EP 77: Ryan Smith (Utah Jazz Owner, Qualtrics Co-Founder): HS Dropout Turned Tech Founder Bought His Hometown NBA Team

Ryan Smith is the owner of the Utah Jazz, as well as the founder and former CEO of Qualtrics (recently acquired for $12B). In the episode, Ryan reveals why he bought his hometown NBA team, and what it’s like to own the Utah Jazz. He shares his unconventional path to founding Qualtrics, including how he dropped out of high school, ended up in South Korea with nothing, and later started the company with his dad and brother. Ryan also gives practical insights on productivity and work-life balance. (0:00) Intro (1:00) Buying the Utah Jazz (8:09) Customer base of a fan versus customer base of enterprise software (10:42) Applying lessons in tech to basketball (18:26) Trading and relationships (21:15) Getting rid of the RSN deal (28:33) Starting a non-profit (19:59) Views on productivity and work-from-home (37:07) Becoming a CEO (40:01) Bill Gates exercise strategy (45:51) Dropping out of high school and going to South Korea (50:03) LDS Mission in Mexico (55:49) Starting Qualtrics with your dad (1:00:26) Working at Ford (1:03:37) Northwestern Field Study (1:05:32) Cheaper, faster, better (1:08:24) Not selling for $500 million (1:12:38) No venture capital (1:16:25) Getting acquired (1:24:07) Product market fit (1:34:35) Brother’s time at Google (1:39:21) Plan for things to take a little bit longer than you expect (1:42:51) The infamous horse story Show Notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN0FAhzD-WI Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-logan-bartlett-show/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. I am your host, Logan Bartlett. What you're going to hear on this episode is a conversation I had with Ryan Smith. Now, Ryan is the owner of the Utah Jazz, as well as the founder and former CEO of Qualtrics, which sold to SAP for $8 billion, then went public and then sold again, most recently to Silver Lake for $12 billion. Ryan and I discussed a bunch of different things, including what it's like to own his hometown team in the Jazz, how that came to be, the sale process of buying into the NBA, as well as the early days of Qualtrics. We go into Ryan's background, which involved him dropping out of high school, ending up in South Korea without knowing a single person in the country and without a job,

• 0:46Logan Bartlett?

  as well as how his life was turned around, and ultimately, he found his way to founding Qualtrics with both his dad and brother. A really interesting conversation with a thoughtful leader. Here's my conversation with Ryan Smith. All right, Ryan, thanks for doing this. Okay, so I want to take you back to 2017. You're asked a question in an interview. I don't know if you've ever been held accountable for this. You don't know where I'm going with this. You're asked in the interview, you said that you picked Russell Westbrook over Kevin Durant to start a team. Do you think at that moment, the NBA owners were like, okay, good, we'll let this guy in. This is this is it?

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Did I really say that?

• 1:17Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah, 100%.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  I said.

• 1:18Logan Bartlett?

  2017.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  I picked Russell Westbrook over.

• 1:21Logan Bartlett?

  I think it was during his MVP run and all of that. This is the kind of research you get from me.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like it. So first of all, I don't know, a lot of changes. But, you know, I think then it was probably.

• 1:35Logan Bartlett?

  Probably just one MVP award.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  But what's crystal clear is you need both of them plus one more to win a championship.

• 1:40Logan Bartlett?

  That's certainly true. So wait, I want to ask about, so buying the Jazz. So you're the governor now, which I still haven't adjusted to. Have you gotten natural in saying governor versus?

• 1:50Speaker 01

  I don't say anything.

• 1:51Logan Bartlett?

  You don't?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  I don't. I don't. That's everyone else's.

• 1:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's what other people say about it. Yeah. So the process of buying in to the, like, when did this actually start to be something that you were thinking about? Like, this could be a real thing. I assume at some point, kids like want to play and then they're like, I'm not good enough. And then if you're lucky, you start to think, maybe I can buy a team.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think there's, there's a couple kind of evolutions of this. Number one is when, unique to most people, when, when I've done Qualtrics for 22 years.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  And we have this principle of all in, like you are all in. I didn't do anything else. I didn't own rental property. I didn't do one other thing. I didn't sit on boards. I didn't invest in tech companies. It was all Qualtrics all the time. The only thing that caught my interest was I'd fly down to like Summer League and go play golf with Danny Ainge, or we'd go meet up multiple times a year and I started to understand like the back office of basketball.

• 2:55Logan Bartlett?

  And is this like 2012, 13, 14?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  This is like 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.

• 3:00Logan Bartlett?

  So Qualtrics is success at this point. You're still the CEO.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, like we're on the IPO roadshow. We're in, you know, we're in Boston and we go into the locker room during a game. We're on a pre-roadshow and it's the playoffs and we planned it out so that we could hang out with Danny because it was just infectious. I love the back office and the inner workings of the NBA. And, and so that's kind of where this kind of spurred. And then when we sold the company,

• 3:33Speaker 01

  I remember specifically telling everyone like, sorry, like, it's like, what are you going to do? What do you do with your money? What are you going to do with this? How is this going to work? Like, everything came down to, well, I want to do something with the NBA, period, hard stop. And by that time I had gotten to know Adam, we'd worked with the league. I'd been to All-Star games. I'd kind of been a part of the NBA. And even within SAP, sitting on like the tech council of the NBA with SAP,

• 4:04Speaker 01

  it just happened. And then the process comes as like, okay, great. You and millions of other people want to be part of the NBA. How do you actually pull that off?

• 4:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And how do you, like, how do you differentiate? Because you came close twice, once.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  So I took, I took a look. I mean, I flew down and met with the folks in Phoenix and there wasn't a majority position at the time there. It was more of a minority. And I, you know, you can, I kind of drew a circle around, hey, I need like a two hour radius around from where I live so that I could actually be helpful, hopefully. And I think Minnesota was on the outside of that, right? It was like two hour and six minutes. And that was one that I went pretty far down the road with Glenn Taylor on. And you know, Utah was never in the cards.

• 4:52Logan Bartlett?

  And Ashley was the one that convinced you. Your wife was like, hey, this is, this is.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, like she just knows me and like, I like to kind of really get in and go all in on this stuff. And she's like, we're never gonna see, like, you're never gonna want, like, I know how this is gonna go. And we're here, this is what we're doing. And it really like came, there was a couple of moments where it came to fruition, like, like, okay, what about our Jazz tickets? It's like, well, we can't have Jazz tickets and on that part of that team. She's like, yeah, that our kids are.

• 5:27Logan Bartlett?

  So you, it's a very practical implication.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, like.

• 5:32Logan Bartlett?

  But and Adam told you at the time, like, hey, or maybe once you bought the Jazz, like, people don't get to buy their team. And so you cross paths with Gail Miller, I assume, in this community here. And so are you like, soft selling, hey, I'm a, you know, I'd be a good steward for the, for the organization?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  I don't know though. I mean, I asked her point blank and it wasn't a soft sell. It was like, hey, like, there's a moment in time, there's a window here. I'm willing to go do this, like.

• 6:00Logan Bartlett?

  What year is this?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  This is 2019.

• 6:04Logan Bartlett?

  And so at that point, it's in a trust, the Miller family put the Jazz in a trust.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Beginning of the year, 19, it was like, that's where it is. And the answer was not like, no, it was like, no way. It's been 35 years, our family's gonna run it. And then, you know, you know, stuff changes. I mean, we had the pandemic, we had a lot happen in the league, the bubble, like, I think, um, I think it's just become a pretty hands-on sport. And I also believe that having like a little bit more consolidation in ownership group, like where there's a single individual to make a decision helps a lot. And because you want to be nimble as an organization. And so I think as they started looking out, we started looking out that, you know, I got the call and said, hey, are you still interested?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  And it's like, absolutely.

• 6:54Logan Bartlett?

  And it was just a one to one kind of brokered.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  There was no process. There was no bid.

• 6:58Logan Bartlett?

  There's a really cool article that we can link in the show notes of her talking about her decision. I guess she gave like a pretty exclusive interview to the Desiree, whatever paper here. And it was clear it was like an emotional decision for them. And I can only imagine the process on their side.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  I mean, 35 years, I mean, I'm in, we're going into year three.

• 7:17Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  And it would be emotional for us after year three, like, like it is. You put your heart, your soul, your time, your games. It's, it's, it's like founding a company, except for the difference is, is like, at the end of the day, people don't care about enterprise software. They care about this.

• 7:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Like, like it is, it is another level. I mean, we're going into the 50th anniversary of TUTAS this year. And the emotion of fans, it's, it's just a part of who they are. That's really the largest brand, you know, I think, I think it's really the front door to Utah. And so I think when, wherever you go internationally, it's like, I mean, I was just in Croatia. You know, it's like Utah Jazz, Utah Jazz, like, oh, you're from Utah Jazz. And that's, that's how people know you.

• 8:09Logan Bartlett?

  What's something different about like the customer base of a fan versus like the customer base of an enterprise software company? It sounds like the, the passion, the level of that. But like, do you, do you think about communicating like the roadmap and the path you're on? And you guys obviously traded Donovan and Rudy Gobert. And like, how do you think about the difference between those two?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting you say that. I think, you know, there needs to be a confidence level, which I think is very similar. Um, not only from a customer base, but an employee base, if you're running a company.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  I think that, you know, you need to be able to show some sort of vision and innovation. I, I would say the difference between.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Tech and sports is in tech like

• 8:58Speaker 01

  five out of 10 is good enough. I mean, if you look at Salesforce market share, it's still below 50% and they're deemed the category winner. We don't have that. There's only one of 30 teams that's happy at the end of the year.

• 9:10Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. The Jazz have been one of the most successful franchises of the last-

• 9:13Speaker 01

  We're like the third winningest team-

• 9:15Logan Bartlett?

  But-

• 9:15Speaker 01

  -in franchises, second winningest team in the last 30 years, but we don't have a championship-

• 9:19Logan Bartlett?

  That's what everyone says is the but.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  So, you know, the question is, can you be a championship organization without winning a championship? Technically, you should be able to win one out of every 30 years. Um, but especially nowadays, it's almost like you have to purposely take a step back to put yourself in a position to win and you've got to get incredibly lucky, like incredibly lucky. Especially if you're not in one of the markets that are maybe three in the NBA, which would be, you know, LA, Miami, maybe New York, but that's a-

• 9:51Logan Bartlett?

  Right.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Um, which we haven't seen either, right? And so I think, I think this is what, um, there, there's a lot of differences there, but I, I also think there's a lot of advantages, like our fan base loves the Jazz. They, and we sold out like 251 straight games with, you know, okay teams and the best team, then a not as good team, like, and they're still there throughout it, which is a little bit different than tech and a customer base because, you know, renewal rates are all over the place and I, I think there's another loyalty level that's here with the team and, you know, I speak from the heart because that's me, like regardless, it's, it's part of who I've been since I was a kid.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  And you can't take it out of me and you don't really choose these things. Like, it's like, this is who you are.

• 10:41Logan Bartlett?

  Is there something you've learned that like is broadly applicable to business or tech? That now you've, you've been in this seat that like, hey, basketball does this and that's something that I wish more founders did as well?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think emotional, like part of running a tech company, at least for a long time, right? I think, I think running tech is great. Running tech for a long time is a different world. I mean, 22 years in tech feels like you started seven or eight companies. Because you're always just one good idea from someone else out there by being completely displaced. And so to be able to continually reinvent and find the energy to work on the same problem that long

• 11:30Speaker 01

  is a little bit different. And so I think, I think the reason why I say that is because I think is you're able to take a little bit more of a long-term approach. You've been able to manage emotion maybe a little longer than other people. And I think as you get into the NBA, what you find is, you know, we've all been in tech or someone we worked with close or an executive, you know, chooses to leave or you got to break up and it's super, what feels like a mountain or hurdle you can't get by.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  And you think like, how am I ever gonna, how are we ever gonna move on as we shift gears to go from a $200 million company to a $600 million company? Or, you know, as some of my leaders say, like, or friends say, who are now five and $10 billion companies, there's a different group for every phase of that journey.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  And it just seems like insurmountable for people. I personally know founders who have sold their companies because they didn't want to have to get a new band together. I mean, these are, these are companies we all know, just saying, hey, look, you know what? I've worked with these people for seven or eight years. It's clearly that this isn't the team to go to the next level. You know, I don't have it. I don't want to go get married, a whole new group of people, go build off sites and go do it all together. In sports, all of that is public.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  And there's another level of emotion that goes into that. Where being on that side, now looking back at these insurmountable moment, they're not insurmountable. There's a, there's another level of that where you're doing that out in the public setting. And the decisions are actually much trickier.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Because of it being a winner takes all game. If it was a market share game, you would probably behave differently. Or if you were just trying to make the playoffs every year because that made the money work and it made your stock not go down. You're playing the beaten raise model. You're not doing that in sports. And actually, the beaten raise model frustrates people a lot. I would, I would argue that our fans would rather see us like, I mean, we had, we had fans cheering for us to obviously be worse than we were last year. But we also want to build a winning culture. And so it's kind of an interesting dynamic, but

• 14:04Speaker 01

  there's a lot of learnings. There's a lot of learnings. I mean, I think, I think the overlap is, it almost blends perfectly because I normally do tech during the day and basketball's at night.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  You know, play late games, kind of sleep in. You don't get to bed till late. You're on the road or whatever, and then you're back at it and shoot arounds at three or four o'clock and then, well, tech is, for me at least, and I'm different. I'm not the rolling at 11 a.m. and stay up coding all night. I'm much more like, we're starting at six, let's go.

• 14:39Logan Bartlett?

  So you brought in Danny Ainge and there's a street in Barcelona that I went to once. It's called Las Ramblas. Have you ever been there? It's like a little, they've got a bunch of little markets on either side and whenever you go there, everyone says like, be careful. There's pickpockets, you know, get distracted.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:59Logan Bartlett?

  So I went there. I was in college. I inevitably got picked. Even though everyone told me I was gonna get picked.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:05Logan Bartlett?

  So Danny Ainge, so I bringing him in and working with him.

• 15:12Logan Bartlett?

  It feels like he is the, the Las Ramblas of this, that he's just so good at what he does from a trade standpoint and like how he architects teams and all of that. Are there elements of, of? Style that he brings to bear just in negotiating or strategizing and all that that that you've really internalized from how he operates and the style around it.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Well, sure. I think first of all, for me, it's just, you know, we go back to tech. You, you know, we live in a culture in tech where it's like surround yourself with the smartest people in the world. We don't care who's right. There's no ego. We typically have a flat, you know, org structure. We have an open office, you know, there's no offices at Qualtrics. Like, we've broken down a lot of the barriers that I would argue, even going into the NBA, like, it felt a little bit like I was going back in time because the hierarchy, and there's a reason for it in the league, which we can get into sometime, but it felt different. And so Danny is the ultimate person that you would want to work with in that tech environment.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Here's someone who's been in the league for 46 years. There's no ego. He empowers everyone. He's the opposite of what you would think he would be where, hey, don't worry, I got it. He's incredibly collaborative. So from the interns down, who you got in the draft? Who do you like? What are you doing? Like, it's just something you wouldn't predict. I mean, I remember when the draft started this year, we were on like the third pick, and he was out talking to an intern, right? And I was just like, who are you? Like, and then, and then I think he really focuses on, like, team dynamics and like how different players, even though it might not seem this way,

• 17:03Speaker 01

  bring different things to the team that most people don't understand. And that's from being a coach and being a player and being, you know, and playing with, I don't know, was it six or nine first-ballot Hall of Famers, right? There's a team dynamic that he sees. And then he's also not afraid of betting on people or doing things that are unpopular. And I think that that's, that's probably one of the biggest attributes that he has is, he will do what he believes is right regardless of anything else. And that's pretty rare in today's world.

• 17:43Logan Bartlett?

  I'm looking over your shoulder and it says, tune out the noise and play the long game.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  There's no noise in his head. There's no noise in his head.

• 17:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Right? And so I think when it comes to starting off. And building out like a culture to have him and then selecting Will Hardy as our head coach, who was the youngest coach in league when we selected him and Jay-Z and Dwayne and our ownership, like it's actually like perfect. And so, but more than that for me is just one of my, one of my good friends and to be able to go and work with him every day is just like, just right. It feels, feels fun. Like we were talking about brain typing this morning before.

• 18:25Logan Bartlett?

  Well, I actually, I actually have a brain typing question that I'll get to in a, in a second on it. Negotiating wise, do, um, entering in those conversations and no trade specifically, but like this, the, you have 29 other governors with you, right? And you need to maintain relationships with all these people and you need to build trust with them. But at the same time, you're, you know, bartering. Is there any, anything to that that you've seen? That's, that's particularly interesting?

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's a closed market.

• 18:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Right? So whoever you run up against, you're going to have to run up against all the time. And actually people are way more friendly than the media comes out to make them believe. Like we, we did a trade with Minnesota. Well, we, we talked to Minnesota all the time. Like this is, this, these are relationships. I think, um, Cleveland, you know, called this year, was like, hey, like I, I don't know what the, the number is, but like, I think the Jazz and Cleveland have done a trade at some level, like four out of the last few years, like no matter what it was, even big or little. But you know, you have to have those relationships and be connected with everyone.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  And different trades are made or, or done for different reasons, right? Um, sometimes a team just doesn't believe.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  That they have what it takes to get over that next hump. They're close and and by the way,

• 19:58Speaker 01

  maybe even get to that point where they're right below that moment. They've had to sacrifice. So if they were going to go even more in, it's like literally almost you're setting the franchise back without a higher than 5% chance of winning the whole thing. You kind of got to take a look at it. And that's a situation that that we found ourselves in and that other people around the league, you can go around the league and be like, whoa, these people are on a journey. They were supposed to go do something. Their players are starting to get into higher contracts. The financials are starting to, it's starting to get up there. And they're not going to win it. Or they don't have a good chance of winning. Then you start seeing moves being made. And

• 20:42Speaker 01

  you know, you've also got to get lucky. I mean, if someone, you know, we were getting ready to host the All-Star game and what you probably don't want to do is come in and move to All-Stars. When you're hosting it the next year, I don't think anyone had Lowry Markkinen starting the All-Star game on their bingo card, right? And

• 21:02Speaker 01

  so, but I know Danny and Jay-Z, they loved Lowry and you know, we'd seen him play in Euro hoops and like there was something there if he could be a more focused player in the offense.

• 21:14Logan Bartlett?

  One of the other things you've done since taking over is the you got rid of the RCN deal and you've gone direct to consumer.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, the RCN.

• 21:22Logan Bartlett?

  Your, your RSN, sorry, not RCN. What were the inputs into that and how how you sort of, because it's you and the Suns, I think, that have the

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're all different, but they're, they're, look, the RSN model and cable and media altogether is like pretty disrupt right now, like it's being disrupted in a bunch of different ways, but the reason why it's coming up now is because most of these contracts, I mean, we were, we were on a 10-year contract. So if you actually think about when this contract was signed, it was signed in an era that

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Isn't like the same. I mean, there's like Netflix DVD days, like all of these different things. And what we would do is we would basically take all of our media rights. We would hand them over to a third party. They would give us a check and then just go. And we didn't have input on anything else. That was it. We were just basically franchising those out. And the problem is, I come from a world of experience and customer experience. And we have three, we have the fastest growing state. We have the youngest state in Utah. And we were showing our games to about 1.2 of the 3.4 million people live in the state,

• 22:36Speaker 01

  let alone showing games to the folks in Idaho and Wyoming, which are right here. And so, great, we were getting a guaranteed check, but we actually weren't building our brand. It was the number one thing I would hear from fans is like, we can't watch the games. You know, our players, our coach, Danny, ownership, like, we work way too hard to not let the product be out. And so what we said was, we're going to basically become free agents. We're not going to sign a media deal. We're gonna work on a deal that's over the air. So we go to 3.2 million people. We're actually going to sign a deal for streaming. So anyone who wants to consume the media in a streaming environment can do that. We're

• 23:21Speaker 01

  actually going to expand our market and go into the neighboring states. And so we're going to ink that deal. And so we think we can go from like essentially showing games to 1.2 million people to maybe four or five million. And that'll be done overnight, basically. And so that's a really unique model, but I also think it positions us for where media's going. We don't know where it's going to be in the next four or five years. But this idea that you enter into these long-term relationships where you don't control your own destiny, and you don't control the unproduct.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  We don't want to be a part of that. No matter how much that check is, it's not as big as us building out the brand.

• 24:02Logan Bartlett?

  And is that the trade? I mean, it sounds so logical to me. Hey, why, of course you would do this the way you're talking about it, but is it really the, the cash flow cycle?

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, you're, you're talking, you're talking, I mean.

• 24:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, hundreds and hundreds and plus.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  But, but in our situation, we, we've had, I think there's a couple of teams I've seen that have a little bit of a dislocation in their market versus that check size. Okay, so if I were to look at, I don't, I don't want to get too, too much into teams business, but there are some teams that their, their check size is so big, they could never do it.

• 24:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Like the, the gap is too, we have had such a fast growing market in those 10 years that we're going to take a hit, but we think because of that market size increase being the fastest growing state, that we can get back there eventually.

• 24:56Logan Bartlett?

  Field on prem to SaaS transition.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a hundred. I mean, this is exactly what it is. And you're, you're going after eyeballs now.

• 25:07Logan Bartlett?

  Now being, so you have 29 other people that you interact with fairly regularly, right? Plus Adam, plus whatever, all the other people, Adam, like he's my friend. And are there things within the league that you've like found as your own passion projects within the organization itself beyond making the jazz product as, as good as it can be? Or you're still sort of getting your sea legs in the league?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  No, I mean, it takes a little while. I think I've been pretty tech focused. Like I think, you know, historically in the league, my, we're the youngest group.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Definitely one that's actually operating or has been operating in tech still. Where, you know, I think one of the things Adam told me when I came in was, hey, like whatever you have learned, don't check it at the door. Bring that to, to the NBA. We want that. Which is kind of different than what you would think. Instead of going in and learning that, it's like, no, no, no, no. We, we, we want you in here bringing everything from Qualtrics and what it is. So I think, I think the experience side has been something that, that we love. Like if you actually think about what Qualtrics does is we're powering the customer, the fan, the employee experience of the world, you know? Like 50 different airlines, whether you fly on Delta or everything.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  It's like, it's always quality. We're trying to help them through not only what happened on their current experience they're providing, but where they want to go next. And so there's a lot of that within the NBA. So how does that translate? Um, you know, I just joined the media committee, right? On, you know, we're coming into a next big media deal, which I think is a really pivotal moment in the league on like how that goes. And so.

• 26:46Logan Bartlett?

  It will either go very well or very poorly. And we'll see how, I mean, I'm sure it'll be good.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'll be good. But, but I think, I think like how this is done is super, super interesting. And there's a great group of people and I'm excited to go and contribute at that level. Um, I think what we've done on, um, using the NBA platform, I think we, we host All-Star differently. I mean, it really felt like we advocated the entire city and state for the All-Star, which was what we wanted to do. Um, and I think everyone who came felt that this last year. Uh, I believe, um, you know, we just launched the clothing line, right? We, we launched our own clothing line called Counterpoint.

• 27:26Logan Bartlett?

  The NBA did?

• 27:27Speaker 01

  No, the Jazz did, right? I'm just joined the social justice committee for, for the NBA and how we're going to use, um, the NBA to make community impact, um, in many different areas. And I think that came from our work with Fight for the Fight, the Jersey Patch. And, you know, we, we know this in tech worlds that the platform of tech or a business is the best way to, to make change. Um, and when we sold Qualtrics, my, one of my biggest fears was wait, we have this massive engine to actually do good. And it's way better than any individual, no matter how much money they have to do. You'd rather have an engine that could continue to do good because you have so many more resources, not just money, but help.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  And the NBA is another level of that platform. And so we've seen this idea, we sponsored the jersey patch. And this is the last year that we're doing the jersey patch, but we raised $50 million for cancer research. And now we're building out another campaign with the NBA for cancer research.

• 28:29Logan Bartlett?

  And we, by the way, so Five for the Fight is

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, Five for the Fight.

• 28:32Logan Bartlett?

  When you went to your board at Qualtrics and said, hey, by the way, we're going to do this nonprofit thing that was super expensive and maybe tell, tell, tell what that is for people who don't know.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so when the jersey patch came out, we put Five for the Fight on the jersey and I,

• 28:45Logan Bartlett?

  Paid for by Qualtrics.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Paid for by Qualtrics and donate and not put Qualtrics there. Which is the first time in sports. And I mean, Donovan Mitchell wins a slam dunk contest and you're seeing Five for the Fight instead of Qualtrics. I'm just like, this one is amazing, but it's also, it hurts. And that's kind of when you want to be, you want to be in a spot where it's like, it hurts, especially with enterprise software where brand lift is the hardest thing to drive. It's so hard to drive.

• 29:08Logan Bartlett?

  Ethereal and what?

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so hard to drive brand lift in enterprise software. Right? And so it was a perfect thing, but it's been such a cool thing for the company.

• 29:17Logan Bartlett?

  And it's for cancer.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's cancer research. And we said, we're going to raise, you know, in five years, we're going to raise $50 million. And we raised $50 million for cancer research. And it all started by using that platform of the NBA. Now, we're just mixing up the campaigns. So someone else will grab the jersey patch, but we're putting a bell and we're doing cancer stuff all throughout the arena at the All-Star game. The celebrity All-Star game, the beneficiary was Five for the Fight. Like, we would have never dreamed of, who, who would have known that that would have been, you know, a thing? Like, I was shooting three pointers with Dwyane Wade to, to go and like, every bucket counted for Five for the Fight. Like, that's insane.

• 29:58Logan Bartlett?

  You, you referenced earlier, brain typing and productivity is one of the things I'm curious about. So one of the things you, I think you said was it's not actually about being productive 100% of the day, but instead getting the most out of your day.

• 30:15Logan Bartlett?

  How do you think about that? And how do you sort of orient your day from a productivity standpoint?

• 30:20Speaker 01

  So productivity.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Over time is tricky. Like, um, some people are like, I've done the same thing for 20 years. This is how I do it. I'm not that person. Like, I want to switch it up. I will switch it up days. I will switch it up weeks.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  I, I'm always trying to introspect, how am I feeling? How am I feeling? Cause productivity is a feeling. Um, there's definitely a measurable outcome. But I think it's as much also an internal feeling. If we just assume we all work hard, like, how, how is it that we're getting through everything? And how do we feel like we're getting through it? Like, I want to feel good about my work. And for me to do that, not only do I need to do it, I need to do it well by the way that it's measured. But I don't always feel the same way. So over the years, um, there's a lot that I did.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Uh, I had an admin who was a statistician who would go back through and like, measure every hour I spent at the end of a quarter and give it to me to let me know. Like, okay, and we'd sit there, turn the paper over and be like, okay, how much time do you spend on all of these categories? And I was always way off. So our minds don't really understand the productivity, the way that we think we do. And so one of the things that, that I begin to tell people is like, okay, first of all, everyone needs to feel like they're an individual contributor. One of the problems you get into, and I'm sure a lot of people in your pod are CEOs and leaders and executives.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Like, you can't sit up and operate as this high-paid router, just taking things and routing them. HR shit stuff will wear you down eventually. Yeah, and just like, that's not gonna make you feel better or be able to be better for the rest of the company. And so in my case, I found myself in that position a lot. And so what I would do is like, I would wake up in the morning. And instead of just going right into the office, I'd go have breakfast by myself. And that was my individual contributor time. I would literally sit there with my music in, my headphones, and I would get some wins before I went and got into the office. Because then it's like, alright, bring it. Come on, I'm ready for it.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  As opposed to getting into the office, everything's coming. And my wife and I call them zingers, like we get zingers, like, "Hey, how's your day going? I got like five zingers this morning." And we all know what those are, because it's just like, ah. Like, you want to get some momentum before that happens. Mornings are everything for me.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  But I think right now, you know, I'm trying to find my new way to be productive when I've got my hands on a lot of things. How does that work? Physical space is really important. Like, where I'm at is really important for me to be productive. I'm incredibly productive on airplanes. It's weird. Like, I will actually think through that and use that time as like some of my favorite time. Like, I love airplane time. I'll write, I'll email, I'll get caught up, like, that's it. And so just understanding those moments. And then, understanding also that, and this is an MBA thing as well, is

• 33:51Speaker 01

  this is part of the reason why, as we think about the future of work and where we're working from and working in person and working remote. Team productivity is what we're measured on. There's no individual winners if the team is losing. And I think that's been a little bit lost in this idea of tech. Is so many people saying, "Well, personally, I am more productive at home." I don't care. The other part of your job that maybe the group hasn't told you about is that you're supposed to share your information with the team members. And you're supposed to be an instrumental part in helping them win.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  And I've watched too many people over the last four or five years saying, "Hey, I'm winning personally, but the team is not winning."

• 34:44Speaker 01

  And by the way, it also goes the other way. If the team is winning, are you winning personally? And we know that that relationship is always happening. Hey, the company's winning, but what's in it for me? Well, it's got to be the other way around as well. And that dynamic is really important. And so I believe that, you know, I, I know at Qualtrics when we were, and this is a hot topic, but when we were remote, it was super hard to get the team to win.

• 35:15Logan Bartlett?

  And everyone probably, or most of the company probably felt they were more productive.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 35:19Logan Bartlett?

  At home, because like you're not getting interrupted, right?

• 35:22Speaker 01

  But if we were looking at what our personal productivity would do for a company like ours in 2004, no one would have thought by adding up all their personal productivity, that we would be where we were in 2010.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  But something magic happened when we got together. We, we not only like one X, we like three or four or five X and had breakthroughs. And trying to dissect and pull that apart and understanding which pieces and where. I, I don't know, I'm not saying that everyone needs to be in office all the time. But I'm saying is what matters is the team wins. If a company can get there where the team's winning, but that for me is, is everything. I don't, I don't care if one of our players has a 70 point night or a 50 point night, if the team loses.

• 36:18Logan Bartlett?

  Where do Qualtrics land on the, uh, what's the current policy?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  I mean, it's shifting. We're trying to get everyone back into the office, um, depending on location and role and function. There are some functions where we don't think they need to be back. But where, where I'm much more interested is saying, hey, what, what about the other part of everyone's job? And how well have we passed on this tribal knowledge that we have as an organization down? And that's where it doesn't show up in personal productivity. Because you don't understand how many people are watching you and watching what you do. And you're setting the tone for an organization. But if, if you've got 2,500 people who joined the company since everyone's been remote.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Super, super difficult.

• 37:07Logan Bartlett?

  Now, you weren't officially the CEO until the Sequoia and Excel round, is that right? And so it was just you, Jared.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, we called it like the team of four.

• 37:18Logan Bartlett?

  Who, who was the four?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Uh, my father and then Stuart Orgel.

• 37:22Logan Bartlett?

  And so it was the four of you and then Sequoia said, hey, someone needs to be a CEO. And Jared said, well, it's not me. You guys kind of did this and you were the.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would, I remember sitting in front of Leone, Maritz and Schreier and Sequoia's office. And they looked over and said, hey, we're going to write the check, but one of you needs to be CEO.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  And it was just awkward silence because Jared, Jared had just moved back from Google a couple of years earlier. And he just, he was running Google China and he was like, okay, wait, I'm not moving back to Utah for a young startup and working for my younger brother. Like that's not in the cards. What have you done? Like, look what I've done.

• 38:03Logan Bartlett?

  But he's also like, I don't want to be the media facing.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  And then he stood up and like, it was awkward stylen- silence. It was like, it felt like forever. And all of a sudden he stood up and he's like, it's him. He's the CEO. And I was like, what? He's like, I don't do media. And that was it. That was his whole rationale.

• 38:20Logan Bartlett?

  And so one of the things you said though, I, I know it was, um, it was growing experience, like being a CEO is for, for anyone, I'm sure. Uh, but that, what you benefited most from was being a fast learner over the experience itself. What, what was stepping into the, the CEO role? I guess, did anything actually change that day when Jared said it's him? And then what was the development process of being a fast learner?

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Well, I think Jared, I mean, he's just such a unique individual, but he, he definitely made it his mission to prepare me. And that's a pretty amazing thing to do. Like his whole mission was to basically mentor me. And I think he did that for 10 years. Which is kind of crazy if you think about it. He knew where my blind spots were. And then he augmented his own growth to augment me. So someone once asked, like, what do you get at or what is Jared good at? And he's like, I'm basically good at everything Ryan's not. And that's why I think qualtrics work.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  That being said, the CEO or any executive on a high trajectory needs to be the fastest learner in the building. And like, when you think you're dead set on something, it's a hard balance. It's like, how do you have this incredible confidence and fear? But at the same time, to be able to lead and do things. But at the exact same time, you're able to admit when you're wrong and like move on and know when to take, take.

• 40:01Logan Bartlett?

  We were talking about this a little bit before we started taping, but there's a, there's a visualization exercise, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, I think, did in the early days of Microsoft about where they would look, think about what the company would be in the distant future. And build towards that, I guess. I've heard you reference it. Is that a strategy exercise in your mind? A leadership exercise? Why, why have you referenced that? Like, how has that impacted you?

• 40:26Speaker 01

  I think just going through enough. And so first of all, I, I do know of this. Going through enough planning exercises at the beginning of the year. I think a lot of times we, we write something down or we get a group together and we say, hey, you know, championship on three, but there's actually no way we're going to get there.

• 40:47Logan Bartlett?

  It's an output.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  It's an, it's an output and it makes everyone feel good in the moment. But I, I just like to start with the end in mind on a lot of things. And it actually, you know, it's this concept of almost like, let's do the pre-mortem instead of the post-mortem. Like, let's, let's go through and actually go through the pain to say, okay, let's take our business in 2026. You know, if you're a company and you work in SaaS and you're saying, hey, look, we've got, you know, a hundred million dollar deals right now. And you're growing at 40%. You've got to ask yourself, okay, in four years, how many million dollar deals are you going to have? Oh, wow.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Like, you actually got to be doing that every month. Or every quarter. Like, people won't go through that exercise. But it actually provides a roadmap for you without even creating one. You know that when you're in the moment and you've got to make a decision that's going to impact deal size or talent. That you know what you're solving for already. And so,

• 42:00Speaker 01

  you know, we'll, we'll often, you know, whether it's product or whether it's something or just like, okay, bring me the, bring me your press release. Let's walk through your press release at the end of the year, end of the quarter, the end of 90 days. You're, you really like this product. We're shipping it. I want to release it. I want you to write the press release. And I want you to write like what it is. And I've even used this exercise when we were acquiring a company. I remember we acquired a stats company out of Y Combinator called Stats IQ. And it was like, oh, we do stats. And it's like, okay, you do, you do stats in the cloud? And it's like, yeah. And I was like, all right, let's go down and sit down and write this press release. And we, we wrote this press release and it was like, this is the first ever low code, no code. Stats cloud platform

• 42:45Speaker 01

  in the world. And it's now hooked on to Qualtrics. So basically every single person is going to be able to become a statistician by using Qualtrics and taking their data and we've completely democratized it. And it's like, well, no, we don't do that. I was like, well, well, no, that's exactly what we're It took a minute, but then that's exactly what we ended up doing with this product. Cause that became the vision just by simply going through that. That exercise. Having to actually talk through, having to say, no, we're not going to do that. Or yeah, we're going to do.

• 43:20Logan Bartlett?

  So it's not as much, it's not, it's kind of neither strategy nor leadership. It's a forcing function of an exercise of the tactics that will actualize to an outcome in some way. It's sort of like the score will take care of itself or whatever it is. Like, let's focus on the inputs of this as well as the long-term vision.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a little bit like if you were comparing to basketball, hey, if we, if we make five three pointers and we get 70% of the rebounds, we're going to win no matter what. And so what you're doing is you're looking at a moment that you're putting down and memorializing.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  And then you're looking back at the team, the product, or the boat, and you're like, "Yeah, okay, I see that." Or, "Yeah, that's what we're doing. That's gonna work." And so you're able to course correct based on that outcome.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  And I think we do it in life. I've shared this story a bunch, like, so many people I know in life feel like they're doing a bad job at everything. It's a common thing you hear. "I'm doing a bad job as a parent. I'm doing a bad job as a husband, or a wife, or whatever it is. I'm doing a bad job as a leader." And then the question is, is like, "Okay, let's just take this week." What would that moment be on Saturday night? Where you would feel like you did an amazing job?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  And most people can't articulate it. I was like, "So you're gonna feel bad about yourself all the time." But you can't articulate what's gonna make you feel like you killed it this week? Like, what is it? Well, let's say as a husband, like with Ash, and be like, "Okay, if I like took Ash to lunch one day this week, I got her flowers, and I did something else nice that no one was expecting, I'd actually feel like I was a pretty good husband, and I was clean this week. I like cleaned the house, or whatever." Like, I would feel like I did some.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  And I'm like, "Whoa, I could do all that by Tuesday."

• 45:19Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  If I thought through it. And then like, the kids, the same way, like individualizing it. And that's the difference, besides waking up with no plan of how you're gonna get something done. And so, in a way, you're childproofing, or you're creating a framework. It's a framework to think about things through. And actually think about big things.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  So what seems like moonshots actually become just what you.

• 45:50Logan Bartlett?

  I want to back up to the call tricks story a little bit here. So, so you had a one nine GPA at high school. You didn't take the SATs and then you only graduated so that you could go on a trip to South Korea with your, with your friends. Can you tell me a little bit about like Ryan Smith up to 18 years old?

• 46:11Speaker 01

  It wasn't, it wasn't a good picture. I don't know why, like I, I was pretty athletic.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  I worked at a golf course when I was 14. My parents split up when I was 14. I kind of just took that moment and just didn't, didn't really care, you know, world was rocked a little bit and, you know, you kind of take these moments and you kind of get back on the horse and I kind of, it was just a weird time. I went as a teenager and just, I just didn't care about a whole lot and dropped out of high school as a sophomore and like literally dropped out, didn't go to school. I played golf during the day and didn't have a lot of supervision to tell me or

• 47:03Speaker 01

  authority that could tell me what to do. And then, you know, my friends, I actually started working at one of the early tech companies and sold to Xite at home. And someone was looking out for me and just said, hey, you're up to no, come over here.

• 47:21Logan Bartlett?

  When you were like 16?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  And I was like 16, it was my uncle and I, he gave me a job and I was with all these tech guys and two of them had just gotten back from Seoul, Korea where they were teaching English. And I was like, well, I'm going to teach English. And I went to my dad and said, I'm going to Seoul, Korea. And he said, well, you got to graduate high school.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  And so like in three months, I just threw it all. I didn't care about the GBA, didn't care about anything and then went and went over to Seoul, Korea.

• 47:50Logan Bartlett?

  You showed up and the job wasn't there.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Job wasn't there. My friends came home. I called my dad and said, hey, this isn't working out for the time. Go to the airport for an international ticket. And he's like, no, like.

• 48:03Logan Bartlett?

  Cause your friend's dad's bought the tickets.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  They bought the tickets and, and my dad's like, no, like you got a place to sleep. Good. Go, go sort this out.

• 48:11Logan Bartlett?

  And you didn't really have a place to sleep.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  No, and his, his whole idea was like, look, you're at rock bottom here. There's, there's a chance you might learn something if you can hang out there. And, you know, I ended up coming home from Korea a year later.

• 48:27Logan Bartlett?

  And so what do you, in that moment, your dad says, figure it out and there's no job. And so you go and find a job.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  I had a contact at one individual and I went and just like literally called his place all the time, went and found him. It was life or death. And, you know, over that year, I had to learn about myself. I had to learn, first of all, are my ideas good? Do I know how to work? All the things that probably I didn't feel like I was and then I got some wins. And I started making some money and I started like building a business. And just having confident that like, okay, there's this connection between what's in my brain. And what's in my heart and my feet, I can go do something.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  And I think it kind of paved the way for the rest of my life. And it was that moment where it was like, all right, you're going to have to go create something.

• 49:24Logan Bartlett?

  In, in a quite literal sense, I mean, I, I've heard you talk about it, but like you would sleep at the school and then make up your bed and then the kids would come in and you would teach and then that was like your rotation.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no one knew, no one knew that I was like living on the couch. Like it would be one of those things where you find the employee sleeping in the, the, the hallway or the, the stairwell. Like I had no, I like, no one knew.

• 49:49Logan Bartlett?

  It's quite literally like a movie scene, it feels like. And then from there, so you established like more regiment and sort of get back on track for that. And then did you go straight from there to Mexico?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I decided, you know, it was interesting. I moved in with, I actually ended up moving in with four guys who had served LDS missions in Korea. And I was like, wait, like this world's different. Because they weren't out partying all the time. They were, they were super buttoned up. They spoke the language, but they were fun. They were like hilarious.

• 50:30Logan Bartlett?

  And I was like, I thought there were only two.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought there was only two paths. I was like, wait a minute, how can you be like someone who is contagious that you want to hang out with all the time, but you're not out partying? Like that, that didn't compute to me.

• 50:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  And I was like, I want to be like them. Like, I actually want to be like them. And I started getting into it and I decided I wanted to go on a mission and I hadn't, I hadn't really been on that path at all. And I came home and you kind of submit your papers where you don't know, you go to one of 300 countries, you pay for it. So I'd saved enough money in Korea. Not only did I want to go, I had saved all the money. And I knew my brothers wouldn't believe me that I was going to do this. So I, I remember walking in and saying, hey, I'm going on a mission and here's the money to pay for it. And they were like, wow, he's serious. There's the money. Right? And I get called, you get a letter, and I get called to Mexico City. And so like, here I am going, whoa, I was just in like the fifth largest city in the world. Now I'm

• 51:28Speaker 01

  the number one largest city in the world. And by the time I got to Mexico that summer,

• 51:36Speaker 01

  I was like, I can handle it. I was like, okay, I'm built for this. And then it was just like, it was like this three and a half year period where it was almost a little bit like, hey, listen, you screw up, like, there's a bigger plan for you. I know you can't see it, but there's a bigger plan. And almost like someone was grabbing me saying, hey, like, you're not going down that road. Like, this is where you're supposed to be. And went on my mission, came back from my mission, decided I want to go to school. What? I was like, wait, like, I've only got a 1.9 GPA, I haven't taken the ACT or any of this stuff. Registered at a community college. Got a 4.0, transferred up to BYU, got into BYU, which is incredibly difficult.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  End up getting into the business school, end up starting Qualtrics, ends up meeting my wife. And kind of the rest is history. And so,

• 52:26Speaker 01

  like, for me, there's like two lives of Ryan Smith. There's like the prior life or the before life. And then like the life where it's like, no, we're gonna go do some. Um, pretty, it's pretty incredible when you kind of think back and look at it that way.

• 52:40Logan Bartlett?

  I, I've heard you say that you, some of the lessons or a bunch of the lessons you've learned on the mission, and maybe it's mission and, and South Korea. You use throughout your life as a, as a leader, executive.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 52:53Logan Bartlett?

  What, what were some of the interesting things that came out of that, that, that are applicable to leadership?

• 53:00Speaker 01

  The one I try to teach my kids is like walking down the street every day in Mexico City. And this is not like, I mean, I had the worst places. I was in like, I was the place where the locals don't go. And, and this is every day. I lived there. I lived right by the airport. I lived, um, all over down there. Like, one of them is, um, just awareness, awareness around you. I mean, like, head on a swivel. And like, I think that's something that, that you can't, you can't really teach. Um, so that's one that I've always was kind of top of mind. The other thing is, um, you know, when, when you're on a mission, you're working towards a singular goal and focus. And there's incredible power of focus. You're not doing anything else.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  And that was such a luxury to feel the level of focus that you could actually get when you actually kind of tune out noise, right? As, as we're looking back.

• 53:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Right? Um, and then I think, I think relationships matter. Like, if I look at the relationships of the people who I still work with, who, you know, I, I work with one of the individuals who changed my life in Seoul, Korea. Stuart Orgel was one of our co-founders who was a mission companion.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Like that that matters. And then I also think that like doing it your way like this was not the way I was. People thought I would go people, you know, I I decided at that point like I'm never going back to that old Ryan. And like everyone, everywhere I've been in my professional career has been like. Like accepting of who I am today and what I stand for and what I believe. And like people don't see that all the time. They think that it's going to be hard. I don't drink. I don't do certain things like. Like it's never been a problem. It's actually been an advantage. And so I think that like, I think it's inspirational for people to say, hey, like every one of us is a unique soul.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  And a unique individual and like you can do it your way. And it can work out. And so I think I think that's a lesson that I'm like trying to tell my kids as well as like. Look, all of you, and I have five kids, they all come in different packages. Even though mom and dad are like, you know. You know, thinking that they're all going to be kind of this similar spin off of us, they're not. And so how do you unlock the kind of creative magic that each one of them has and. And kind of let them believe that they can go do that. Um, or or for me, like. I don't think I don't know that my kids are ever going to have that career experience.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Like that was pretty unique and and pretty much saved my life.

• 55:49Logan Bartlett?

  So now you're at BYU, you have an internship in Southern California, you get a call. Dad has cancer, you come home and that was actually kind of the genesis of. Paul Trix sort of came out of that.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Like, um, I just in like. Post career mission fashion emailed a bunch of people in the business school who were alumni at BYU at the Marriott School and said, hey. I'm going to be in California. Do you have a job and someone emailed me and this is, this is right. I mean, this is like 2001. Right? Um, kind of not a, not a time for a startup. And someone said like, hey, I'm about ready to hire someone. I'm at HP. That was a stable job then. Everyone had gone through that tech boom. And then everyone rushed back to brick and mortar. And didn't want to go to do with anything with tech because everyone got boomed.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Or got, got, everyone got burned. And so I was down there. I was in the middle of internship. It was going great. I was living in Huntington Beach, driving up to, to like Long Beach area.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  And my dad called and I just got that call that it's like, what do you do? He's like, I just want to tell you personally, like, I got some really bad news. This is happening. You know? I don't have much longer. No one knows. And I'm trying to figure it out. Family devastated.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  And I had become pretty close with my dad. Like, I think, I think that's one thing that, you know, post Korea, he, he's just a gifted human. Who was able to do incredibly hard things for me. But he knew me. He knew how to communicate with me. Where like ages 14, 18, one of those things where like the older I got, the wiser he got.

• 57:38Logan Bartlett?

  Amazing how much he learned and that, yeah.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  He really grew.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  And then like, he just had his own way. Like he'd never do anything for me, but he'd always be there for me. And, and so I was just like, no, I gotta go be there for. Like you've totally changed my life. Like I am going to be there for you. And he, I, I was there and he'd go do his radiation treatments and then like he'd come home and was floored. I was like, we can't do this. Like, let's go do something.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  You know, I had been working in tech. He had this idea. He had been working on it. And we just said like, this is what we're going to go do. But he had, he had throat cancer. And, um, you know, couldn't speak. And Qualtrics when it started was incredibly sophisticated. I mean, this was an academic product and the people on the other side were PhD researchers who were some of the best and brightest in the world. I didn't know anything about them. And so we really had to wing it. We really had to say, hey, like, I mean, he was writing stuff down while I'm on, I'm on calls with like, like, you know, professors from UNC. I'll never forget like John Lynch at Duke who runs, you know, Dan Ariely, all those

• 58:51Speaker 01

  people learned under him. He's, he's the godfather of research and like, I'm on the phone with him trying to guess what he's going to do or the problems he's got in this little software app that we've created.

• 59:02Logan Bartlett?

  Cause your dad was a professor, I guess.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  He was a professor and we were, we were in such a niche group. And that's when I decided like, hey dad, like, if you can be that side, like, I'm really good at the business side, I can grow this thing. Like, and then Stu joined and like, we got up and we got it going.

• 59:20Logan Bartlett?

  Was your dad coding it?

• 59:22Speaker 01

  He was, he was helping code it, but it was very much the methodology around it because at the time, the integrity of the process of research online.

• 59:31Logan Bartlett?

  The thought tree.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Research online was not a widely accepted practice. I mean, in fact, all the journals would say it wasn't valid because of sample sizing and everything else. And it wasn't in person. And that's crazy today, but that's, those were literally the obstacles we would deal with. And so we had to have a lot of, you know, blessing from academics who had published in A journals to say, hey, actually, what people say online is actually true at some level. And you can test it and you could actually publish from it. And so getting all these people to publish and then from there, wanting to be able to take that to corporations.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Like, there was still a lot of skepticism. And this was back when you wouldn't enter your credit card online.

• 1:00:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  You remember those days?

• 1:00:21Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Like, so going through all of that was, was interesting.

• 1:00:26Logan Bartlett?

  So, so you got it going and Northwestern signed up and UNC signed up and you got some schools using it. But your dad was kind of like, this isn't a real thing. You go get another job. And so then you were at Ford?

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, like Ford was recruiting. They were taking one or two students from BYU and like I got the job and then they wanted me to go to Dearborn. And I was like, I want to do, I want to do Qualtrics. And my dad's like, no, like you can't do Qualtrics. So I convinced him to let me go to Denver. My job was to work in brand marketing and launch the F-150 for the West, the new body style. So I had all the states in the West. And I remember working there and then on, on my lunch break, I was still like closing deals. And I closed Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  And I closed the deal for about as much as they would pay me at Ford for the year. And I remember calling my dad and I was like, are we doing this? Like, like I'm, I'm like literally working in the mornings at luncheon at night. If I went full time, like there's something there. But I was in school as well. And so it was complicated, but we got to the right thing. And I think, um, I had to fight for it. And I also learned a ton at Ford. Like, like I, I learned that like, hey, you can market, you're good. Like you understand the brand side.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  Um, you have good ideas and you know, especially with multimillion dollar ad agencies coming in and pitching how you're going to launch this. And, um, all of that mattered.

• 1:02:04Logan Bartlett?

  You touched on expanding out of corporate. Uh, I, I know that wasn't easy or getting out of the academic world. I would say that's probably not something we encourage our companies to do to start in academia and then expand to corporate. Your first seven enterprise customers left, I think. Uh, I don't know if Royal Caribbean was one of them, but, uh, first two sales reps wanted to quit. How did you go about expanding from? The academic market to the corporate market and was that the vision that like, okay, if this is going to be big, we need to get these other people?

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  I mean, this was probably like part of the press release thesis of like, okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to go after academia because we're already here and we can pay the bills that way. But the, the real pitch is like, how do we get them to tell corporations because academics have no money and, you know, we didn't have money for marketing. So we needed to use, we always viewed the academic as like, hey, if we treat academics different than everyone else, they'll be great marketing for us. And every company wants to break into that, that world. This is very much like back in the day was like, oh, this is like Apple and the Apple one and Apple two. And you learn through academia. This is like Lexus Nexus. This is like, people have done this model. Everyone wants to do that. There's not a product out there. It's like, hey, we don't want the market.

• 1:03:22Logan Bartlett?

  Cause you start and then graduate and Esri did it famously with like maps, right? And like now it's the standard in the software industry.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  It happens, but it's a horrible, you're never getting investment.

• 1:03:32Logan Bartlett?

  You can't monetize it.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  You can't monetize it. And so we, we were just stuck there. And then a couple of things happened. Number one is students started graduating. Kellogg made it a mandatory class. We started doing their field study projects for their MBA students. And I specifically remember calling every single MBA student who did a field study for a third party and saying, hey, could you make the connection so that we could go and sell? I mean, it was grassroots. Like this wasn't, we didn't have a team. This was, this is me on the phone, waking up every morning and saying, hey, who are we calling? Stu's doing the same thing and servicing. I'm like, this is how we're doing it.

• 1:04:08Logan Bartlett?

  So just to be clear, academic, they did a field study at Northwestern for MBA. And you're like, hey, can you put me in touch with your contact at?

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Hundred percent, like I a hundred percent, like I specifically remember someone from doing a research study on Qualtrics from Heineken.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  And it went well. And it's the first time they've ever done anything like it and me saying, all right, give me your contact. Like, let's go. And they end up buying a $50,000 license. And so this was, this was how we were gonna go do it. And then it was our job to land them and, and kind of educate, because we were doing something new for these companies. And the idea was, is like, look, research isn't this outsourcing, it's not a part, you can actually predict the future. And like, you can be right. And that was our whole pitch. 2007, 8, 9 happened, where marketing departments pretty much went away. I mean, you know, we have a lot of volatility in the macro environment right now, and you hear every earnings, oh, well, the macro environment, unless you're in video.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  But like, if you look at, if you look at that world, that's interesting, but actually, companies are still intact. Back then, companies were not intact for us. And so, but what did happen is everyone went back to universities, universities had more money than ever. And so, we got a fresh start and we kept rolling. And the whole time, we were bootstrapped. You know, if we didn't make it, we didn't need it.

• 1:05:31Logan Bartlett?

  And did, did some of the brands move stuff in-house that was otherwise done by agencies?

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  100%. And so during, during the pandemic, my pitch was, cheaper, faster, better, you can do more, and there's not a better time for you to do this than right now. Like, you have to understand what the market's gonna react, because you used to be able to have a certain amount of inefficiency in your budgets and in your teams. You're actually being asked to run in a deficit right now. And you have no margin for error. We can help you be right. If you're gonna launch a commercial, let's test it. If you're gonna do this, let's test it. You know, your websites, let's make sure that Qualtrics is on every part of your websites. Your employee base, let's make sure that people are all right. And that was a model that we kind of built out.

• 1:06:18Logan Bartlett?

  I heard you say that one competitor, I don't know if this is true, but raised more money, had a better product and lower prices in the early days, which seems like a recipe that's hard to beat. I don't know if all through, if you're just being overly humble about that, but it was a competitive, there were other players, better funded, certainly.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we had one competitor in 2005 and six. I remember that it raised forty, forty million dollars, which was a lot at the time.

• 1:06:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, you had zero.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had zero. They were on the front page of every magazine and they had a better product and it was cheaper.

• 1:06:50Logan Bartlett?

  How did you out execute these, like, was there, I mean, the academic thing probably helped?

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  So I think we did out execute them, but I also think that they didn't get out of their own way. And this is the problem, you know, I've seen over a 22 year period. It's like, I knew that they were raising money and they were just kind of blowing through it. And we, we, we literally had to tune out the noise and play the long game. And sure enough, they self sabotaged because their cap table was so screwed.

• 1:07:23Logan Bartlett?

  Is Qualtrics a better business because of those constraints that you bootstrapped and therefore you had to value the money?

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And I don't think it's because of the money. I mean, although the money is the, really the true.

• 1:07:38Logan Bartlett?

  The forcing function.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Forcing function there, but the symptom or what comes out of it is you actually have to be a, you know, as a company. If you, if you had, I mean, my number one question is when I sit on boards or I'm in board meetings, like, okay, if we handed you another twenty million dollars, what would change? And the answer is normally not a whole lot.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Because they've got to be forced and out of necessity, you think of how you're going to go do something. You're not calling Heineken through a reference of a field study project if you've got a bunch of cash in the bank. You're just not. But when that's your only thing, you, you see signals that are different for opportunity when you're completely resourcing.

• 1:08:24Logan Bartlett?

  You get an offer in 2012 to sell for 500 million bucks and it's totally bootstrapped. And you guys were in a fortuitous position with that. Why not sell? What were the inputs that you were thinking about at that?

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  I mean, everyone told us to. I mean,

• 1:08:40Logan Bartlett?

  Who was everyone at that?

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Everyone I talked to in the state of Utah, everyone that was here. I had one advisor who became the chairman of the board. He's the only one that said, don't sell. And he sat me and my brother, my dad, and my brother and my dad looked at me and said, Ryan, this is your decision. And he jumps in and says, Ryan, as far as I can see, if you and Jared can get along, then I think you guys will let this run. And then,

• 1:09:06Logan Bartlett?

  And you're in your early 30s?

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, early 30s. And that's a lot. We hadn't given out equity. We owned the whole company and, you know, I got in the car with my wife and we said, we gotta drive. So we, we like scheduled like a three day weekend. We didn't get more than a half hour. She was like, I don't know why you'd sell. Like, what are you gonna do?

• 1:09:26Logan Bartlett?

  I don't want you around.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't want you around. Like, what are you gonna do? And, and then, you know, I went back, I went back to that individual after we turned the money down and I said, why did, why were you the only one? Why were you the only one?

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  And he's like, well, who else did you ask? And we went through the whole thing.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  He's like, had any of them ever been in that situation before? He's like, no. He's like, I, I was running this at WordPerfect. I was the one that would have to write a couple hundred million dollar check every year as distribution to the founders. I've held that kind of money. I've been in that spot. I knew what happened when you sold and what happened to the company. And I knew what happened when you didn't. So the problem is, is you asked the wrong people. You asked a bunch of people that you thought were successful, but you didn't ask anyone who had been in that spot before. And I see that so much. That advice is so, and people say, hey, I've talked to all these people. This is what it is. Or like when the company's getting ready to go public and like everyone's freaking

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  out at I F E O, but they're not talking to people who've actually ever been through an IPO. And so that was a great lesson that I learned that if you're going to take advice from people, couch it based on, first of all, have you ever actually been in this situation before? Or one where the stakes are this high? And in that situation, the stakes were high. And I think it was the money was one thing, but also the post, what happened to the company if it's not done right?

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  It's the end of the ride.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  And I think there's a lot of people who were involved with Word Perfect back in the day, and that's all the novel that were not happy with how that ride ended.

• 1:11:13Logan Bartlett?

  And then at that point, I mean, I assume there's no calculation you can really do that says, oh, if I go for it, it's this versus that. It's a very personal decision at that point that like, hey, I'm going to be good in either of these scenarios. And does it feel like the journey has more legs to it?

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, like we, we, I've taught a class for a couple of years called Launch to Liquidity. I used to do it with Jonathan Lavav at Stanford. And we'd be in the NBA students and he'd always do these little polls, like, what would you do if you were Ryan in this situation? And like they would all vote and then he'd call out the students, the NBA students and saying, hey, why would you do this? Why would you do this? Why would you do this? And they were all off. It's all personal. They're like, it's, it's like, why do I want to or not want to? And, you know, it came down to the car ride with my wife.

• 1:12:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  And none of them had that on their rationale.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  And like, I think that that's where it's like, they're looking at this case study and NBA exercise, and it's just not reality.

• 1:12:16Logan Bartlett?

  Waiting a hundred million dollars.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:18Logan Bartlett?

  Path to it. You're like, no, it's actually.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  The rate of interest return. And it's like, what are you talking about?

• 1:12:23Logan Bartlett?

  Your life is pretty much the same until you buy an NBA team. And then it's really good. But up until that point, yeah. Uh, so, um, and what was the advice? So there's, you sat down with Mike Moritz as well, who legendary venture capital Sequoia, and what, was he feeling you out at this point?

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. Yeah, like, um,

• 1:12:41Logan Bartlett?

  Because Sequoia wasn't an investor then. Ultimately, they were.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  We had no, we had no venture capital. Um, we were in the process. My brother Jared was adamant, no venture capital. My dad was adamant, no venture capital.

• 1:12:51Logan Bartlett?

  What was that, by the way?

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  Just, you know, my dad had kind of watched a lot happen in 98, 99. And, you know, really had an adverse reaction to people who were building hundred thousand dollar buildings and redoing the interior but couldn't pay their bills. And he didn't like that model. He didn't like the model we saw with the company, we're raising 40 million. He felt like a model where we were profitable, we were growing, we could dictate our own terms, we were self-reliant, was a model that we had achieved. And every month I was paying my dad a lot of money. And the other founders, a lot of money. And that was a good, that was a good model. So, why would we take outside capital to go give that up?

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  And, you know, you really had to believe that there was a bigger ambition there.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  And it really came down to, look, we've got this asset and this opportunity that could be something way bigger than anyone thinks that we ever thought.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  We need more people in the tent. We need the smartest people in the world in the tent. This is why we want venture capital. We want them to be our partners. Look at Duff being in the tent and how value-add he is. If we're not gonna take the money and sell, we better take something and get some people in the tent because they're now our competition and we gotta go.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  And so then it became, okay, we're bringing the smartest people we can find in the tent. How much is it gonna cost them to play with us? And Moritz, I specifically remember at dinner, I'm sitting across the table from the guy who gave Steve Jobs his first money, Larry and Sergey the first money, like, and he's going, you know, he basically says, Ryan, like, this is the perfect, perfect litmus test for me. Why, why aren't there more successful companies in Utah?

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  I was like, what do you mean? He's like, yeah, there's a bunch of companies that could have been.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  But we don't talk about them anymore. There may be a little interesting dinner conversation, but they're not relevant. And so you've got a choice in front of you. Do you want to be an interesting dinner conversation? Or do you actually want to build something relevant?

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  And I was like, I want to build something relevant, you know? But so we grabbed Sequoia and we grabbed Excel. Two best venture firms at that time and put them together. And it, you know, Jared knew Schreier and I knew Sweeney and like we did it. And they were both young. And for the next 10 years, we just rocked. And it was like, one of the coolest partnerships that I've ever been a part of.

• 1:15:42Logan Bartlett?

  What changed between that moment at 500 million and then SAP at 8 billion? And obviously there's been.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  What was the sell difference?

• 1:15:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, like, what was the big input? Was it just the order of magnitude, the money and how many people would do well now within the company? And the journey felt more fulfilled? And like, what was the, that car ride you took with Ashley in 2012 versus the conversation? The nap in at Catalyst, you know, conference with Bill McDermott?

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  So first of all, it was a, it was a, the next time someone approached us.

• 1:16:19Logan Bartlett?

  Right.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  That's what people don't understand, especially, especially what founders. I mean, if you look at our trajectory, we were 100% grower. All the way up to 50% grower, kicking off cash, not consolidated, owning a category. And we had two people approach us in 22 years to acquire us. So I tell all these founders who are building something to go get acquired, like, it's not going to work out the way you think it is. You don't build a company, you better build it to keep it.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  Because your company looks, looks nothing like ours. And we had no one circling, right? And so, um.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  You know, I think a lot of change. Number one is, you know, when we turned down the 500, I specifically remember, and I'll be straight up, this was Dave Goldberg back in the day, incredible human. He was sitting right across the street.

• 1:17:17Logan Bartlett?

  Dave Goldberg, CEO of Survey Monkey, rest in peace, passed away five years ago, probably?

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, five, seven years ago. And he came and said, like, I remember saying, I like sat him down, he came out here and he said, hey, look, we're not going to join forces. We're going to go out alone. He said, well, I was like, I'm not ready to exit right now. And he, he said something I'll never forget. He said, you realize you're exiting either way. When you take venture money, you're exiting. You're getting on the rails, on the track. I was like, I want to do it. And,

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  and then he said, how do you think you're going to be able to do this alone? And at the time, I had like walked him through our headquarters, he put on a Qualtrics hat and walked through. And I was like, I just got you to put on a Qualtrics hat and walk through our building. I think we're going to do okay. And it was funny, but as I look back, he was 100% right. The second you take on that venture capital, you are getting on a path towards the next. Whether or not they're pressuring you or not, if you have any decent awareness or care at all,

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  you're going to want to do right by them. I wanted to return the whole fund of Sequoia and Excel for betting on us. I wanted, we wanted to be able to recruit talent to come into the building that would ultimately be able to say, hey, I was right by going here.

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  We wanted to be able to take the platform global. We wanted to do all these things. Those were all the reasons to go take venture capital. But you've got to line those reasons up with the way you monetize all of that. Not only to pay for the growth, but also for the employees and the people that are working on it. And so what we were able to do was say, hey, we're getting ready to go public. We actually were going public. We were on the road show. McDermott calls and says, hey, Ryan, like, we had been talking. He's like, hey, do you want to be a public CEO? I was like, what kind of question is that? Like, we're on the tape, bro. Like, it's going, like, tickers out in three days.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  But do you really want to be a public CEO? And I was like, actually, no. Like, he's like, why? And I was like, because you talk to any public CEO. The high mark is it's not that bad. I was like, so, so the best I know are like, it's not that bad? That's not that lofty of a goal of happiness in that role. But I said, I'm willing to go do it. Um, but never as a kid was I like, oh, I need to go be a public CEO or I'm not fulfilled. Just didn't care about it. And he said, well, I have a proposition for you. How about you come public through us? I'll take you public.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  And we'll put you at the tip of the SAP spear and all the marketing and everything. And we will take you to the world, largest company in Europe. One of the reasons why you want to go is you want to have this, this party where everyone can see Qualtrics globally. We'll take you further and, and better than anyone else. And it's true. You know, the only company on the road. We announced it, a billion dollar largest private software acquisition, the price of all time. And the whole thing, he did everything he said he was gonna go. And then we got in there and he obviously left after a year. And, you know, I think his philosophy was really going after the customer.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Where they had not been a customer focused organization, was much more back office ERP, um, solutions. And this was more like, hey, we're gonna go make a massive play at some of the other customer focused providers, which Salesforce, all these other things. And, um, we're building out this new category and that's what he wanted to do. And so I think during the pandemic, everything shifted back to ERP. And, you know, we're, we're not a company, Qualtrics isn't a company, just kind of let, just chill there. Uh, we're in the middle of building out a massive category. And so we decided together, well, I didn't want to leave it. Like, let's go public.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  And so we took a public and then right before the IPO, we sat around with Chris Bexted, myself and Zig, who we had grown the company a lot with. And I just said, Zig and Chris, like, You guys are going to be the most recruited people here. Everyone's going to want you to go be CEO and president. Why don't I slide over, Ziggy, take CEO, Chris, you're president, and I'll be founder? And that's what happened. And then

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  a year and a half into it, you know, we decided that we needed to spin out, I mean, deconcentrate SAP shares because it's hard when someone owns 70% to even get any float. And, you know, the markets were crazy, the pandemic affected.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  But the business was awesome. And so we decided to do a little bit of an auction and Silverlake, who was an investor and Egon sitting on the board, ended up winning the bids and came full throttle, writing the biggest check they've ever done. We have a lot of respect for those guys. If you, if you think about Dell and even the work of Twitter and Airbnb and VMware, obviously UFC Endeavor and Addix and like they've got, they don't, they don't make that many bets, but they go all in. And this was the biggest check they've ever written. So we're about three or four weeks.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  And that whereas Zig's the CEO, I'm chairman, like we're rolling. Pretty cool. So

• 1:23:11Logan Bartlett?

  It's a cool

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  Four, four, four years and like three different transactions. You can't make it up, especially because once we sold SAP, I mean, 30% of our workforce left. They said, the ride's over. You're never, we're never going to be a chance to be a part of it. Well, how do you know that? They were getting advice from the wrong people.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  And then it goes public and then it like, and one of the coolest parts about this is Excel Partners just came in for a lot of money into this new company. And I said, why are you doing this? And they said, well, you're pre-IPO again. We invested pre-IPO companies. So here we are.

• 1:23:53Logan Bartlett?

  There's going to be a, what is that? Fourth?

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Fourth. It's good.

• 1:23:59Logan Bartlett?

  I heard you say that you made every mistake that you could as the CEO, and I'm sure that's a bit of an exaggeration, but.

• 1:24:07Logan Bartlett?

  The product market fit element of like what you guys established, is there anything that's that you can take away that that anyone should internalize about the Qualtrics product market fit in this? And you talked about doing things that don't scale and like bouncing between the Northwestern person to the to the Heineken person and all that. But as it relates to the product and the insight you all had and how you actually developed and built around it, is there anything that you would point to that we didn't talk about in that?

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  I think in 2017, we basically completely moved the market because we said we're going in a different direction. And we did it from a position of strength and we created our own category.

• 1:24:51Logan Bartlett?

  The experience.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  The management category.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  That was a hard decision.

• 1:24:58Logan Bartlett?

  What the category historically would have been?

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  We had like a survey or an insight platform, but if you actually got into the data, you had hundreds of thousands of people logging in to do something.

• 1:25:10Logan Bartlett?

  Because people would do it for their own employees, they would do it for their customers.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so people would be like, oh, Qualtrics, you're the research platform. Oh, Qualtrics, your employee platform. Be like, no, we're more than that. You're the customer platform. Well, we're more than that. But we basically laid out a roadmap over the next six years, coming from that base, that this is what we were going to go build. And this is how we were going to talk about it. And this is the story in the category. And it was a bet the company move, absolutely bet the company, creating a new category of experience. Because it wasn't one that our customers asked for. They they were not asking for it. And it wasn't product market fit. We basically believed in this and then and told the world why experience is the commonality.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  But we didn't do it blindly. We had a different view of what 10,000 brands at the time were doing on our platform. We could see the problems they were solving.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  And, you know, it was validated, for example, Royal Caribbean Cruise Line calls me in the middle of the pandemic. They've got no ships going out. They've got one ship stranded with all of their employees on it because of COVID. And they called them renew their license and actually great. Why? Like, let's talk for a second. And by the way, I mean, this is a dear, dear to my heart customer because it's like the stories that I've already told, but

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  he said, Look, all of our other data that's coming in is pretty useless right now. We need to know how our employees are doing. We need to know.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Well, what is it that would make our customers feel safe to go cruise again? And where would want to go?

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  Pretty much you're the only ones in the world that can give us that new flow of data. And we were like, okay, great. They got it. And by the way, they're going to put it on one single platform and, you know, run the analysis of where to go and how to go and customers feeling good. But then they have this other voice that feel safe as well, serving customers.

• 1:27:22Logan Bartlett?

  Work-life balance, it seems that you you don't necessarily believe in that. You believe there's elements of integration of your work and your life. Your, your wife's dance studio is, is downstairs.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  Below us.

• 1:27:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, right below us as you walked in, which is very confusing when I, when I came in the wrong door. But your kids are around and I think they were Qualtrics. People would bring their kids to work and all, all of that. I see your kids at basketball games and stuff. How do you think about like not work-life balance, but the integration of your work in, in life? Is that, is that kind of rooted in the fact that it was at the founding? It was you and your dad.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  No, I just, I don't like.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  I mean, no one's ever told me no. So why wouldn't we do it? Right? I think, I think we, I think we're all trying our hardest and like, I care about that portion of my life. I think a lot of people do. And I think you can do it all. I just truly believe that.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  You know, tech's a little harder. Like there wasn't as much of a role for

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  like Ash and the kids inside Qualtrics. There wasn't. And in most tech companies, there's not. There's just not, it's not a family really event. And, you know, so how do you make the culture as family friendly as possible? Because we always believed that if the family was on board, then that's really the team.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  And if you actually look at how it's translated, the NBA is much more. It's actually the first thing that Ash and I have really been able to do together. And that's what's really cool. Um, way more than tech.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  And so I think, I think the idea of, of tech was, hey, we care. And a lot of companies, it's not just a Qualtrics thing. We, we want people to, to feel like they're either part of the family or their families are part of the company as well. And that, that was it. I mean, right across the streets, the 40,000 square foot daycare center. Right? Where, I mean,

• 1:29:33Logan Bartlett?

  For Qualtrics employees.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  For Qualtrics employees only, but we did that during the pandemic, or right before the pandemic for working mothers, really. We wanted to be able to recruit and to be able to have more, you know,

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  mothers with children be able to go and work

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  in our offices and actually be able to feel like they were, they were taken care of.

• 1:30:04Speaker 01

  And, and it's a combination now between whoever the primary care responsible person is or whoever they're doing. So it's not just females who are there. It's males. It's like, it's however the family setup is, it's at the daycare. But what we've been able to do is set up this environment where people can check in with their family. And what's kind of amazing is my kids don't want me around all the time, like, but they want to check in with.

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  I think that's a really cool thing. And by the way, it's like proximity to work is a big thing.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  And it's something that, that we tried to carry over to the NBA as well. Whether it's with our players or people on the road or people who moved to Utah. Just really trying to say, hey, look, this is a little different. This is, this hopefully is something different.

• 1:30:58Logan Bartlett?

  I want to read some things that you said, uh, and I want to get you just to expound on them a little bit because I, I took down as particularly interesting thoughts. So I guess, uh, original thought is incredibly difficult and incredibly painful.

• 1:31:12Logan Bartlett?

  What do you mean by by that?

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, like when you when you think of stuff that you came up with or you invented,

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  it's hard. And it's almost like every good thing you do, there's like, there's 20 other people that put off. And like, whenever we see that, and it's stupid stuff, like I remember we came up with this amazing hoodie at Qualtrics. And it was designed and sourced overseas and like, I wanted it because the high neck came up was like this killer hoodie and it said Qualtrics on it. Everyone who had one, and then I started seeing like 45 different brands with something just like it. What do you say? And we came up with like, original thought's hard. Like, and that's, that's it. And it's painful. It's painful to come up with something.

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  But, you know, as a culture, you want to be able to have a culture where original thought is always existent. I always bet on that company with original thought. We had to have original thought in our company because we were resource constrained. You had to be able to think through it. So if someone wants to come and go through a real tour of Qualtrics or even this place or like, we always try to come up with stuff. And that's what makes it fun.

• 1:32:27Logan Bartlett?

  I, I, I think I know where this is coming from, but you said it's sad to see people job hop every year and a half and that nothing great happens over a short period of time. Is that just 22 years of

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  I just

• 1:32:43Logan Bartlett?

  chopping wood and?

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  I've been able to see the the beginning to the end and watching people's careers and watching those who actually stayed through the hard parts. And actually, what, what, what I found is very few people were able to run away from the problem they actually had to solve. My brother Jared used to always tell me like, when it came to a blind spot or coaching someone or something is like, hey, they've heard it before. And especially when you're young in your career, I think when you're post 40, it's really hard to change. So when you're young in your career and you've got someone or an organization that's willing to bet on you and is on a high trajectory, then, you know?

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  You should ride that train.

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  That being said, like, a lot of people have thought that, especially in tech, that it's easy and you can just go jump on a company and you're gonna catch that next wave. And the problem is, is like, from what I've seen in tech, is like, I always say that if it, if it looks like a lottery ticket, it's probably not. Because if you actually go to the early days of most of these companies, whether it's us at Lassie and Slack, they're not, they're not what you would say looks like that. It's almost like you need to get in there. And I know that there's reasons why, there's false starts and things happen, but I think this culture of not being able to sit through something and actually learn the hard lessons is,

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  is one that, I just, for my own kids, I, I hope that they don't get that. Like, I had to sit through Seoul, Korea. I'm watching in the NCAA and the transfer portal, anything, something gets hard, it's like, like, wait, that's not how you're gonna be able to grow. And so, just because someone offers you more money or a different job, like, I'll never forget my brother when he was a deep Nishar, who, you know, if you remember him from LinkedIn and everything, came to him and said, Jared, I want you to go work with Kai-Fu Lee and I want you to go run Google China.

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  And he said, wait a minute, I'm gonna go over and live in China, I'm gonna live in a hotel in Beijing.

• 1:35:00Speaker 01

  And you're not gonna pay me as an ex, you're not gonna give me more money where I could actually go into another organization here. I could get a promotion. And it's guaranteed. Why would I go take that job? And he came to Jared and said, because one day you'll pay me $20 million for the opportunity.

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  Jared ends up taking the Google job.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  He ends up doing that and then coming back and coming with me. I'll never forget the meeting I had sitting down at lunch in Palo Alto with Deep. They're telling the story and then Jared chimes in and says, I would have paid you six years.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  And how do you get that if you're jumping every? Or whatever. First of all, you're not even going to be around for someone like Deep to bet on you. And the other part of that is that most opportunities, especially young in your career. Someone has to take a chance on you. Like someone took a chance on me. My dad took a chance on me. The person in, you know, Hewlett Packard took a chance on me. My brother in Sequoia in Excel took a chance on me. And it only came over time.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  It wasn't that I was going to create something or I was going to come in at a different level. It was that someone would pull me up to that level and the next level and the next level. And that's what matters. So it's a deep answer to.

• 1:36:37Logan Bartlett?

  No, it's good. I mean, I, it's a, it's an important. I think one of the things that I, people ask all the time is like, I think there's a lot of people dissatisfied in their job in some way, shape or form. Right. And they're trying to figure out, particularly when you're 22 to 25, 27, 28, like, you know that what you're doing isn't your life's work, right? Uh, but you're not exactly sure what it is. And people tell you follow your passion or don't follow your passion. You need to follow the, the path progress in the business that you're on and stay committed to something. And so, I think having some of these lived experiences for people is just like, it's a, it's an impactful thing.

• 1:37:21Logan Bartlett?

  And I struggle with the advice to give to people in that setting because I can tell my story. And that's maybe interesting, but like all those doors closed after I walked through them. Right. And you can't replicate what I did. What I did was, worked hard and like tried to glom on to people that would teach me. That's not a strategy. That's like a dick that I actually.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  Well, there is, there is a strategy here that I think from something you said. I, I still don't feel like I'm doing my life's work. So like this concept that you're gonna come out of school and like go follow your passion. Like that's really bad advice. Cause it's work. Like early days of Qualtrics suck. It was work. It wasn't my passion. Um, the amount of people I know in life that actually get to follow their true passion. Like, and by the way, even in the NBA, I mean, I was talking to an agent. Couple of months ago who had 20 players and out of 20 players.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  Half of them weren't happy, right? So, so if you look at.

• 1:38:32Logan Bartlett?

  You just get to new levels and then you look around and you compare yourself to someone else.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  So this idea of like, go follow your passion. I would never use the word passion. I would say, follow something that is intriguing. And then by the way, you're going to get in there and every job you do, including in the NBA. There's gonna be half the things that you don't like about it. And when you're more senior in your career. You get to choose to offload some of those things to other people. And that's it. That's how this is gonna go. The higher up you get. There's gonna be more things you don't like, but you also have the ability to organize it because you are the one that can call the shots. About who gets to do what.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  But there's no perfect thing.

• 1:39:20Logan Bartlett?

  One of the other things I heard you say is, uh, is that your strategy will ultimately be wrong. Plan for things to take a little bit longer than you expect, which I think ties in to that. You can't be too prescriptive. It's somewhat at odds with the press release concept in the future, but like. Do you think just being nimble in your know where you're going, but nimble in your journey to get there? Is that the right take?

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. The way I look at it is like, so you've got that press release. You know where you're going and you think. It's gonna go like this, but actually what's gonna happen is you're gonna take off and you're gonna go and you're gonna hit this. Like roadblock. You hit the ceiling. What happens is you have to slide over. And then find the new ceiling. And then you're going to hit that. And then you're going to slide over. And there's a lot of pain throughout those three bumps. But then you look back and you got to the end of the press release. It looks like a straight line, but it was actually really like that. And that's, that's just how it goes. Like, I don't remember one product, one website, one thing we've done where we launched it. It was exactly how we thought it would, even though we knew where we wanted it to be.

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  Where we want it to be was a chance to always come in and say, okay, are we on track? Or do we need to change the way we're? Most of the time, we need to change the way.

• 1:40:34Logan Bartlett?

  You gave a commencement speech at BYU that was centered around the concept of being all in that we can link in the show notes and I would encourage people to, to watch. What is, what is being all in being to you now? How do you think about that? And what advice do you give to people about being all in?

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  I mean, the, the concept, I mean, in that commencement speech was like, it was back to a little bit of the, the changing jobs every year, right? Like,

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  nothing good that I have has come from not just burning that boat. And we talked about a story earlier today where whether I did it or it was burned for me. When you don't have a backup plan, then you tend to operate. And whatever you're working on in the situation actually tends to, to go a lot better. When we got rid of the RSN, that was scary.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  But once it happened, it wasn't a week before we figured out like how a bunch of different revenue and opportunity to go after that was way better. Now you couldn't give me that deal all over again if you tried. Like, but it wasn't till we burned it. All right, this is the new, let's go. And so I think there's that moment on how to get there. And I think you'll operate a lot better. If you're sitting there working at Qualtrics and you don't know whether you're going to be here long-term or you're not thinking about that, or you're like, I don't know. You're not going to perform well. If you decide you are, if you go into college and you say, well, no matter what, I'm graduating. I don't care. That's the rules. This is what's going to happen. I am going to graduate. There is no problem.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  Most people, that's kind of in their cards. They're saying, hey, I'm gonna go commit for four years and we're gonna go graduate. Are you gonna go all in on the other things you're doing? You've already proven you can commit to four years to something? Like, can you do that? Can you commit to your job? Can you commit to this? Can you commit to that? And it's just this concept that you just operate better when you're 100% committed. And the problem is today's world, it seems like hedging is just the priority. Hedge, hedge, hedge.

• 1:42:50Logan Bartlett?

  Last one. I'm not even really sure what this means, but uh, someone told me to ask you about riding a horse into your office building.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  That's a funny.

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  I don't know why, but we had a sales goal once and we would always do random things.

• 1:43:07Logan Bartlett?

  What year is this?

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  This is like 2014. And

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  we, we just wanted to celebrate somehow. And I don't know where the idea came from, but I didn't have a horse, but my brother knew a guy who was out of town and he knew his horse caretaker and he has this really, really expensive horse that he liked. And I was like, wouldn't it be cool to just take his horse and like bring it into our office? And so his caretaker came down with a horse, we backed it up to the door. We walked it in and like, we rode the horse through the office and we actually had a couple of meetings instead of sitting on the chair, you sat on the horse and.

• 1:43:52Logan Bartlett?

  How many employees are you there?

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  That many. But I think the picture was more for the gentleman that we knew. To tell him like, like the picture of us in him with someone on his horse was pretty funny. And it's still funny today. Like, like, um, but it was, it was great. It was a beautiful horse.

• 1:44:13Logan Bartlett?

  Ryan, thanks for doing this.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  No, thanks. Uh, that was some incredible detail.