20VC: Qualtrics' Ryan Smith on Building A $Bn Company & Raising The Largest Series A Since 2008 From Sequoia & Accel

Ryan Smith is the Founder & CEO @ Qualtrics, an online survey company with 1,200 employees and a valuation of more than $1bn. They have backing from some of the world’s best investors including the likes of Sequoia, Accel and Insight Venture Partners having raised a $150m Series B in 2014. As for Ryan, there are many awesome things, first, he has built Qualtrics from Utah allowing him to gain perspective outside of the traditional tech bubbles, second, he held off on attain VC funding for many years despite the common belief that it is necessary for unicorn growth and finally he has the most incredible work life balance I have seen and if you have not already you must check out this piece on him in Forbes, it really is a must. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Ryan made his way into startups and came to found Qualtrics? 2.) Sequoia’s Bryan Schreier states that Ryan’s success is due to running the company on ‘first business principles’. What does he mean by this? How does this affect the way Ryan runs Qualtrics? 3.) Why did Ryan decide to bootstrap the company for such a long time with the likes of Accel and Sequoia looking to invest? What are the benefits of retaining such control? What are the financial requirements to do so? 4.) What makes the best CEO’s? How do they view the internal structure of the company? How do they perceive their role? How do they manage their day and optimise their time? 5.) How does Ryan look to instill ‘radical transparency’ in the organisation? What are the benefits of doing so? Can an organisation ever be too transparent? What are the challenges of such transparency? As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ryan on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it’s time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it’s solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we’re able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It’s also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield. Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device. When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Hello and welcome back to Founders Friday on the 20 Minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings and you can find me on Snapchat at H Stebbings with two Bs and writing highly inappropriate things on Mojito VC dot com. I'd absolutely love to hear what you think of that. However, to the show today, and this is the first for me, as I recorded today's episode deliberately intended for the official Sasta podcast, which I host with support from Jason Lampkin at Sasta, but the guest was so fantastic and gave such a unique perspective on fundraising that I really wanted to share it with the 20 VC community also. So for today, this episode is on both Sasta and the 20 Minute VC and if you listen to both, which you all should, that is perfect. Trust me, you'll want to take notes and listen again on this one. So joining me today, I'm thrilled to welcome Ryan Smith, founder and CEO at Qualtrics, the unicorn startup from Utah that's crushing

• 0:44Harry Stebbings?

  the world of online surveys. As I said, with a billion dollar valuation and 1,200 employees, they have backing from some of the world's best investors, including the likes of Sequoia, Excel and Insight Venture Partners, having raised 150 million Series B in 2014. As for Ryan, he is genuinely one of the kindest guests that I've had on the show and his management of work-life balance is evidence to us all that it can be done and genuinely makes me truly envious. Not only is he one of the best CEOs today, he has built Qualtrics outside of the traditional tech hubs with Qualtrics based in Utah. And if that wasn't amazing enough, he's also done this while remaining a fantastic father to his five children. And if you have not read his incredible feature in Fortune, then that really is a must. But before we meet Ryan today, accounting always seemed like a massive headache to me, but it doesn't have to be. Xero is beautiful, easy to use online

• 1:30Harry Stebbings?

  accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device. When you add Xero to your small business, you're able to send online invoices and get paid faster, get an instant view of your cash flow, track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory, partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over 500 business apps, including advanced solutions for point of sale, time tracking, e-commerce and more. It's no wonder over 860,000 customers in more than 100 countries signed up for Xero. Sign up free now today for a free trial at xero.com/20vc. That's xero.com/20vc.

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  And now the books are in order. You might have some extra dollars to spend. And what better way to do that than with Pearl? Now Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver, whether it's time for you to buy a new car or not. And Pearl Rear Vision is their first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl Rear Vision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10 minutes to install and is completely wireless because it's solar powered. Since Rear Vision is software based, they're also able to push updates and new features over the Pearl app. In the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone now. Pearl Rear Vision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes and costs $499 and is available at pearlauto.com or through amazon.com or through Crutchfield.

• 2:53Harry Stebbings?

  However, enough from me. And so I'm now delighted and very honoured to hand over to Ryan Smith, founder and CEO at Qualtrics.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:09Harry Stebbings?

  Ryan, it's so fantastic to have you on the show today. A huge thanks to Jason Lankin for the intro, but thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Thanks. I'm a big fan of what you guys are doing. Big fan of Jason's.

• 3:19Harry Stebbings?

  Well, thank you so much. And I'd love to get started today with a two to three minute founding story of Qualtrics and how the business really got off the ground in the early days.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  So starting a business was very different in 2002 than it is now. It's not like you got in a room and ran an MBA exercise and said, hey, look, we're going to go grab a business idea and then just go. You know, the word startup was not what it is right now. I mean, it was much more by accident. You know, my father and I started the business. He's a scientist. He's a researcher and academic. And he was always trying to figure out ways to duplicate himself. And, you know, in his world, for him to get or make any money or get published, he had to do a ton of research. You know, everything was called research back then, you know, and nowadays it's become way more mainstream. And that was kind of what we set out to tackle to do is like, how do we take what this PhD who's written the books

• 4:10Speaker 02

  on PhD level statistics classes in order to synthesize and get insight and democratize it? And we wanted the ability to be able To create form or survey or, you know, some way to collect data and analyze it in real time and spit out the results. And we thought if we could do this online and we could do something that was very sophisticated, but make it simple, which, which actually you think about a most technology that has caught on, has been taking a process or creating something that used to be really hard to do and making it simple and take it in the hands of everyone. And we thought that the workers today and the knowledge workers, this is where it would be. And it's, it's taken, you know, 14 or 15 years, but that's really what's come to fruition.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  We started early into academia. I recruited my brother out of Google who was running product and a third of the world's internet traffic and search. And I was, I convinced him to come work with us and

• 5:02Harry Stebbings?

  Was that easy convincing?

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Oh, it was the hardest sell I've ever had to make in my life. And, you know, it was me and a, and a co-founder we were starting with, who, who I had known and we didn't have any money and we were completely bootstrapped. So I, I basically for two years hounded my brother and here he is on one of the greatest rides. He was running China and I said, you gotta come back to Utah and work with me. And, and I, I used every ounce of guilt or everything I had that he was gonna, he's the oldest sibling and he's gonna let a whole nation down if he doesn't.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  It was pretty good. And, and, you know, when he came back and kind of took over the product and insight and really thought about what the future from a product standpoint would look like in this new world of being able to have real time insights, it just took off. And, you know, I don't think it would have been able to take off the way I had earlier, both on a product market fit and a timing standpoint, but also on just our ability to actually go do something great. And so it's a, it's a long story. I think that, you know, most people think to do something great, it's, it's gonna take a couple of years. And I think those are such outliers, I think for the rest of the world, especially in the enterprise, you know, 10, 12, 13 years are, are really what

• 6:17Speaker 02

  it takes. And, and I'm actually appreciative of that because it takes a long time to get going. It also takes a long time to get out. If you, if you do something in two or three years, someone else is going to be able to do it in a year and a half.

• 6:27Harry Stebbings?

  And listen, I know, I know it's like in terms of getting out, I speak To all the VCs, but in terms of building the business there, I do want to discuss one of your investors, Brian Scherer at Sequoia. Cause he said that you built the business on first principles and not on business books. So I'd love to hear what you think Brian really means by this and what that suggests about your kind of initial company building.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  I'm not sure what Brian meant, but no, he's talking about us, which is super complimentary. And I think that we never, we're in Utah, we never built a business to go get funding. We never built a business to go sell. We built a business to keep and we built a business where it's got to be bigger than Ryan. And it's got to be bigger than the founding team and Jared. It's got to be bigger than all of us. This is an opportunity, we're trying to build something that's going to be around for the next forty years, fifty years. And if you're, if you're building that way, it's actually a totally different playbook than if you're building something that it's got to work for you. And maybe that's as far as you're thinking. And that's just how we've always thought about it. Being in Utah helps that a little bit because we're, we're left alone and there's not a lot of noise.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  And we're able to put our heads down and really go to work. But that's the lens that we try to think about how we build Qualtrics. We're like, what are the right decisions? What are right for the employees? What are right for the customer? What's right for this product? And maybe, you know, I think if you go back to our academic setting, I mean, for five years, we stayed in a basement and called on the academic market. There wasn't a VC in the world that would sit and bet on that plan. You've got a really needy customer who has no money and wants to do a bunch of one-off stuff. And they can sit and play around with your product all day. It's just not a good business model, but if you look at it now, every single academic higher ed institution in the world uses Qualtrics. We have a million academic users that are popping out annually.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  And throughout the course of time, everyone's getting trained on our product and our platform. And it's a, you know, it's been a ten to fourteen year bet or play. And so I think that's what he's describing when he says fundamental principles. But in the time, no one ever thought that that was sexy or said that was a good idea. It was actually opposite, people were laughing at us.

• 8:33Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, is that building without a liquidity event in mind? And do you, how do you pitch that then to VCs? who often have liquidity events in mind and timescales and horizons in mind.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  So fortunately enough, I've never had to pitch a VC and so I don't know what that really looks like. We've been cash flow positive from the beginning and I think more companies should work on that and try to get to that state and it's a foreign state. And I understand the reasons why we could go out early or why people would want that early on. But I believe that there's kind of an incubation period of every idea, every company. And a lot of people take funding during that incubation period. And you really don't know what's what's right. And I'll give you an example of this is like when we first went into academia, we thought we'd just go to the CIO and we'd sign a license with the university. Well, that was wrong. Then we went to the research group because they're doing a bunch of research and we thought that's where we go.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Well, they didn't buy it and we're six months in. And then we went to, you know, the business school and they didn't buy it. And I'm now nine months in on this journey of like how to get customers. And when we went, we ended up, you know, a year and a half into this, finding that if we had professors who was passionate about us, then they would tell their department who would buy it. And then the university would get one of the schools on board and then a school would get another school and another school. And the next thing you know, we're back at the CIO working on a university wide deal. And so that took about two and a half years to figure that out. And what would have happened if I would have had a ton of funding and a bunch of money? I probably would have never been able, or we would have never been able to figure out like how to navigate all of that.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  And so I believe that creativity comes from resource constraint. And I believe innovation comes from resource constraint. You know, you're never, you're never clipping coupons if you've got $50 million in your bank account. And I think that that's the necessary forcing function to be able to actually do something great. So when it comes to the venture capital side and when you're pitching VCs, I'm not very familiar with that, but the way we thought about it was if we're going to have a business partner to come in, then they need to see eye to eye with us and they need to have that vision. And so we were cash flow positive in 2009. Started reaching out to us. I remember Excel Partners who Excel and Sequoia, they led our Series A. Excel had reached out for three years and I just kept saying, I wouldn't even respond.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  I just kept saying, stay around the hoop because I don't know when something's going to take place. But I promise I will give you a shot if that happened. And they flew out here, they were always out here, they were chasing us. And Jared, my brother, had worked with Brian Schreier at Google. And so when we got to the point, we said, hey, we want the best partners we can, we can be in. If you look at who we put on our board, we put Brian Schreier, who was, he was younger. I mean, our agent, Ryan Sweeney, who's our agent, if you look at what both of them have done in the venture community, their trajectory's been the same as ours. And so Ryan Sweeney's in Excel, they put on a clinic in late-stage investing that I don't think anyone in tech has ever seen before. It's, it's awesome. And you know, Brian sits on the board of Dropbox. It's been an amazing ride and that's been part of the fun is to grow with, with these individuals.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  But they're our partners. And if they're not bought into the vision of Qualtrics and where we want to take this, then we made bad moves. But I'll tell you, I'm, I'm probably one of the only tech founders I know that is, is where we are as far as scale, who can look back and say, there's not one regret or not one thing they would do different on the funding side, including the partners they brought in and the equity that they gave up.

• 12:05Harry Stebbings?

  I'm just so intrigued then in terms of kind of, you said about kind of stay near in case we do have an event that requires capital. What was it then in 2012, when you were, as you said, cash flow positive and the business was thriving? What was that kind of catalyst for you guys realizing that now was the time for venture funding? And you wanted to take Excel and Sequoia's money?

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it was incredibly tough decision. Here I am with my father, my brother and another co-founder Stuart. And we were ripping off some pretty good distributions, to be honest, from a cash standpoint. And there was this idea that, hey, maybe we're being short-sighted here. We, you know, we were close to coming up on $50 million in, in sales and, you know, 50% profit margins, 100% bootstrap. And we thought, wait a minute. And we started to see this vision that we had in 2002. Here we are, eight, nine, 10 years later, starting to play out. And all of these students were graduating. And people were going into the enterprise and saying, oh, my gosh, Qualtrics isn't just surveys. Qualtrics is, we're going to run all of our customer feedback on Qualtrics.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  So, you know, currently, we power nine different airlines. We power all the feedback for healthcare.gov. And, you know, we have 160,000 net promoter score study, NPS studies, running on Qualtrics. So, people are like, this is the de facto NPS product. And then people were like, also using us on the employee side and doing, you know, the second use case on Qualtrics has become doing all of their employee feedback and 360 reviews. And it was this idea that I don't need to go pay some expensive group anymore. I can actually do it on Qualtrics. And so, we saw this multi-billion dollar opportunity, and we had to really have an honest discussion with ourselves. Are we going to go all in and put all of our chips in here or not? And it was probably one of the hardest decisions we had to make. And

• 13:49Speaker 02

  then if we are, who are we going to bring in that's going to help us get there? Because we're giving up a lot. We're bringing someone else in the tent. It's nice to own 100% of your company. And I think that's where it came out. And then we, and I went around the table. And to be honest, you know, my father and my brother, Jared, didn't leave Google to come work for someone. He left Google to become founder. And we decided we were going to go raise a Series A. And, you know, I wanted to raise $100 million Series A. I thought that would be a cool thing. And mind you, this is- That's a bold move. Yeah, this is in 2012. We raised a $70 million Series A. It was Sequoia and Excel. And it was the largest Series A or first time investment since 2008. Look, I don't, I don't regret any of it. I think it was, I think it was definitely the right move.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  It was the right move at the right time. We were very deliberate on it. And we got the partners we wanted. And I think that's more important. We never optimized funding for economics. We had term sheets at $100 and $150 million more than what we went with. And I think that's the part that people don't understand. If you're going to go and create something big, it's going to be a rounding error at that point anyways. Get in with the partners that are going to help you with the largest chance of success to get there, and people that you jive with, and people that you want to go into work with every single day, and people that you want to be your first call when you've got a problem. And I think we've done a phenomenal job at that. And I love going to board meetings. I love, I love sitting there. My, my partners give us, you know, the most incredible direct feedback.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  And it's not because we're all best friends, but it's because we respect each other and we're close and we've gone on this journey together. And they can actually tell me more than anyone, maybe besides my wife.

• 15:27Harry Stebbings?

  And that, that mess, that mess is the wife.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Messing, where we're messing up, where we're messing up and what we need to work on. And I love that dynamic. And I see a lot of these vanity boards and people out there that have these big hitters and all of these different things. But you go and you actually get under, under the tent and it's a mess internally.

• 15:45Harry Stebbings?

  Talking of that dynamic, the kind of core to that is transparency, is it not?

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean transparency is the number one component of Qualtrics. And I think it's starting to become, as you, as you kind of make a generational shift within the, the work environment. And also in the way that the world's working is we're probably one of the most radically transparent companies that are out there. Both internally, and I think we're pretty transparent with our customers as well. But, you know, the idea of transparency is that everyone's basically an insider. And we've gone from 600 employees to 1,200 employees in one year. We've gone from one office to eight offices. And we spend a lot of time and a lot of money communicating and over communicating. If people don't have what they need to come in and do their job, they're not going to be successful.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  And, and if I, if I just take this back to basics principles of what I've seen. Because Qualtrics is a series of 20 startups built into 15 years. Where we started is not where you end up. And every time we start, it's the wrong place anyways. And so we just get out into the ocean and navigate. Companies fail for two reasons. They either get internally focused on each other, or they get externally focused in a million different directions and, and can't execute. And I'm seeing this constantly. You know, we all have a bunch of money. If anyone has a pulse right now, they're able to raise money. And we all have smart engineers. So why are there winners and losers? You know? Why, for example, that Microsoft kind of so-called losers way for a while? They have brilliant people and a ton of money, right?

• 17:13Speaker 02

  So it becomes down to execution. And so we want to make the default within Qualtrics to share. We want to share everything, you know? We have a, we have an all hands meeting every Thursday and then Kim Malone Scott, Kim Scott, who's my CEO coach and along an old Googler and Apple University, she created this thing called Whoops, where we've, we've incorporated where we stand up and someone can get the monkey every week if they've messed up. And you know, we're not promoting people to mess up, but we want it safe to be able to communicate. We're completely transparent of what, what everyone's doing every week. We build internal systems and we've spent a lot of time building our internal systems as we've scaled so that everyone can see what everyone else is doing. So if someone's saying, hey, something's not built in engineering or engineering's lazy, no, they can look and see, no, actually,

• 17:54Speaker 02

  engineering stood up three, three new data centers that no one saw and no one felt and it was a perfectly executed transaction with standing up these, these data centers. And so that's what we're trying to go for within Qualtrics and it's, and it's extremely expensive and you have to be very, very thoughtful around it.

• 18:11Harry Stebbings?

  Do you ever think transparency can be detrimental, potentially in funding rounds, potentially in acquisition talks, potentially in exit talks in terms of maybe disaligning the team, causing the team to stop often with acquisitions. If there's acquisition talks and the team knows about it, it can cause kind of productivity lapses. Is there ever a sense of too much transparency is detrimental?

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Look, you have to be thoughtful, but I'm pretty straight up and I'm pretty straightforward. And that's just my style. I don't, I don't have time to mess around with politics. I don't have time to mess around with, life, life's too short and you know, we've got to be able to trust our team. And are there situations where people can't manage that? Yeah, obviously. I mean, we have a principle at Qualtrics, it's called no minor lapse of integrity. There's literally no minor lapse of integrity. And you know, we have to educate people and that's part of it. But the opposite of transparency, which would be like opaqueness or, or having something that's closed, I never want to be a part of that. That's like the government. That's like, that's like a lot of different things that, that I never want to ever see. And you know, part of the reason that you

• 19:15Speaker 02

  can become a founder and entrepreneur is that you can write your own story. And you know, we get to create this the way we want and there's no playbook, there's no rulebook. I've done everything wrong since the second we started and it's worked out beautifully. And so that's the way that we want to live. And once people Taste this type of environment. It's pretty tough for them to go somewhere where they experience the opposite.

• 19:35Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I saw the basketball court. It looks pretty good.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we have a basketball court in our lobby and, you know, I couldn't figure out what to do with the lobby. And someone said, oh, let's put a basketball court. And we're like, okay. But more than that, I think it's a great, when you come into our headquarters, I think it's a great reminder. It's like, look, don't take yourself too seriously. Right? And, and that's, that's part of it.

• 19:55Harry Stebbings?

  And I'd love to dive into a quick fire round with you now. We call it sixty seconds. So let's do, I know you're a data nerd like me. So what are your productivity tools?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  So my product, my, look, my, my job as CEO changes every three months and so does the way I go about the job. What used to work for me two or three years ago does not work for me now. And so the very first thing that I do to be productive is I, I've tried to understand Ryan and how Ryan works. You know, my brother Jared is probably the most productive person and I, I know and anyone who knows him kind of says the same thing. He gets more done in a, in a, in a week than most people do in, in a quarter. What works for him does not work for me. And so I know, for example, that I'm very, I wake up very early in the mornings. I, no matter what time I go to bed, I am up at four, five, six. And I know that that's my go time. I'm on like supercharged speed at that time and I'm two to three X more productive than I am at say four o'clock in the afternoon.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  So I take all of my creative tasks, everything that I haven't ever done before, and that's the time that I do it. Because I want to make sure that I'm not using kind of the best part of my brain for email, for example. The second thing is it's not uncommon for me to, I work through lunch. I don't have lunch meetings because I'm still part of my productivity, my productive time. So I'll have breakfast meetings if they're important. But I either take time or go to breakfast every morning, either by myself or I'll sit in my car. And I make notes of what my plan is for the day. And I think it's really important that as you start scaling and you start getting bigger, that you have a personal plan because the day will run you if you don't run it.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  And what does success look like for me that day? Like, what is it going to be that that day, then I'm going to fist pump as I walk out of the building and say I got what I wanted to get done? And then everything else is going to happen either way and everything's going to happen during your day, but I do not want to show up to the office without a plan ever. And the plan can change, everything's there, but I'm, I want to be thoughtful about my day and my time.

• 21:50Harry Stebbings?

  And then you have a round table at home for the dinner table conversation to encourage conversation. What tips do you have at work to encourage culture and engagement?

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of tips. I think understanding what everyone else is doing so that there's empathy for the rest of the organization is probably number one. So all we're trying to do is make sure that everyone knows what everyone else is doing and doing that in a variety of different ways. And the reason why is because innovation might come from another group. We don't want them totally focused on that, but we have that entirely transparent. If there are issues where, you know, one person comes to me and maybe they're not happy with someone else, I mean, one of the things that I believe in is is is complete escalation where if someone's talking to me about someone else, we're doing it in the room together. And so really being able to teach and have open conversations

• 22:39Speaker 02

  and remove me out of it as much as possible by by allowing open and positive feedback. Kim Scott calls this radical candor throughout the organization solves a lot of a lot of problems.

• 22:50Harry Stebbings?

  I'm intrigued, though, as kind of you look at your incredible success now with Qualtrics and the incredible company that it's become. What do you know now, though, that you wish you'd known when you started out with your brother and your father?

• 23:01Speaker 02

  I feel like we're just getting started with Qualtrics. I mean, this is my this is my last job. This is all I'm doing. I'm still young and I don't really have another another idea. What what I wish I would have known now that I probably didn't know then is maybe early on I wasn't as confident in this thought of you can do it your way and it's you against the world. And that's probably the first thing is it's kind of been us against the world the whole time. And I don't think that's going to change. And that's kind of where I thrive and I love that. The second component is that Rome wasn't built in a day and it's going to take time. And if you can keep your optionality from a funding or a partner standpoint to actually give you a long enough runway, entrepreneurs will figure it out. The problem

• 23:46Speaker 02

  is is when they put a bomb or a stopwatch on their back, every bet that we've ever made has taken a little longer than we anticipated. But it was there, you know, for the most part, they've always been the right bets. And if you looked at Any of them across any part of the time, every single one had a point where you were like, ah, this isn't gonna go. And so I think that success and execution comes from a lot of little iterations. And if you look at Gmail, when Gmail came out, it was horrible, but it's, it's, it's been a bunch of little iterations. I mean, I used to think I'm never getting off of Yahoo and kind of look at the change there. That, that's kind of how the world works. And so you don't want to limit or take a snapshot of one point in time. And you want to give yourself that optionality.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  That took a long time for me to understand because I'm not that patient of a person. So I've had to learn to be a little bit more patient, but at the same time have that fire and rigor of like, we need a bill yesterday and we're going now and we're still gonna do incredibly hard thing. But that's been hard. You gotta play the long game.

• 24:47Harry Stebbings?

  And then you stated before, the nine important minutes of your interaction, particularly with, with the kids, being waking up, home from school and before bed. If you were to surmise that and align that to your workday, how would you align that nine minutes?

• 25:02Speaker 02

  So I don't, I don't try to really predict what's gonna happen in the workday because my job as CEO is, is to be there and be ready and drive a lot and help remove roadblocks from people. But I would say that I would take all nine of those minutes. And instead of spreading them out through the day, make sure that you're starting your day and make sure you're getting your day off onto the right foot. And I think that's really important to me. I just found that once it starts going south, it's pretty, it's pretty hard to like turn it around. And so how in the world can you make sure that, first of all, we all, we all want to feel like we're individual contributors? Because very few people I know get happiness out of being a high-paid router, just routing things.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  So our, our natural value is you talk to CEOs, I was most happy when I was coding. I was most happy when I was selling. I was most happy when I was doing this. Well, every day you should get to feel like you're an individual contributor. And I think you will become most happy if you've got a plan to do that every single day. And then typically you can do that in an hour or two. I, I have a friend who studies organizations and he's like, most people only have three or four productive hours. In the day where they're actually getting stuff done. So if I can come and for example, from seven to eight or eight to nine in the morning, get my individual contributor process done, then I'm going to feel great and successful that day. And the busier I get, the more effective I become. So it's it's it's multiplied.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Then I'm happy with the rest of the course of business and I'm much more joyful to be around because I know that you've got to get a little bit personally to be able to give to everyone else. And you know, if your batteries are low, it's going to be tough to help charge everyone else's.

• 26:40Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I have to say, when I read the article in Fortune, it was one of those moments where you you really, in a lovely way, you really just hate you because you're the loveliest guy. You're incredibly chilled and you just achieved the most insane amounts with Qualtrics. Do you know what I mean? There's kind of nothing wrong, which is really infuriating, but I can't emphasize enough how great it is to have you on the show.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Well, I think I think the media, I think the media paints a pretty rosy picture. I mean, things are going well. We've been super fortunate and and and lucky. I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't think about luck. Anyone would have thought what we were working on in two thousand two would become where it is. They're they're crazy. But I also believe that you just need to be thoughtful and you get to write your own story. So write it the way you want.

• 27:25Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really mean that. It was so special to have you on.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Okay, awesome. Thank you.

• 27:32Harry Stebbings?

  And again, I want to say a huge thanks to Ryan for giving up his time today to come on the show. As I said, it was so fantastic to have him on. And you really must check out the article in Fortune on how Ryan juggles running a unicorn startup and juggling a family. Uh, it really is absolutely fantastic. And I do also want to say a huge thanks to Jason Lemkin at Sasta for the intro to Ryan's day, without which the show would not have been possible. However, before we leave you today, as I said earlier, accounting was always a real headache for me. And then Xero came along. Xero is beautiful, easy to use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere, from your computer or mobile device. When you add Xero to your small business, you're able to send online invoices and get paid faster, get an instant view of your cash flow, track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory.

• 28:17Harry Stebbings?

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• 28:59Harry Stebbings?

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