbright scholar and was teaching. And so the second he left, I just moved out of the basement, said we're gonna go scale this thing. And when he gets back in 18 months, it's either gonna be good. And then the downturn of the economy happened and our business took off. People in the enterprise who we'd been calling into, I remember calling into one major airline and they were like, hey. We said, hey, you gotta power all your customer feedback on Qualtrics. And they're like, if our customers are unhappy, they'll just call us.

Yeah.

And three months, three years later, they're actually powering all their feedback on Qualtrics. So the data driven decision making took off once people started not being right with everything they were doing. And I feel like we're in that spot right now where it's all high fives and chest bumps. And soon people are gonna realize, hey, you've got only a limited number of bets and you better be right. So our business becomes very powerful there. So right now, if you look at Qualtrics, we transitioned to the Enterprise. We have 8,000 brands on Qualtrics. We power the feedback for all of healthcare.gov customers. Customer experience is a big piece of what we do, plus general research. So it's pretty cool. It's evolved in a slow, long 12 year overnight success.

And how many employees worldwide today?

We have 1,000 employees worldwide and we had 500 last year.

Okay, so doubled. And of those, how many are in Greater Utah?

We have probably about half. A little bit more than half.

An interesting thing from the story. These are the best of times, aren't they? At least in our careers in South.

America, if you've got a pulse, you've got money, right?

Hasn't been better. But folks like you and I have been through 08 and 09, and one of the interesting lessons was anyone that pulled back an 0809 that had something actually made a mistake for all different reasons. And so how do you think about that today? At some point, NASDAQ cannot go up infinitely high. If folks are worried. If they're worried, they sell only into technology. If they're worried that they have a nice to have and not a solution. Is this something if you have enough cash, Runway you should even worry about.

So I think that's a protection nowadays that you didn't have an 08 or an 09. Someone could feel like, hey, they're just figuring it out. We have this model that's like, nail it, then scale it. We want to nail something and then scaling is easier if you know where it's going. But a lot of companies are trying to figure that out, build the car as they go, which makes it really tough. But if you have a long enough Runway, the thought is, if you're a bright enough entrepreneur, you're going to figure it out. And I tend to agree with that to some point. But if you could have it the other way, which is how I prefer to have it, where you have a long enough Runway and you figured it out, then it gets really fun. So in 0809, where all of our competition, mind you, I was looking up and five competitors who had all merged together, they raised $30 million. I'm sitting in a basement, they're selling a cheaper product than me. That's better.

Yep.

So that was tough, right? I was like, damn, that's going to be a hard one to overcome. But we just did it. And nothing was better when that company, Fire sold a couple years ago for 70 million bucks to see them in the rearview mirror. But the best part of it was when the downturn happened, everyone retreated.

Everyone.

And we went to heavy hiring and development mode because our model was sound and we came out of 2010 five years ahead.

Yeah.

And so I think that's the part of these cycles that people understand. You just don't want to be affected. So, like, when we do our growth, if you look at, we hired 500 people in one year. We had 180 people last quarter. And these aren't $12 an hour employees. It's the same talent war that you're all in. And we were cash flow positive last quarter.

Yeah.

For every quarter in the history of quality, we've been cash flow positive. So I think there's something about that where it might take a little longer, but I want to be able to write my own story as an entrepreneur. I don't want anyone writing that for me. And so for me, that's why I do what I do.

If you talk to any of the senior folks at Salesforce that have been around for a few years, they'll tell you their biggest mistake was not investing in FNO809. And Salesforce is a pretty good SaaS company. It's number one. And it sounds like even in those days you had structured Qualtrics such that cash is always stressful until it isn't. Right. It inherently is. But you never had Runway issues. You never worried you're going to run out of money in 14 months, at least in those years. Because it's. Especially when you have a sales driven model, it does consume a certain amount of cash. So any insights into Runway and stress around that until now, it doesn't matter. You're cash flow positive. And you've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but you didn't even raise any money until when, 2010?

Yeah, 2012.

Okay.

That's a decade in.

So Qualtrics is a story of two models. So mind you, my father wouldn't let me raise capital. So I said, hey, the only chance I'm ever going to take a dime out of this company is to be extremely profitable.

Yes.

So at the time we raised money, we had, I think 48 million in sales, kicking off 30 million in cash.

Kicking off 30 million in cash with no outside funding. Wow.

And then I was sitting there one day going, hey, wait a minute, we're onto something. And I would like clear out the checking account every month. I was paying people like a million dollars a month to stay away. And we were sitting there going, wait a minute, this is a multi billion dollar platform we're working on. What if we took all of that money and put it back in? And I know that sounds duh, but when you're taking home that much money, that's not how you think. And so then it became, well, how do we do this in a responsible way, but still maintain that scrappy bootstrap culture that we grew up with? So that's been the challenge now is we are accelerating as fast as we can. The interesting thing is, so is everyone else in the world, but I don't think we're doing it in a way that we're going to have to stop.

There's a lot of things I want to talk about, but you raised a really interesting point, especially the last couple of years. I work with more companies, so back then you had a $48 million run rate and you were dropping 30 million to the bottom line. So what are your zen thoughts on capital efficiency in SaaS? We look at Box, and I think Box is an amazing company with an amazing CEO in the most competitive space in the world, with really tough unit economics, and we've just heard really an amazing set of metrics. What's the difference between you and Box or Salesforce is in the middle? Salesforce is generating free cash flow, but never quite at the numbers that you did. And it's not as simple as the fact that your product isn't any higher margin, gross margin than those. What's your zen learnings on capital efficiency?

I think Box is doing a great job for what they're doing. I used to always say, hey, Aaron, I wish I was picking a fight against someone who was like one of these big players. It'd be so much Fun. That was how we grew up. But now it's. We're in uncharted territory in our space and a lot of people are trying to pick a fight with me. But he's not going to tiptoe into the market he's in. He's not going to tiptoe in and all of a sudden, like, strategically get in there and say, oh, Microsoft. He. No, he's got to come in there full frontal. So in that market, I think he's doing exactly what he should be doing.

Yeah.

In markets where you're creating a market or you're doing something that might not have as long of a leash, that's what you got to do. If you've got one where you can create something, I think you've got a little more chance. But I think they're doing a great job. And I've actually looked at their enterprise model and I think that's exactly how I would go about it.

So one factor, and these are the things I've tried to learn and think about. One factor is creating a market. It's harder, and very few people are.

Right. Really hard. I've been pounding our market and everything we're doing since 2004, and now people are finally starting to go, oh, yeah, oh, I see what you're talking about.

The advantage I can see to creating a market is that there's less competition in this segment of the market. If you create a market, it's minute, it's tiny. And so when I think about capital efficiency, a second factor I look at is the actual competitive, like deal by deal, not theoretical competitors, but deal by deal. And so in competition is something we all obsess about as founders, sometimes to our detriment. Tell us about competition, how it's changed and how that impacted your growth up until your 30 million free cash flow, and then these last few years as you've exploded.

So when you're bootstrapped, you can't really look at the competition and copy what they're doing, or you're going to. You're already dead. So I think the best thing that we've done by trying to maintain that culture is if I look at Qualtres, it's a series of six startups. And I think that if I was looking to go join a company or I was looking to invest in a company, everything would be about innovation. Does this company have the ability to innovate for the second and the third and the fourth act? Yes, because you might get super lucky where your first act is this Huge market. But every company I see now that they're public or they're grown and they're big, they could even be at $30 billion market cap, they're saying, what's next? And reality is it's hard to innovate. And it takes a long time, and it takes a lot longer than you thought. So I think Qualtrics, we're really, historically, we've been pretty good at innovating because we didn't have another option. And so my big proponent for scarcity and to bootstrap for most of these startups is you're gonna need that muscle memory and scar tissue down the road. And if you don't have it, it's like cramming for a marathon. You're only gonna get to mile mark 7 before you just fall over.

Now, you did start in 02, which was the crappiest of all time of the Internet. Luckily you were a junior in college, so you didn't know any better. How do you vary that advice in 2015, when you come out of Y Combinator at 22 and. And you can be doing 10 million in revenue within 18 months, does it change that advice you give on that discipline of that efficiency? Because you were lucky you had years to do it in the depths between 1.0 and 2.0.

I think it really depends on the space. Back to the box example versus us. There's really go back to that nail it, then scale it principle, right? If you're trying to scale something you haven't nailed, then that doesn't work. But if you've got a model that you have nailed and you're going after a land grab and you've got to acquire that market share, go. If it works. So, like in the academic market, once we got to 250 schools, it was probably well baked at about 40. But I'll give you another great example. When our investors first came in 2012, I didn't want to go. And once again, I was trying to be super profitable, so I didn't want to go over to Europe. So I had a team coming in at night selling into Europe.

2012 In 2012, after you raised nine figures of capital.

Well, you're right about that. Yeah. They were trying to get me to go over and it was like this huge battle I didn't want to go over.

You did it too late, didn't you?

Well, no, I didn't do. But they were doing about 400,000 a quarter over the phone. I was like, this model is beautiful. And then it's no, we need $3 million and we've got to go place that bet and open up our Dublin office. And now we have 100 employees in Dublin. And it's the right move but it's definitely a different model. And the one thing I see nowadays is the model that got you here is not going to be the model that gets you to the next place.

Yeah.

And you've got to get really comfortable tearing that down. You've got to get very comfortable reinventing that model. I'll give you a great example on the sell side and then go to market because I'm pretty passionate about this. My head of sales was coming out to dreamforce. He had 400 emails in his inbox of someone trying to sell him something. So that didn't happen in 2009 and especially not in 2006. There weren't that many planes on the tarmac when you showed up. Yeah. There were like eight emails. And you can kind of just see right now it's just. It's chaos. And what are you going to do for the future to differentiate yourself is a company. Yeah. And so that's the part that people haven't thought through. Everyone's got a bunch of engineers that are super smart and a bunch of money. We can all build anything.

Any software can be.

Anyone can build any. Especially if I've got a model to look at. Right.

Including at Microsoft, Adobe. Any big. They have good engineers.

What was Microsoft excuse? They had a lot of money and super smart people. Everything's going to be coming around. Go to market. So you cannot just be a good product company anymore. You have to be a good product company and an amazing go to market company. And together you have a chance to go do something big. Yeah. And people don't spend enough time on that side.

Yeah. Let's go back and touch on some things that I find pretty interesting. Let's talk about the viral coefficient in B2B and SAS. So you talked about you start a university and then you have some students and then they go off and they bring it to another university. I calculated our viral coefficient of SAS at about eight months. It took about eight months for that process to yield another paying customer. Do you calculate that? How do you think? Because we get impatient.

Yeah.

This is an Instagram. It takes time. So how does that virality work? How do you think about it?

First of all, I think if you think about this is interesting because I actually think the go to market in the enterprise is totally changing. The way we buy is changing. So I'll give you a great example. Someone wanted to sell tableau into Qualtrics. And our head of INS was like, no, we don't want more BI products. We're not doing that. And so our head of Sales bought a $10,000 tableau license, and then our head of Finance bought a $10,000 tableau license, and our head of marketing bought a $10,000 tableou license, and I just bought a $300,000 tableau license. So the way we buy, it's this. Try before you buy. I don't remember the last time even a company in our situation just came in and bought a $400,000 license or something like that. So I think if you look at the tableau, if you look at the Atlassian, if you look at the slack models on the way, they're. They're going into the enterprise. It's very different than the historic enterprise sales rep with United Platinum. Miles showing up to your office. It doesn't work anymore. Yeah, and actually, it's the opposite of that, where I have a friend who's the CEO of one of these companies, and he's like, hey, Ryan, we're evaluating Qualtrics. And I was like, what's there to evaluate? We're buddies. I'll give you a great deal. Let's close it. No, my team's got to do a bake off. I'm like, come on, man. Like, can you just have your team jump on our product? And so, no, if Benioff calls me and says, ryan, I want you guys on Salesforce. And my head of sales doesn't want to use Salesforce. Like, look, he's got his KPIs, his OKRs, and whatever he's shooting for. And I don't care how he gets there. Just get there. If I'm telling him what software to use. And that's what's going on now. That's actually what happened in academia. We started with these really prominent faculty members who actually drove the business decisions for all of the university.

I want to talk about silos and try before you buy. To me, it's more that the functional heads are making the buying decision. That sometimes is the same as a silo. You can still buy a million dollars worth of Qualtrics right off the bat. You have customers that have bought all.

We're competing with some of these enterprise spaces. And there's, oh, there's 300 RFPs going on in this enterprise space. We show up. There's five other companies bidding there. The customer doesn't know the win loss ratio is all over the place.

Yeah.

But what they don't realize is there was 4,000 RFPs that they never got invited to because it was our people who were already in there upselling throughout the process.

Yeah.

So they never even got a call on them.

One thing I worry is when we give binary Atlassian Slack advice. Right. Because everyone would love to build a product like Atlassian without a real sales team, which is there but not real. Or Slack, which truly up to at least 20 something million, has no traditional sales team. But that's not quite the same as silos that expand. And more importantly, I'm not even sure that Qualtrics is totally binary. Right. So you've got, you do these C level sales where you go in and in the beginning you will bring down a six figure, even seven figure deals and then you do the tableau type deals that are smaller, I think and then close more of the company later. So is it really so binary?

No, no. I think we've got a great product so we're very comfortable having one department use our product and then they start gathering data and getting insights and they're like, whoa, this is easy. Let's use it for event feedback. Oh great, this is awesome. Let's use it for our customer sat service. Great, this is awesome. Let's use it for hr and it spreads way. If you don't have a viral product or a product that you think people won't tell other people about, then yeah, you better go slay the dragon once and lock them up in a three year deal because that's your only chance. But when the companies aren't ready to do that, yeah, it's a lot better to drop something off there and move on to the next and work on how to navigate and let that grow. And the other part of this is some of these companies and this is where founders don't think about a lot. Where are you going to get your wallet share from in the box situation? What was the budgets five years ago for file sharing?

Zero. But ECM is real, so it's there. Yeah, but it has to be from ecm.

But every company can't have. We're going to go create a bunch of discretionary spending in our world. You can't raise your hand and say, hey, I'm on the consumer side, I'm going to the enterprise. You actually have to rip something out, change the old way of doing it.

Yes.

Or come in and wrap it all together.

Discretionary small. Discretionary small.

The budget's There. Yeah, but who are we ripping and replacing?

What's the case with Qualtrics? What did you learn about that? So what bucket did you come out of?

Yeah, so when we first started, we're like, hey, you can do more for less. This was the 2009, 2010. Your budgets just got cut. You can't outsource to this 30 billion market research industry. So do more for less there.

So you came out of this cmos outsourced research budget, which is a huge.

Yeah, which is huge.

It's a big piece. Okay. That's where you came from.

And then you go in. And now we're ripping out success factors and companies like that on the 360 review side. And then on the customer experience side, it's a really hot area. And people are doing this for the first time and they're replacing call centers and all sorts of different programs and then they're doing it all together on one enterprise platform.

Yeah.

So instead of three different products and a bunch of consultants, we're saying, you guys own all the data. It's all here. And for the first time ever, you've got this insight platform that is going to be as equally as important as a CRM tool or an HRM tool like Workday, and it connects with the whole org instead of just like HR or just sales. The success of Qualtrics is for me to show that to the world.

The wallet share, it's such a misunderstood topic by founders. And when I was acquired and I was a VP at Adobe, we had a huge budget for our department, which these web services. My discretionary budget was 500,000 a year. So if you wanted to sell me something, first you had to get my attention as a vp. But all the stuff that I was going to buy, discretionary, it had to fit into five. And so it exists. But if you want to go do something big, you have to match into a category right into a bucket and probably rip somebody out ultimately. Right.

100%.

Or play with a changing budget like reallocation of the CMOS money. But you're still ripping something out, even if it's human, some sort of human capital.

Yeah. And I think founders and tech folks sometimes think that, all right, I've got this great product, I got a bunch of users, I'm going to go into the enterprise, some head of sales is going to come in and take me through there, and this person on this white horse is just going to go get all of this. And it doesn't work that way. If anyone's starting a company or they're starting to get into some of these problems. If you can't sell this yourself, probably no one else is going to be able to. If I can't walk in and grab your budget as a CEO, even if I'm not technical or salesy, that's not an excuse because no one else is going to be able to do that. And you can't understand the value prop. And if you are in front of the customer with that budget, you're going to look at it and say, oh, wait a minute, I can't get that budget. But if our product changes a little bit, there's nothing better from an R and D standpoint or a product development standpoint than having those conversations. And everyone says our customers want this. That's how we drive product development from customer requests. And for me, that's 50% of it. The other 50% is will they request it and write me $100,000 check.

When you look back in the early days, how good a salesperson were you?

I got us out of the basement.

Because my point is, I think 95 times out of 100 with SaaS founders, we have to learn how to sell. We're bad at it. And maybe we're good at elephants or maybe we're good at schmoozing. We're typically good middlers.

Yeah.

Like, we don't know how to totally open and we definitely don't know how to close in 60 seconds. But at least we're decent middlers, right?

Yeah. I remember being in Dallas, Texas and operating out of the basement and closing Sabre and Travelocity for $75,000. And it was like, go home. Like, I took two weeks off. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna make 30 grand. My dad's gonna, we'll put five in the pot. And I just remember sitting in the airport going, do they know that? I, first of all, I'm really young. Second, that I'm in a basement.

But let's talk about that for just a minute because this is another thing founders get wrong. I think the customers know, and I think what they know is they're making a bet on innovation and they're making a bet that this is a seven year journey, but not a seven week journey, and that you have something special and they'll. I think they know the risk. And I think if you try and hide that. I'm sure you tried to hide it a little bit because you hadn't even graduated if you ever graduated.

But yeah, it got Me really confident though. So our next project was with like the Federal Reserve. And so we went out to these army bases. We were doing all these projects and they're like, Mr. Smith, what's your hourly rate? That's nine grand a day. Nine grand a day. That's expensive. I'm an expensive person.

Yeah.

And we closed the deal and they paid me nine grand a day. And that gave me enough fuel. Hey, I'm worth $9,000 a day. Like, we can go. I'm on my way.

Yeah. So one bit of advice I give to founders like in their first 18 months or so that are doing the enterprise is I ask them what their biggest deal is. 10k, 20k. And I go ask the customer for twice as much. How did you challenge yourself to ask for 75k or 150k? How did you lear to do that?

Look, I think we're smart business people and I think we're good entrepreneurs. But if you would have told me in 2002 that what I was working on would be at like the forefront of decision making today, like no one would. We're pretty lucky and we're pretty fortunate. I think that's what people don't also don't understand is everyone comes up. I did this. This thing could have gone sideways 15 different times.

Yeah.

And for whatever reason. And that's kind of what now where we have all this optionality in front of us. What do you want to do? You want to go public? Do you want to do all these things? It's okay. Why are we here? How many families are we going to help? How many jobs are we going like, how are we changing the world? And part of it goes back to I did ask for that double amount and someone paid us. They saw that young kid. You're probably right. Saying, hey, this guy needs a bone. And that happened all the time to make payroll. And so I just think we're super fortunate to be a spot where.

So you've reinvented yourself five or six times. You said different phases, as I guess we all do as we scale. Looking back over these phases over the last 13 years, were there key hires, whether they're right hand people or like almost an ex post facto co founder who made the company a different. Because it's a lot of time, right?

Yeah.

Just give us some titles or some anecdotes that move the needle.

The hardest sell that I ever had to make is my father wouldn't let me take capital and my servers were falling over and I'm not like so this is 2003.

So they're in a closet?

No. Yeah, they're in a closet.

There's no aws.

Power would go out of the side of the house and shut us down for hours. And I'd answer the phone and make something up. Must be on your end. Hit refresh.

DNS.

Yeah, that was a constant line. But in 2009, I was like, I got to take capital. I need to hire some real people to come help. And it was just going nowhere. So I finally said, okay, if I hired a venture capital firm or they partnered with me, what would they do? And they run out. They'd scour the market. I fast forwarded through what they would do and who they would hire, and they would grab this great HBS head of product, whatever it was. Then I said, who do I know that I can maybe convince to come back and work with me? And I have this older brother who was running product at Google at the time, and he was running China and a huge percentage of the world's Internet. And I called him up and I said, hey, you need to come back to Provo, Utah and work with your younger brother. Leave Google.

Which was, like you said, with or for.

Well, for. Right. And it took me two years, but I convinced my older brother to leave what he was doing and come work with me. And that was probably the run product.

Or what was his.

I gave him, hey, we're founders. Let's go. Right. It's been ying and yang ever since.

So he became like an ex post factor co founder for you.

Yeah. And he was. He was always an advisor to me, but that was a really tough sell. And if anyone knows Jared, he's probably one of the most amazing product people in the world. And when you two or three, there's only a handful of these people that exist. And when they touch a product, they can turn it to a billion dollar product. And you saw that with Andy Rubin, Android and all of that. Jared's one of those people.

It took you two years to recruit him. He's even your brother, right?

Yeah, 100%.

So if you try.

And I threw everything out, I was like, you're gonna. You're the oldest sibling. Like, you got a whole nation that you're supposed. This is your moral and family obligation. And it worked. And it's been hard. The first year was crazy hard because we're exact opposites. People can't even believe we're from the same bloodline, but it's actually been one of the joys of my life. If you could do this and you could be wildly successful, wouldn't it be cool to be able to do it with your brother?

And I want to make sure we. Because we're probably almost out of time. I want to get one other story. But what does he run today? Do you guys split some stuff up or what's.

Right now he's running Eng product.

He's running engine. Okay, so he's managing a third of the company.

He runs a third of the company. But then we split and work tandemly on different things. We play to each other's strengths. But when we're thought partners, and that's what you all want out of your VCs as well, and your investors is thought partners are really hard and really rare. You don't get extra points for going alone. I think people don't realize that enough. So if there are thought partners that could really work with you, Jason, look at all your knowledge. Like you would be so valuable to someone like me five years ago or even now, who has gone through that. And if you see eye to eye, hold on to those people because they're the ones that you're going to call. And so Jared, more than anything, he's like that blanket that I've had since I was a little kid. And we've got good mojo together. And you don't want to run that.

And I love that it took you two years to convince them, but it took him seven years. Yeah. I don't think it's ever too late for what I call this Ex post facto co founder. And it changes it. Now you've got to think about how to get to a billion in revenue. You may need another guy like this.

Never say never.

You may need your.

You would have told me in 2011. I would have raised money in 2012. I would have said, you're crazy.

Crazy.

I thought that was our only round we'd ever raise that. We're never doing this again.

But times got even better a year later.

So I just stopped. I just stopped saying we won't.

One other game changing hire that you made after your brother.

So actually, before my brother, I had a college roommate named Stuart Orgel who bet on doing this with me. It was just me and my dad and Stuart joined us. And Stuart was. He worked for $8,000. He turned out a $60,000 job offer to work for $8,000. And the next year he made 12.

That's an odd negotiation. I can't afford nine, but I just can't do 10 bucks a month.

Stu is the most charismatic, like, happy person to be around in the world and always positive. And I think is if you look at partners and Stu's been my partner, and he's still a founder and is on our board. And I think people look for who's the partner you want when things are going well, but Stu's the partner. Ship sinking, and it was sinking a lot of times, and Stu was right there just to pick it up.

10Pm you could sit together without anybody else.

When I'm like this, he was just like, steady Eddie, like, we're gonna go kill it. And sometimes that's all you need. You need someone in there that's just got your back. And so Stu's been that. And there's so many people along the way that have done that, and there's so many people that will continue to do it. And so my job as CEO is to find those people that fit that DNA and remove the roadblocks that's gonna be in front of them to help take Qualtrics to what it's going to be.

We hit so many interesting things, but when you talk about the team, I want to make sure we at least hit one thing you and I chat about on the phone, which is recruiting SaaS management outside of this glamorous Bay Area we're in. And you told me, because I work with companies from all around the world, and I do think it's a challenge outside of the barrier. You can get kids anywhere. And what you told me is you relocated a lot of people to Utah and it was hard enough to get your brother to come from Mountain View to Utah. So I think you agreed with me that it's hard. And the way you solved it was relocation. Just a minute or 2. Insights on VPs. If you're not in this sort of echo chamber of Silicon Valley.

So the benefit of Silicon Valley is success breeds success. So you start with HP and so on. You go all the way back. And we're always looking for the right DNA that's been created. And in Utah, it's such a young area where you got WordPerfect and Omniture and Adobe, but outside of that, there hasn't been a lot of success to breed success. And. Right. And arguably some of the DNA in there might not always be good. It's dated. And so what's exciting about Utah right now is there's probably six companies worth over a billion doll. There's three of them on our street. And 10 years down the road, it's going to be Phenomenal.

They'll try and rip your whole team out.

So one of the things we're doing is we're going around and we're saying, okay, where do we need those folks? And then what percent of the workforce can we grow our own? We're in Utah and so we believe in growing a lot of the talent, but we need coaches. That's a real interesting pitch when you've got someone like yourself who's been around the SaaS world and say, hey, look, I've got 150 kids or young kids that we're growing between this age and this age and this is where they're at in their career. You want to come coach? That's a very different pitch than hey, look, I need you to come out and manage a bunch of people that are going to be a pain in the ass. Like these people want someone to manage them. They want help. They're looking for direction. They're not these millennials that are just taking a tour, two year tour of every single company, like we said, or.

300 something, 66 day tour.

Yeah, yeah, 366 day tour. And oh, I want to acquire some Uber stock and this stock and it's diversifying my portfolio. But then you look out here and you've these people to have that experience. So every market we go into, from Seattle to Utah to Dublin to Sydney has something in the talent base that's special. And I think this fragmented work environment where you've got multiple office, you can't scale anymore without it. And as much as no one likes it, we were 18 months ago, we were just in Provo, Utah and now we have six offices and we've got engineering up in Seattle. We just opened up another sales center in Dallas. We've got dc, we've got Dublin, and everyone has something different. And then we take the puzzle pieces that they don't have and augment for that. And I think that's the new strategy. But I think what we're seeing is no one has the exclusive on Smart People.

All right, Ron, this was epic. Thank you very much.

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