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Havish Gupta
Figuring Out • 7d
From a Side Project to an $8 Billion Exit So, it was 2002 when Ryan’s father, Scott Smith, a professor, was battling cancer and needed an easier way to conduct research surveys. Thus, Ryan, his brother, and his friend started Qualtrics as a tool to simplify the process of conducting research. Although it was started to help his father, Ryan saw a lot of potential in it, which is why he dropped out of school to take it on full-time. Unlike other startups, Qualtrics didn't raise any funds. Thus, Ryan manually cold-mailed his potential customers and walked door-to-door selling the software. The early days were tough, but still, they managed to onboard major universities and soon, businesses too. By 2010, they had over 4,000 paying clients—all while being bootstrapped. Then finally, after 10 years, they raised their first funding round of $70M from Accel & Sequoia to scale. And by 2018, Qualtrics had even filed for an IPO. But then, SAP dropped an $8B acquisition offer in an all-cash deal just days before the listing, which they happily accepted. But the story didn’t end there. In 2021, SAP IPO’d Qualtrics, and then in 2023, Silver Lake & CPPIB took it private again at $12.5B. Today, Qualtrics is trusted by 18K brands, boasts $1.46 billion in revenue (with a $1.06 billion loss). Anyways, a side project that began to help his father rose to become one of the biggest SaaS acquisitions ever—all built without VC for the first 10 years.
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