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How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

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Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#81

Post by roymurdock »

artemonster wrote: post #7

Can someone please genuinely explain the need of such software products to me? I work in VLSI engineering and such things sound like a total superflous bullshit-bingo to me (stats, dashboards, metrics, "value proposition", "targeting", "customer segmentation") I suppose I think so because I am a total layman in these fields. I'd greatly appreciate if someone could explain - is this a thing that acutally helps with so…

We (a market research/consulting house) use it pretty heavily to survey engineers to ask what types of technology they're using. I'm sure academics use it similarly - put in a list of emails, program and send out surveys, collect data, analyze said data, create reports.

The alternative was some god awful platform without a WYSIWYG editor where you have to code surveys by hand, an enormous waste of time and very inflexible compared to Qualtrics.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#82

Post by nine_k »

Mistletoe wrote: post #59
mdorazio wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a real-world example from a client who uses Qualtrics heavily. At regular intervals following vehicle purchase, an automotive manufacturer sends surveys to vehicle owners asking about their perception of the quality of the vehicle, issues that may have come up, features that were not explained properly or don't work as expected, etc. We're talking hundreds of thousands of surveys a year, each with 20+ branchin…

>each with 20+ branching questions I just recoiled in horror at the thought of my car company asking me to fill out a survey like this and mentally closed the window on it.

Imagine that your car has a few things that bother you, and you'd like the car company to know about it. A link to a survey appears in email, and you think: "Aha! Now I'll let them know for sure, I'll tell them all I think about it!". Now you have 20 question to vent off your frustration, and likely a large text field for "anything more you might like to add".

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#83

Post by r00fus »

ekianjo wrote: post #36
ejstronge wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skype was far better before the MS acquisition - there doesn’t seem to be a comparable video platform anymore, considering that Skype offered amazing video at a time when (U.S.) internet speeds were even slower than what they are now.

Agree, Skype in MS era is just a shadow of what it was before. They completely destroyed the user experience. I don't even know how you can break something that working so well before, and not realize it.

Forcing all supernodes to route through MS owned datacenters?

...which unfortunately destroyed the full P2P nature.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#84

Post by TomVDB »

nine_k wrote: post #82
Mistletoe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>each with 20+ branching questions I just recoiled in horror at the thought of my car company asking me to fill out a survey like this and mentally closed the window on it.

Imagine that your car has a few things that bother you, and you'd like the car company to know about it. A link to a survey appears in email, and you think: "Aha! Now I'll let them know for sure, I'll tell them all I think about it!". Now you have 20 question to vent off your frustration, and likely a large text field for "anything more you might like to add".

It'd be cathartic if Audi sent a questionnaire to my wife to ask her about the dashboard GUI. ("Only a German engineer could design such a thing.", which is a bit harsh: there are plenty of thermostat designers who could do worse.)

The fact that iOS 12 now supports 3rd party apps (==Google Maps) on CarPlay has been a life saver.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#85

Post by pbreit »

artemonster wrote: post #7

Can someone please genuinely explain the need of such software products to me? I work in VLSI engineering and such things sound like a total superflous bullshit-bingo to me (stats, dashboards, metrics, "value proposition", "targeting", "customer segmentation") I suppose I think so because I am a total layman in these fields. I'd greatly appreciate if someone could explain - is this a thing that acutally helps with so…

It helps in delivering a superior experience to customers which ultimately is one of the only things that really matters in business.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#86

Post by twtw »

csbellina wrote: post #78

This might be the biggest Utah exit so far. Whenever all those "where are the other silicon valleys?" articles come up, they never seem to bring up the Wasatch Front, even though it probably has one of the most vibrant tech entrepreneurship scenes in the country. I moved here from Boston a few years ago and it has turned into one of the best decisions of my life.

> Whenever all those "where are the other silicon valleys?" articles come up, they never seem to bring up the Wasatch Front

Huh, interesting. This is exactly the opposite of my experience. I would have said those articles always bloviate about Silicon Slopes.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#87

Post by devmunchies »

lechiffre10 wrote: post #80

I'm currently reading a book called "Financial Shenanigans" and I'd highly recommend it. It's about account shenanigans companies do to make their business seem more profitable than it really is. Not sure if this applies here but interestingly there's a section that discusses IPO's and how investors should be very careful when companies decide to do an IPO through a M&A (Merger and Acquisition) instead of the usual I…

Qualtrics is an exception to the typical unprofitable unicorn. they've been cashflow positive for over a decade.

(I was a growth engineer and an admin for the Stripe instance, Their stripe account had lots of money flowing through and that was just for sub-5k deals.)

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#88

Post by kcorbitt »

sjg007 wrote: post #57

Easy to setup programmable web forms and surveys for non-experts. Apparently it is big business. One thing I think is interesting is that I'd heard of SurveyMonkey before but never about qualtrics.. even here on hackernews. Maybe because qualtrics was outside of the valley? Yet clearly a unicorn and a very successful exit.

Qualtrics looms large as a tech employer in Utah Valley, where they're based out of. I went to school in the area and almost ended up doing my first internship there.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#89

Post by mikeyouse »

lechiffre10 wrote: post #80

I'm currently reading a book called "Financial Shenanigans" and I'd highly recommend it. It's about account shenanigans companies do to make their business seem more profitable than it really is. Not sure if this applies here but interestingly there's a section that discusses IPO's and how investors should be very careful when companies decide to do an IPO through a M&A (Merger and Acquisition) instead of the usual I…

I think what you're referring to is a reverse merger instead of an IPO -- This is entirely different, just a standard merger transaction. Reverse mergers are when a private company that is trying to go public (often with shaky financials) "merges" with a company that is already public, usually on some OTC board somewhere. This process avoids the scrutiny of the S1 / roadshow / etc and allows a cheap and easy way to 'go public'. Typical mergers involve a lot of due diligence from the acquiring company, they can still go wrong but it's a much different proposition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_takeover

Many of the Chinese 'fraud-cap' companies were taken public in this way: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/business/global/reverse-m...

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#90

Post by IanCal »

lazyjones wrote: post #52
CalRobert wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I was addressing the more general question about the field of stats, dashboards, etc.. "Once I have these, logging/counting usage is simple. The decision is made with a one-page Excel sheet with the raw numbers." I think a lot of people would get the data in to excel and not know what to do next. Also, implementing tracking of views, clicks, etc. is non-trivial for a lot of people. Or just a hassle.

> I think a lot of people would get the data in to excel and not know what to do next. Also, implementing tracking of views, clicks, etc. is non-trivial for a lot of people. Or just a hassle. Really? In "enterprise" class companies? Managers who can't use Excel like this should be (and probably are) fired quickly and for tracking there are plenty of solutions any junior web developer can implement and report on.

> Managers who can't use Excel like this should be (and probably are) fired quickly

For not spending their time dealing with random excel files being thrown around full of raw figures? It's a common way businesses work but it's an absolute nightmare.

Dashboards mean a bunch of things, one is that people are all seeing the same figures. Another is that people aren't reimplementing the same analysis code (where you can easily get errors, because it's not necessarily going to be obvious how to do the stats on the results). And a very obvious one is the time it takes.

Give me an excel file full of raw numbers and sure, I can pull something together. I can even do it quickly. But I'll bet a boatload of cash I can't do it faster than I can open a link.

I could get another dev to spend the time doing it, but without knowing how much Qualtrics charges it's easy to view this as simply being cheaper.

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