The Story Behind Qualtrics, The Next Great Enterprise Company.
#SuryaRay #Surya Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 35-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He also founded Commonred and is ex-Electronic Arts. I met Ryan Smith about nine years ago in a college apartment in Provo Utah. We were both attending school, and after asking him what he was working on he replied, “I’m building an online research company with my dad called Qualtrics.” Nine years later Qualtrics has 5,000 customers, $70MM in funding, and turned down a $500MM acquisition offer last year in a bold attempt to build a billion dollar company. Qualtrics was well described last year when Sequoia Capital partner Bryan Schreier called them the “largest software company you haven’t heard of yet.” That is changing quickly. If you don’t know, Qualtrics was created by Ryan and has dad as a way to help schools and companies gather feedback and data on students/customers through surveys. They have 5,000 customers including FedEx, Hewlett-Packard, JetBlue, Microsoft, PepsiCo and Zappos. The company was started by Ryan and his dad. I recently interviewed Ryan at Startup Grind Utah and learned how it all happened. In the summer of 2001 while doing an internship at Hewlett-Packard, Ryan’s dad Scott called him and said he had throat cancer and would begin treatment immediately so Ryan returned home and took a semester off school. While at home he found that his dad, who Ryan describes as a “super early adaptor,” had built the technology that was the beginning of Qualtrics. Each day after Scott returned from chemotherapy they would work on the product. By the time Scott had returned to full strength, Ryan had signed up 20 customers and they had hired a small team to build out the product. The first customers were in academia. Ryan realized that he could easily find key decision makers’ contact information online, and since it worked for one it seemed only natural that it would work for others. The first customer was a professor at the Kellogg School of Management. Ten years later the first ten Qualtrics customes are still customers. All of this was literally happening from Ryan’s parents’ basement in Provo Utah in 2002 and 2003. Ryan’s first big hire was a friend that he convinced to turn down a $60,000 job to make $8,000 at Qualtrics. Don’t worry – after over delivering he made $12,000 the next year. By 2004 they had 20-people and there were so many cars on their street that neighbors http://dlvr.it/31w82V @suryaray
Keith Rabois is going to be a full-time investor after more than a decade in operating roles. And fittingly, he’s be doing that as a partner at Khosla Ventures — a high-powered firm as fiesty, contrarian, and entrepreneur-focused as he is. Rather than being put off, Silicon Valley had jumped at the chance to hire him after he left his COO role at Square over an employee’s sexual harassment claim in January. Sources say that while he was weighing offers from Khosla and a new executive role at AirBnB in recent days, he also fielded serious inquiries from a large handful of other venture firms and tech companies. Firm founder Vinod Khosla has had one of the better views of the situation. He sits on Square’s board and so is privy to the details of the claim. When I asked him for comment on the matter during a phone interview yesterday, he only pointed me to the supportive statements from the company, and Rabois’ own post on the matter – but the hiring reads like a big “he’s not guilty” sign. Rabois and Khosla have been working together as investor and startup executive since 2007, and through other difficult situations — a theme Khosla hits on in a separate post for us today. In it, he explains how his firm is focused on hands-on “venture assistance” to entrepreneurs they invest in, helping them through the inevitable highs and lows of building big-league tech companies. Khosla put money into app developer Slide in 2006, shortly before Rabois joined it from LinkdedIn. The company ultimately sold to Google in 2010 for $228 million, after a long journey building a variety of social apps designed around self-expression. At times it had major hits like a slideshow widget on MySpace and the famous sheep-throwing app SuperPoke! on Facebook, but it never found a truly big business in that fast and loose industry. Rabois’ move to Square after the sale marked a return to his roots in the payments business. He’d been an early leader at PayPal during its ride to public offering and eventual sale to eBay. A formative member of the PayPal Mafia, he’s been actively investing for years (we currently count around 40 investments in CrunchBase). He’s currently on the board of money-transfer service Xoom since 2003, which ten years later has just had a successful IPO this month, and reviews site Yelp since 
Editor’s note: _Brad Garlinghouse is CEO of YouSendIt, the cloud file collaboration service. He is an avid angel investor in and advisor to several consumer and enterprise tech companies._ The news that electric car company Fisker Automotive could potentially be acquired by Chinese automaker Dongfeng Motor for about $425 million reminded me of an article that’s been eating at me for some time. 
The #1 request I hear when talking to founders in San Francisco is: “We are hiring engineers. Know any?” We all know this is a big issue that’s only getting worse, and so do most of the investors. But, I’m now starting to hear this so often, I’m beginning to worry that all the conventional tactics simply won’t work. Early-stage startups that don’t start experimenting with new ideas to source, recruit, and close engineers and other technical hires may end up running out of money or never achieving the product traction they need to get to the next level. I don’t have data to support this, but my intuition is that technical talent is so fragmented right now, all options need to be reexamined and placed on the table. 
Israeli early stage high tech startup VC fund Magma Venture Partners, whose current portfolio includes online video-editing software developer Magisto, mobile analytics company Onavo, and navigation app maker Waze to name three, has completed fundraising on its third fund — Magma III — exceeding its target of $100 million. Magma said it manages more than $300 million to-date. 
Earlier today, CNNMoney broke the news that well-known Googler/YouTuber Hunter Walk and former Googler Satya Patel would be starting a new VC firm called Homebrew. What wasn’t known was whether Walk would be leaving Google to pursue Homebrew full time, but he has confirmed that to be the case. The last time that we spoke with Walk, he was passionately explaining all of the things he gets to work on with the YouTube For Good team, which was a team that I didn’t know existed. It consisted of people with all types of skill-sets, including forward-thinkers and leaders like Walk, who would help out non-profits and organizations with spreading their message and raising awareness for their programs using YouTube. In a blog post, which is the email that Walk sent to his colleagues at Google, he thanked those who brought him into the company and gave a glimpse into the Google culture that you hear from those who have “re-entered the mainstream” after leaving the Mountain View company: After nine years, two months it’s time for me to figure out how to make lunch for myself. Yup, I’m leaving Google and it’s my year-old daughter’s fault. You see, when I look at her I think about the values my wife and I want to instill. Among the most important is the belief that you should pursue all your dreams, think big, lean into your fears and keep building. The best way for me to teach this is by example, so I need to step away from Google’s comfort. No next adventure to announce yet – this is about feeling there’s more for me to do, but also knowing I need some space to figure it out. Google has changed my life. The chance to work with so many smart and creative people – thank you for letting me learn from you. There’s no university in the world which could have supplied equal education. Because of my time at Google I truly look at the world in a different way, one of problems waiting to be solved rather than insurmountable obstacles or indelible truths. I’m especially appreciative of Joan Braddi, Susan Wojcicki, Chad Hurley and Salar Kamangar – leaders who took me into their teams and, when it was time, encouraged me to find new challenges. Selfless, intelligent and loyal to Google. While being inside of Google is special, passing through 
Samsung continues to come good on its commitment to investing in more startups that will help it build out its portfolio of services beyond hardware. Today the company 
Editor’s note: _Norman Winarsky is the Vice President of Ventures at research and technology development organization SRI International._ What have we learned over more than 65 years of invention and commercialization? There are several specific ways in which our venture processes stand in contrast to what is in vogue today. These are lessons that anyone in the business of innovation should consider. 
Nokia’s venture capital arm Nokia Growth Partners (NGP), which was founded back in 2005 and invests in mobile-related ventures in the U.S., Europe and Asia, has launched its third fund — back by a further $250 million long term commitment from Nokia. The VC firm is also expanding its presence in China with the appointments of David Tang as MD and Lu Guo as principal. 
Scott Hartley, a venture capitalist at Mohr Davidow, decided to completely overhaul his investment strategy today after returning from a trip to New York. Hartley, who is originally from Palo Alto, spent a few days in New York for meetings and an interview on Bloomberg TV. When he unlocked his Sand Hill Road office today, he found that his colleague Abhas Gupta had cheerfully Bieberized his new desk on the other side of Mohr Davidow’s office. While at first he was shocked, with a little reflection, it sunk in that the mobile-social wave is over, and that while enterprise is cool, the next wave of disruption is Bieber. “I have a belief that ‘Tech is a Horizontal Enablement Layer‘ that disrupts traditional verticals,” he said. “First, we saw this with the Internet in the 90s, then with mobile as a dominant form factor, and social as a proxy toward authenticity. We believe that the next wave will include Bieber, and we are well positioned in this space.” His colleagues and the firm’s LPs, while stunned by this sudden pivot, were understanding and said they felt confident in Hartley’s abilities to identify the very best early-stage teams in this new Bieberification wave. “The question is how will Bieber disrupt traditional verticals,” he said. “We’re investors in RockHealth, pioneers in the digital health category, and we’re actively seeking opportunities in the vertical disruption Bieber is applying on Sand Hill Road.” He’s now working on partnering with Y-Bieber-cubator to source deal flow on companies that have evidence of Bieber-gagement and Bieber-tention. He added: If I was your VC, I’d never let you go I can scale you places you ain’t never been before Baby take a chance or you’ll never ever know I got money in my hands that I’d really like to blow Swag swag swag, on you 
It’s a brand new year, and a brand new class for the Entrepreneurs’ Roundtable Accelerator is only fitting on this cold, January morning. The accelerator announced back in October that this January 2013 class of ten startups will be receiving 