5 ms·

I am very happy to see this kind of success stories for multiple reasons. 1. It gives a great morale boost so many other not so sexy US places outside of silic

I am very happy to see this kind of success stories for multiple reasons. 1. It gives a great morale boost so many other not so sexy US places outside of silicon valley. YES big success possible outside of Silicon Valley. 2. Now with this big SAP investment, UTAH will get considerable 'tech employment' boost longer term instead of same old crowded Silicon valley & New York (sky rocking housing prices) 3. The way the company grew organically for long time instead of hitting VC money from day one (another big company that did was Atlassian) 4. a very rare father-son founder company and a family company (brother and many of family members in big roles) > both his parents held doctorates and his father lectured about market research at the University of Oregon. The Smiths moved to Utah around the time Ryan’s father opted to work at Brigham Young University, and in 2002, the pair started Qualtrics, originally targeting academics that needed to conduct field research.

JPKab 8y ago
Good for Utah. I've heard some good things about the tech scene there, apart from Domo.
- fjp 8y ago
  I used to work for Qualtrics. I think Qualtrics and maybe LucidChart was a rare exception to the rest of the tech scene in Utah, which is pretty much "build a slightly different version of something at already exists and sell the shit out of a subpar product". Qualtrics has come a LONG way in terms of underlying product quality, but they themselves got by for a long time selling the shit out of a product that could barely deliver. The company is 50% salespeople. Less than a year ago their APIs were going down every day because of the crappy pile of legacy PHP monolith they were built on. They have brought in some very smart engineering leaders to transition to a more modular and scalable core product, but there's a ways to go. Another thing that really sucked about the organization was that half the engineers are professional services engineers building custom, overpromised, one-off solutions for large customers. The vast majority are almost completely unmaintainable and they do a very poor job of leveraging previous work or having cookiecutters/shared libraries to accelerate custom development. With all that said, I think their market opportunity is fucking gigantic and they are serious about curing the underlying inefficiencies of the organization. They are the leader of the field in a time when pretty much every C-suite is realizing they need customer & employee experience data to stay competitive.
  - fjp 8y ago
    More info to explain some of their marketing speak (Experience Management! Creating a category!): They are by far the leader in being able to create surveys for serious research. However, since so much of this segment is owned by academics, they can only charge so much. They want to stay deep in the academic market because millions of undergrads and grad students every year do their first market research with their student Qualtrics account. Those students go on to be the decision makers in fledgling analytics departments/teams at many companies. They expanded into Customer Experience and Employee Experience products with the big enterprise deals and fat margins that come with them but were much worse at those things than specialized competitors. They then came up with the concept of "Experience Management" to tie the data together. This is actually pretty cool stuff - Ford was able to find which crappy conditions at their dealerships were driving lower sales, etc etc. The strategy was basically if we can offer a total package where we're pretty good at everything, we'll beat competitors that are excellent at one thing.
  - todipa 8y ago
    Total agreement on the market opportunity. I'm not technical in any way like most of the people commenting here. I run a small financial planning business and I'm paying "a lot" of money to Typeform and to Wufoo to gather client data. Both of them have their advantages and disadvantages but I'm ready to move on to something else if it fits my needs which aren't that complicated.
    - justaguyhere 8y ago
      What are the disadvantages of Wufoo and Typeform? I've used both as a user before and I Wufoo as an admin. My needs were simple and they seemed to work for my use case. Just curious about your use case for which they don't work?
fjp 8y ago
Worth noting that their engineering org is in Seattle
- austenallred 8y ago
  Not 100% true. They have some engineering in Seattle but a ton in Utah too.
  - devmunchies 8y ago
    they have most in seattle and some in utah. I engineered in both offices. VP of engineering and product are both in Seattle and there are MORE engineers in seattle if talking absolutes.
    - fjp 8y ago
      When I was leaving I was under the impression that they were no longer hiring new non-professional services devs in the Provo office
vram22 8y ago
Sounds a bit like SAS. Not the family part but the part about starting from an academic background, plus high growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute SAS is an interesting company, both for their revenue growth and their work culture. >During the 1980s, SAS was one of Inc. Magazine's fastest growing companies in America from 1979 and 1985.[18][23] It grew more than ten percent per year from $10 million in revenues in 1980[6] to $1.1 billion by 2000.[23] In 2007, SAS revenue was $2.15 billion, and in 2013 its revenue was $3.02 billion. By the late 1990s, SAS was the largest privately held software company. >SAS is well known for its workplace culture.[36][41] The company was used as a model for workplace perks at Google[3] and is taught as a case study in management seminars at Stanford. The page about the SAS CEO, James Goodnight, is also interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Goodnight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Goodnight

JPKab 8y ago

Good for Utah. I've heard some good things about the tech scene there, apart from Domo.

fjp 8y ago
I used to work for Qualtrics. I think Qualtrics and maybe LucidChart was a rare exception to the rest of the tech scene in Utah, which is pretty much "build a slightly different version of something at already exists and sell the shit out of a subpar product". Qualtrics has come a LONG way in terms of underlying product quality, but they themselves got by for a long time selling the shit out of a product that could barely deliver. The company is 50% salespeople. Less than a year ago their APIs were going down every day because of the crappy pile of legacy PHP monolith they were built on. They have brought in some very smart engineering leaders to transition to a more modular and scalable core product, but there's a ways to go. Another thing that really sucked about the organization was that half the engineers are professional services engineers building custom, overpromised, one-off solutions for large customers. The vast majority are almost completely unmaintainable and they do a very poor job of leveraging previous work or having cookiecutters/shared libraries to accelerate custom development. With all that said, I think their market opportunity is fucking gigantic and they are serious about curing the underlying inefficiencies of the organization. They are the leader of the field in a time when pretty much every C-suite is realizing they need customer & employee experience data to stay competitive.
- fjp 8y ago
  More info to explain some of their marketing speak (Experience Management! Creating a category!): They are by far the leader in being able to create surveys for serious research. However, since so much of this segment is owned by academics, they can only charge so much. They want to stay deep in the academic market because millions of undergrads and grad students every year do their first market research with their student Qualtrics account. Those students go on to be the decision makers in fledgling analytics departments/teams at many companies. They expanded into Customer Experience and Employee Experience products with the big enterprise deals and fat margins that come with them but were much worse at those things than specialized competitors. They then came up with the concept of "Experience Management" to tie the data together. This is actually pretty cool stuff - Ford was able to find which crappy conditions at their dealerships were driving lower sales, etc etc. The strategy was basically if we can offer a total package where we're pretty good at everything, we'll beat competitors that are excellent at one thing.
- todipa 8y ago
  Total agreement on the market opportunity. I'm not technical in any way like most of the people commenting here. I run a small financial planning business and I'm paying "a lot" of money to Typeform and to Wufoo to gather client data. Both of them have their advantages and disadvantages but I'm ready to move on to something else if it fits my needs which aren't that complicated.
  - justaguyhere 8y ago
    What are the disadvantages of Wufoo and Typeform? I've used both as a user before and I Wufoo as an admin. My needs were simple and they seemed to work for my use case. Just curious about your use case for which they don't work?

fjp 8y ago

Worth noting that their engineering org is in Seattle

austenallred 8y ago
Not 100% true. They have some engineering in Seattle but a ton in Utah too.
- devmunchies 8y ago
  they have most in seattle and some in utah. I engineered in both offices. VP of engineering and product are both in Seattle and there are MORE engineers in seattle if talking absolutes.
  - fjp 8y ago
    When I was leaving I was under the impression that they were no longer hiring new non-professional services devs in the Provo office

vram22 8y ago

Sounds a bit like SAS. Not the family part but the part about starting from an academic background, plus high growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute SAS is an interesting company, both for their revenue growth and their work culture. >During the 1980s, SAS was one of Inc. Magazine's fastest growing companies in America from 1979 and 1985.[18][23] It grew more than ten percent per year from $10 million in revenues in 1980[6] to $1.1 billion by 2000.[23] In 2007, SAS revenue was $2.15 billion, and in 2013 its revenue was $3.02 billion. By the late 1990s, SAS was the largest privately held software company. >SAS is well known for its workplace culture.[36][41] The company was used as a model for workplace perks at Google[3] and is taught as a case study in management seminars at Stanford. The page about the SAS CEO, James Goodnight, is also interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Goodnight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Goodnight