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

29:23And we raised$50 million for cancer research. And it all started by using that platform in 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 five. Like, we would have never dreamed of it. Who would have known that that would have been a thing? I was shooting three-pointers with Dwayne Wade to go and every bucket counted for five for the fight. That's insane. You referenced earlier brain typing and productivity is one of the things I'm curious about.

30:06One of the things 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. How do you think about that? How do you sort of orient your day from a productivity standpoint? So productivity over time is tricky. Like 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. I'm always trying to introspect, how am I feeling? How am I feeling? Because productivity is a feeling. There's definitely a measurable outcome, but I think it's as much also an internal feeling.

30:58If we just assume we all work hard, how is it that we're getting through everything and how do we feel like we're getting through it? 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 uh i had an 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?

31:38And 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 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, like you can't sit up and operate as this high paid router, just taking things and routing them. HR stuff will wear you down eventually. That's not going to 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.

32:24And so what I would do is like, I would wake up in the morning and instead of just going right in the office, I'd go have breakfast by myself. And that was my individual contributor time. I would literally sit there, my music in, my headphones, and I would get some wins before I went and got into the office. Because then it's like, all right, bring it. Come on. I'm ready for it. 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, like you want to get some momentum before that happens.

33:06Mornings are everything for me. Um, 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? Um, 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 this is part of the reason why as we think about the future of and where we're working from and working in person and working remote.

33:59Team 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. 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. And by the way, it also goes the other way.

34:46If the team is winning, are you winning personally? them. 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 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. And everyone probably, or most of the company probably felt they were more productive 100 % at home because like you're not getting interrupted. 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.

35:38But 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 where do qualtrics land on the uh what's the current policy 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 in saying, hey, what about the other part of everyone's job?

36:38And 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 you've got 2 ,500 people who joined the company since everyone's been remote. It's super, super difficult. Now, you weren't officially the CEO until the Sequoia and Excel round. Is that right? And so it was just you, Jarrett? Yeah, we called it like the team of four. Who was the four? My father and then Stuart Orgel.

37:22and 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 yeah i would i remember sitting in front of leone moritz 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 a ceo and it was just awkward silence because jared had jared had just moved back from google a couple years earlier and he just he was running google china and he's 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 but he's also like i don't want to be the media facing and then he stood up and like it was awkward silent silence it was like it felt like forever and all of a 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.

38:19That was his whole rationale. And so one of the things you said, though, I know it was a growing experience like being a CEO is for anyone, I'm sure. But what you benefited most from was being a fast learner over the experience itself. What was stepping into 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? I think Jared, I mean, he's just such a unique individual, but 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.

39:06And 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? 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. That being said, the CEO or any executive on a high trajectory needs to be the fastest learner in the building. And 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 it back.

40:00We were talking about this a little bit before we started taping, but there's a visualization exercise Bill Gates and Paul Allen, I think, did in the early days of Microsoft about where they would 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 have you referenced that? How has that impacted you? I think just going through enough. and so first of all 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 it's an output it's an it's an output and it makes everyone feel good in the moment but 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 sass 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?

41:31Oh, wow. 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 um you know 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 in the quarter the end of 90 days. You really like this product.

42:13We're shipping it. I want to release it. I want you to write the press release. And I want you to write what it is. And I've even used this exercise when we were acquiring a company. I remember we acquired a stats company at a Y Combinator called Stats IQ. And it was like, oh, we do stats. And it's like, okay, 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 wrote this press release and it was like, this is the first ever low-code, no-code stats cloud platform in the world. And it's now hooked onto Qualtrics.

42:50So 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, no, that's exactly what we're doing. It took a minute, but then that's exactly what we ended up doing with this product. Because that became the vision just by simply going through that exercise, having to actually talk through it, having to say, no, we're not going to do that, or yeah, we're going to do it. So it's not as much, 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.

43:31It'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. Yeah. It's a little bit like if you were comparing to basketball, hey, 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. 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 going to work. And so you're able to course correct based on that outcome.

44:11And I think we do it in life. I've shared this story a bunch. 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? And most people can't articulate it. I was like, so you're going to feel bad about yourself all the time, but you can't articulate what's going to make feel like you killed it this week.

44:51like what is it well let's say his 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 um and i'm like whoa i could do all that by Tuesday. Yeah. 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 going to get something done. And so in a way you're child proofing or you're creating a framework.

45:38It's a framework to think about things through and actually think about big things. so what seems like moonshots actually become just what you i want to back up to the culture story a little bit here so so you had a 1.9 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 it wasn't um it wasn't a good picture. I don't know why. Like I, I was pretty athletic. 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.

46:33You 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, um, 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 authority that could tell me what to do. and um then you know my friends uh I actually started working at one of the early tech companies that sold to excite at home and someone was looking out for me and just said hey you're up to know come over here and it was you're like 16 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.

47:34And 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. And so like in three months, I just threw it all. I didn't care about the GPA, didn't care about anything. And then went and went over to Seoul, Korea. You showed up and the job wasn't there. Job wasn't there. My friends came home. I called my dad and said, hey, this isn't working out. Go to the time, go to the airport for an international ticket. and he's like no like because your friend's dad's bought the tickets and and my dad's like no like you got a place to sleep good go go sort this out and you didn't really have a place to sleep no and 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 and so what in that moment your dad says figure it out and there's no job and so you go and find a job I had a contact of 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.

48:51I 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 confidence 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. 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. In a quite literal sense, I mean, 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.

49:34And then that was like your rotation. Yeah. 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 hallway or the stairwell. Like I had no, like no one knew. It's quite literally like a movie scene, it feels like. And then from there, so you established like more regimen and sort of get back on track for that. And then did you go straight from there to Mexico? Yeah, I decided, you know, it was interesting. I moved in with, I actually ended up moving in with four guys who would serve LDS missions in Korea. And I was like, wait, like this world's different because they weren't out partying all the time.

50:20They were super buttoned up. They spoke the language, but they were fun. They were like hilarious. And I was like, I thought there were only two. Yeah, I thought there was only two pounds. 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. 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.

51:02You 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 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, well, he's serious. There's the money. 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 the number one largest city in the world. And by the time I got to Mexico that summer, I was like, I can handle it.

51:37I 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. Walk, 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.

52:13Got a 4.0, transferred up to BYU, got into BYU, which is incredibly difficult. End up getting into the business school, end up starting Qualtrics, into meeting my wife and kind of the rest is history. And so 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 going to go do something. It's pretty incredible when you kind of think back and look at it that way. I've heard you say that some of the lessons or a bunch of the lessons you've learned on the mission, and maybe it's mission in South Korea, you use throughout your life as a leader or executive.

52:52Yeah, for sure. What were some of the interesting things that came out of that that are applicable to leadership? 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 in a place where the locals don't go. And this is every day. I live there. I live right by the airport. I live all over down there. Like one of them is just awareness, awareness around you. I mean, like head on a swivel. And like, I think that's something that you can't really teach. So that's one that I've always was kind of top of mind.

53:32The other thing is, you know, 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. 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 we're looking back yeah 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 work with one of the individuals who changed my life in seoul korea um steward Orgel was one of our co-founders who was a mission companion.

54:16Like 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 and a unique individual.

55:01And like, you can do it your way and it can work out. And so I think that's a lesson that I'm trying to tell my kids as well is 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, thinking that they're all going to be kind of this similar spinoff of us, they're not. And so how do you unlock the kind of creative magic that each one of them has and kind of let them believe that they can go do that? Or for me, I don't know that my kids are ever going to have that career experience. That was pretty unique and pretty much saved my life.

55:48So 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 Paltrick sort of came out of that? Yeah, for sure. Like, I just in like post-Korea 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. I'm kind of not a time for a startup. And someone said like, hey, I'm about ready to hire someone.

56:31I'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 burned. And so I was down there. I was in the middle of an internship. It was going great. I was living in Huntington Beach, driving up to Long Beach area. And my dad called, and I just got that call. I was like, what do you do? He's like, I just want to tell you personally, I got some really bad news. This is happening. I don't have much longer. No one knows. And I'm trying to figure it out. The family is devastating.

57:16And 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. Um, where like ages 14, 18, one of those things where like the older I got, the wiser he got. Yeah. Amazing how much he learned in that. Yeah. Yeah. He really grew. Yeah. Uh, 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 so I was just like, no, I got to go be there for him. Like, you've totally changed my life.

57:53Like, I am going to be there for you. And 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. 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 throat cancer. and, 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.

58:30I 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 where I'm on calls with professors from UNC. I'll never forget John Lynch at Duke who runs Dan Ariely. All those people learned under him. He's the godfather of research. 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. Because your dad was a professor, I guess. He was a professor, and we were in such a niche group, And that's when I decided, hey, dad, if you can be that side, I'm really good at the business side, I can grow this thing.

59:16And then Stu joined and we got up and we got it going. Was your dad coding it? 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. The thought tree. 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 those were literally the obstacles we would deal with. And so we had to have a lot of blessing from academics who had published in aid journals to say, hey, actually, what people say online is actually true at some level.

1:00:03And you can test it. 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, like there was still a lot of skepticism. And this was back when you wouldn't enter your credit card online. Yeah. You remember those days? Totally. Like, so going through all of that was interesting. 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. Go get another job. And so then you were at Ford. Yeah, like Ford was recruiting.

1:00:43They 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 them 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 my lunch break, I was still like closing deals. And I closed Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. And I closed the deal for about as much as they would pay me at Ford for the year.

1:01:21and 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 lunch and 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 learned that like hey you can market. You're good. You understand the brand side. You have good ideas. Especially multi-million dollar ad agencies coming in and pitching how you're going to launch this. All of that matters. You touched on expanding out of corporate.

1:02:07I 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 their corporate. Your first seven enterprise customers left, I think. I don't know if Royal Caribbean was one of them, but 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? I mean, this was probably like part of the press release thesis of like, okay, this is what we're going to do.

1:02:43We're going to go after academia because we're already here and we can pay the bills that way. But the real pitch is like, how do we get them to tell corporations because academics have no money and we didn't have money for marketing. So we needed to use, we always view the academic as like, hey, if we treat academics different than everyone else, there'll be great marketing for us. And every company wants to break into that world. This is very much like back in the day it was like, oh, this is like Apple and the Apple one and Apple two. And you learn through academia, this is like LexisNexis.

1:03:15This 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. Because you start and then they graduate and Esri did it famously with like maps, right? And like now it's the standard in the software industry. It happens, but it's a horrible, you're never getting investment. You can't monetize it. 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.

1:03:48And 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 is me on the phone waking up every morning and saying, hey, who are we calling? Stu's doing the same thing and servicing. This is how we're doing it. 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? A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I specifically remember someone from doing a research study on Qualtrics from Heineken.

1:04:24And it went well. And it's the first time they've ever done anything like it. And me saying, all right, give me a contact. Like let's go and they end up buying a$50 ,000 license And so this was how we were going to go do it. And then it was our job to land them 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.

1:05:03when you hear every earnings call in the macro environment, unless you're in video. But like, 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 and 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. And did some of the brands move stuff in-house that was otherwise done by agencies? 100%. And so during the pandemic, my pitch was cheaper, faster, better.

1:05:43You can do more and there's not a better time for you to do this than right now. You have to understand what the market's going to 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 going to launch a commercial, let's test it. If you're going to do this, let's test it. 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.

1:06:15And that was a model that we kind of built out. 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 you're just being overly humble about that, but it was a competitive. There were other players, better funded, certainly. Yeah. I mean, we had one competitor in 2005 and six. I remember that it raised$40 million, which was a lot at the time. Yeah. You had zero. Yeah. We had zero. They were on the front page of every magazine and they had a better product and it was cheaper.

1:06:50How did you out-execute these? Like, was there, I mean, the academic thing probably helped. 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 literally had to tune out the noise and play the long game. And sure enough, they self-sabotage because they're captive with social media. Is Qualtrics a better business because of those constraints that you bootstrapped and therefore you had to value the money?

1:07:32A hundred percent. And I don't think it's because of the money. I mean, although the money is really the true - The forcing function. Forcing function there. But the symptom or what comes out of it is you actually have to be innovative as a company. if you hand 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 20 million dollars what would change and the answer is normally not a whole lot 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 book.

1:08:12You're just not. But when that's your only thing, you see signals that are different for opportunity when you're completely resource-good. 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 time. I mean, everyone told us to. I mean, who was everyone at that? 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 and my dad and my brother and my dad looked at me and said, Ryan, this is your decision.

1:08:55And 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, um, and you're in your early 30s yeah early 30s and 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 we said we got to 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 i don't want you around 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.

1:09:36And I said, why were you the only one? Why were you the only one? And he's like, well, who else did you ask? And we went through the whole thing. He's like, had any of them ever been in that situation before? He's like, no. He's like, 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.

1:10:13You 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 out at IFEO, 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?

1:10:50And 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. It's the end of the ride. And I think there's a lot of people who are involved with WordPerfect back in the day and that's Selden Novell that were not happy with how that ride ended. 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?

1:11:30Yeah, like we I've taught a class for a couple of years called Launch to Liquidity. I used to do it with Jonathan Lavov 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. Yeah.

1:12:04And none of them had that on their rationale. And like, I think that that's where it's like, they're looking at this case study and MBA exercise and that's just not reality. Waiting a hundred million dollars. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're like, no, it's actually - The rate of interest return. And it's like, what are you talking about? 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. So, and what was the advice? So there's, you sat down with Mike Moritz as well, who legendary venture capital Sequoia. Was he feeling you out at this point?

1:12:39Oh, for sure. Yeah, like - Because Sequoia wasn't an investor then. Ultimately they were. We had no venture capital. We were in the process. my brother jared was adamant no venture capital my dad was adamant no venture capital what was that by the way 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 weight 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.

1:13:23And every month I was paying my dad a lot of money and the other founders a lot of money. And that was a good model. So why would we take outside capital to go give that up? And And, you know, you really had to believe that there was a bigger ambition there. And it really came down to, look, we've got this asset and this opportunity that can be something way bigger than anyone thinks that we ever thought. 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-at he is, if we're not going to take the money and sell, we better take something and get some people in the tent because they're now our competition and we got to go.

1:14:20And so then it became, okay, we're bringing the smartest people we can find in the tent. How much is it going to 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 and he's going he basically says Ryan this is the perfect lipness test for me why why aren't there more successful companies in Utah I was like what do you mean he's like yeah there's a bunch of companies that could have been but we don't talk about them anymore. They may be a little interesting dinner conversation, but they're not relevant.

1:15:07And 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? And I was like, I want to build something relevant. But so we grabbed Sequoia and we grabbed Excel, two best venture firms at that time and put them together. And 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. What changed between that moment at 500 million and then SAP at 8 billion and obviously there's been...

1:15:53What was the sound difference? 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 uh the journey felt more fulfilled and like what was the that car ride you took with ashley in 2012 versus the conversation the napkin at catalysts uh you know conference with bill mcdermott so first of all it was a it was a the next time someone approached us all right 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.

1:16:35And we had two people approach us and 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 um because your company notes looks nothing like ours and we had no one circling right and so um 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. Dave Goldberg, CEO of Survey Monkey, rest in peace, passed away five years ago, probably?

1:17:22Yeah, 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 your money you're exiting you're getting on the rails on the back I was like I want doing and and then he said how do you think you're gonna 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, you're going to want to do right by then.

1:18:37I wanted to return the whole fund of Sequoia and Excel for betting on us. 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. 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.

1:19:16We actually were going public. We were on the roadshow. McDermott calls and says, hey, Ryan, 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, 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, cause 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 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 and we'll put you at the tip of the SAP spear and all the marketing and everything.

1:20:21We will take you to the world, the largest company in Europe. One of the reasons why you want to go is you want to have this party where everyone can see Qualtrics globally. We'll take you further and better than anyone else. And it's true. You know, the only company on the road, we announced it, $8 billion, largest private software acquisition, prize of all time. And the whole thing, he did everything he said he was going to go um 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 where they had not been customer focused organization was much more back office erp solutions and this was more like hey we're going to 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.

1:21:18And so I think during the pandemic, everything shifted back to ERP. And, you know, we're not a company. Qualtrics isn't a company that just kind of let, just chilled there. 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. And so we took a public. And then right before the IPO, we sat around with Chris Beckstead, myself, and Zig, who we had grown the company a lot with and I just said again 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 Zig you take CEO Chris you're president and I'll be the founder and that's what happened and then um a year and a half into it um 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 but the business was awesome and so we decided to do a little bit of a an auction and um silver Lake 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 um 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 Attics 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 um and that where zig's the ceo i'm chair like we're rolling pretty cool so cool four four four years and like three different transactions um 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 and then it goes public and then it tried 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 invest in pre-ipo companies so here we are There's going to be a, what is that?

1:23:55Fourth. Fourth. Yeah. It's good. 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 the product market fit element of what you guys established, is there anything that you can take away 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 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?

1:24:37I 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. The experience. The experience management category. That was a hard decision. The category historically would have been... 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. Because people would do it for their own employees. They would do it for their customers. Yeah. And so people would be like, oh, Qualtrics, you're the research platform.

1:25:16Oh, Qualtrics, you're the 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 about 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.

1:25:56But 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. 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 to renew their license. And actually, great. Why? Like, let's talk for a second. And by the way, I mean, this is a dear to my heart customer because it's like the story that I've already told. But they said, look, all of our other data that's coming in is pretty useless right now.

1:26:47We need to know how our employees are doing. We need to know what is it that would make our customers feel safe to go cruise again and where they would want to go. 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 all 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 work-life balance uh it seems that you uh you don't necessarily believe in that you believe there's elements of integration of your work and your life Your wife's dance studio is downstairs.

1:27:37Down below us. Yeah, right below us as you walked in, which was very confusing 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 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 life? Is that kind of rooted in the fact that it was at the founding? It was you and your dad. No, I just, I don't, like, I mean, no one's ever told me no, so why wouldn't we do it, right? I think we're all trying our hardest, and, like, I care about that portion of my life.

1:28:17I think a lot of people do, and I think you can do it all. I just truly believe that. You know, tech's a little harder. Like there wasn't as much of a role for 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 believe that if the family was on board, then that's really the team. And if you actually look at how it's translated, the MBA is much more, it's actually the first thing that Ash and I have really been able to do together.

1:29:03And that's what's really cool. Way more than tech. And so I think the idea of tech was, hey, we care. And a lot of companies, it's not just a Qualtrics thing. We want people to feel like they're either part of the family or their families are part of the company as well. And that was it. I mean, right across the streets, the 40 ,000 square foot daycare center, right? For Qualtrics employees. 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, mothers with children be able to go and work in our offices and actually be able to feel like they were taken care of.

1:30:04And 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 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. But they want to check in with you. I think that's a really cool thing. And by the way, it's like proximity to work is a big thing. And it's something that we've 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.

1:30:52Just really trying to say, hey, look, this is a little different. This hopefully is something different. I want to read some things that you said, and I want to get you just to expound on them a little bit because I took down as particularly interesting thoughts. So I guess original thought is incredibly difficult and incredibly painful. What do you mean by that? Yeah, like when you think of stuff that you came up with or you invented, 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 and 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 thoughts hard like and that's that's it and it's painful it's painful to come up with something um 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 I I think I know where this is coming from but you said it's sad to see people job hop uh every year and a half and that uh nothing great happens over a short period of time is that just 22 years of I just chopping wood and 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.

1:32:54And 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, um, you know, you should ride that train. Um, that being said, like a lot of people have thought that, especially in tech, that it's easy and you can just go jump onto the company and you're going to catch that next wave.

1:33:44And 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 one that just for my own kids, I hope that they don't get that.

1:34:21Like, I had to sit through Seoul, Korea. I'm watching in the NCAA and the transfer portal. Anything, something gets hard. It's like, I'm out. Like, wait, that's not how you're going to 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 nashar 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 fuli and i want you to go run google china and he said wait a minute i'm gonna go over and live in china i'm gonna live in a hotel in beijing and you're not going to pay me as an expert.

1:35:04You're not going to 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. and Jared ends up taking the Google job. 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 just 60 or so.

1:35:46And how do you get that if you're jumping every 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 Hewlett-Packard took a chance on me. My brother in Sequoia, in Excel, took a chance on me. And it only came over time. 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 no it's good question 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.

1:36:49And they're trying to figure out, particularly when you're 22 to 25, 27, 28, you know that what you're doing isn't your life's work, 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 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. 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.

1:37:32Right. 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 execute 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 going to come out of school and like go follow your passion like that's really bad advice because it's work. Like early days of Qualtrics suck. It was work. It wasn't my passion. 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 a couple months ago who had 20 players and out of 20 players, half of them weren't happy, right?

1:38:30So if you look at - You just get to new levels and then you look around and you compare yourself. 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 going to 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 going to go. The higher up you get, there's going to 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.

1:39:18But there's no perfect thing. One of the other things I heard you say 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 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 takeaway? 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 going to go like this, but actually what's going to happen is you're going to take off and you're going to go and you're going to 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.

1:40:22It was exactly how we thought it was. Even though we knew where we wanted it to be, 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 doing? Most of the time we need to change the way we're doing. You gave a commencement to each 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 um what is what is being all in mean to you now how do you think about that and what advice do you give to people about being all in 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 nothing good that i have has come from not just burning that boat i mean 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 to the situation actually tends to to go a lot better.

1:41:30When we got rid of the RSN, that was scary. But once it happened, it wasn't a week before we'd figured out 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. But it wasn't until 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.

1:42:08If 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. 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.

1:42:46It seems like hedging is just the priority. Hedge, hedge, hedge. Last one. I'm not even really sure what this means, but someone told me to ask you about riding a horse into your office building. That's a funny story. I don't know why, but we had a sales goal once and we would always do random things. What year is this? This is like 2014. And 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 this caretaker came down with a horse we backed it up the door we walked it in and like we rode the horse through the office and we actually had a couple meetings instead of sitting on the chair you sat on the horse and how many employees are you that many but i think the picture was more for the the gentleman that we knew yeah to tell him like like the 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 beautiful horse ryan thanks for doing this no thanks uh that was some incredible detail

1:44:29Thank you.