Ryan Smith

The State of Utah is the last place that you would expect to find a Unicorn, not the mythical kind but the ones that are the rage in Silicon Valley. Turns out it is not only mountain ranges that abound there but multi-billion dollar startups as well. Ryan Smith, co-founder of Qualtrics plays host to both. His office has snow-capped mountains as a backdrop and his experience management company’s last capital raising round valued it at $2.5 billion. Not bad for a startup which spent countless nights in a basement wondering if it would live to see another day. Except its humble beginning, Qualtrics breaks all the norms associated with a successful startup. It is founded and run by a family, it established itself by selling to academia and it restrained from raising capital as long as it could. And when it went out to seek funding none other than Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital came calling. Customer-centricity defines it but as Ryan and his elder brother Jared work on catapulting Qualtrics to the next level, its core values of scrappiness, transparency and teamwork will hold it in good stead.

Qualtrics was born after you quit your internship to be with your father who was diagnosed with cancer. Take us through that germination stage.

We were simply looking for something to do. I don’t think back in 2002, it was cool to launch a start-up. It was an interesting process and I was fascinated with the idea that you could gather data online. In fact, by cheating a little bit, you could understand what everyone was thinking. I remember the first project I did. I was working in Los Angeles then and we would have these huge debates on where to go for lunch. I was able to create survey forms and gather everyone’s feedback. For the next three weeks, it was simple [to decide] where we would go for lunch. That’s when I thought, how could we use this to streamline everything else?

Now-a-days, it doesn’t feel that revolutionary, but at the time, it really was. How do we create something where we can question anything that we have and do it in real time? I think the idea of getting customer data, feedback, and getting analytics done on a real-time basis was a novel idea. That’s how we got started. We wanted to take this into the enterprise and corporate world. But they weren’t ready for it. I remember calling one major airline and it said, “If our customers are unhappy, they’ll call us.” And we all know how that works out now! No one would say that today. But back then, it was very common. The real crux was — how do we get people to use it? And once they use it, their eyes will open to all the other possible use cases.