The High School Dropout Who Made $2B & Bought an NBA Team

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/b37e0f35d655ed12

This is Ryan Smith.
The guy who went from a 1.9 GPA high school dropout to a$2 billion net worth.
But this isn't your normal dropout story.
At some point you have a conversation with yourself, like, okay, I gotta make this happen. Yeah, I gotta find a gear that I've never used before.
When he dropped out, he had no plan, no money, and nowhere to live. There's a great story about the early days of Qual Trix and Focus.
We were religious about it. And it was actually an incredible forcing function for me. At some point you get offered$500 million to sell the company.
And you turned it down. Every other person I would talk to about this offer was like take it and run. You're building it.
From your family's basement all the way to the end zone. Basically sell for eight billion dollars, you end up going public. I didn't do anything else when I was doing quals. I didn't invest, I didn't sit on boards, no side hustles. No side hustles.
Nothing.
Except for who's. What's it like to now own an NBA team? That's insane.
My philosophy was don't blink.
Just go.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to
I'm putting my all in it like my day's all on the road, less travel, never looking back. I wanna start with this, like you know, you've
Done what?
Kids like me dream up.
It's like build a successful company.
With my family no less.
Become the super successful guy, billionaire, NBA team owner, you live this really interesting life.
What's cool is that
If we rewind the clock.
You were a guy who
Dropped out of high school.
And
had a one point nine GPA in high school, so
Going from a one point nine GPA.
to like I don't know, a two billion dollar net worth, that's a pretty big jump.
We hear these
Stories where it's like
Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, the
They were at Harvard and then they dropped out with this big grand idea and it

That's not your story at all.
So let's do the origin. Can you take us back?
Uh, you know, you're fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old. What was going on in your life at that time?
Yeah, I mean
It's no secret. Like my parents split up when I was like fourteen.
And
The world was rocked in
You know, I was a I was very much like, okay.
Screw everything.
No one can tell me what to do and
You know, I think my parents were trying their hardest to keep us I mean, we had five kids, they were keeping us all
kinda afloat in
I think to be honest with you
You know, I never really developed the skills for for school.
And and I didn't think I was really good. I knew I was a good athlete.
I knew I was good at golf and could play poker.
And like
I
I knew there was something there.
But
I didn't work hard.
I didn't finish anything.
And
It was really hard. Like
This concept of finishing
And
It just never happened. And so I think
The trajectory I was on at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.
Was
Not a very hopeful one.
And there was no indication that there was a spark.
There's no indication that there was good ideas in there. Right.
So what was your move? So you're not
Not love in school.
Not doing that well. No spark there.
What was the decision to to quit, to drop out, to to leave? Yeah, I mean
It was just kinda force. It was like hey
school is like this isn't working out for you. Like you don't go to class. You don't it's not us. It's you don't study. You know, there's probably another path for you and
I had an uncle
Who reached out and said, Hey Ryan, you're sixteen. We're doing a tech company.
It was called I Mall.
You're not gonna just
Screw off all day. Might as well come work. I'm running a sales team, come work. And I worked in the mailroom.
And I worked with three older gentlemen. I mean one was in his
Fourties one was there and
The founder had just gotten back or someone had just gotten back from Seoul Korea.
And I would always say, like I'm gonna go make money one day, I'm gonna go work on the fishing boats in Alaska'cause they're paying twenty bucks an hour. I'm gonna go do this and
My parents were like, Go do whatever you want.
just graduate high school. Like we don't care. The borrow was really low. And like
These guys were like no, you should go to Korea.
And
I was like, That sounds good. And my dad was like, If you can pay for it and graduate high school
We'll do it. So I graduated high school. I got a G E D when I was seventeen.
I went to like
a university and just like cranked it out.
Like three months through like packets.
And like
I was with like mothers and like everyone else who would not and it was like I I was like okay, I'm gonna crank this thing out and
I did it and it was a little bit of a moment like, Whoa.
All right, when I kinda set my mind to something, I can do it.
And then I went out and that's that's when I went to Saul.
And so you go to So you're what, seventeen years old at this time?
Do you have a plan?
The plan was I communicate I never left Utah. I
I communicate with someone and like we were supposed to show up and like
We had jobs, they had a house for us, they had all these things.
And
You know, we had talked to him, so
I remember getting there and like
We had limited cash.
But we were there. We were there to sign a contract and work for a school and move in and
We get there and we
We go right to the hotel.
And
We're waiting and we call where we're supposed to meet up and
No answer, no answer, no answer, no answer. Next day, no answer, no answer, no answer. And we're like, What in the world?
And then finally someone answers and it's a Korean woman who didn't speak any English.
And it was like okay.
Well, but this person like I thought we were showing up and they were just gonna
I'll be there waiting. Hey, we're so excited to have you. And it was the exact opposite and like
Basically after a week in this hotel.
It was like you have no job.
You have no house.
You don't have enough money to be staying in this hotel. And so
I remember sitting in a in a coffee shop and
Yeah.
We kinda all called our parents to come home.
These guys.
All the parents went to the air, bought him a ticket and
They all jumped on the plane, but
Like I sat there, my dad's like you're not coming home.
And I was like, What in the world?
I know what you're gonna do here.
Like
You got a chance to go do something and I and I look back as a parent now and I was like
What in the world? Like
I would never leave my kid over there. But he was like the upside is like
Way better in
So what was your dad was that tough love or was he just sort of like look, you just need to look at it this way.
Hang in there? Like what what was he
What was going through the mind, you think?
I have no idea.
I I like, honestly, I've thought about it so much. It's like and that's just my dad, like he
He's like fine with his kid's failing.
Did you feel like rock bottom at that point? Oh my word.
So homesick.
In a country.
No Americans.
No. No English. No money.
And
You just kinda had to go figure it out. All right, so you meet this guy, crash on his couch.
At some point you have a conversation with yourself, like, Okay, I gotta make this happen.
Yeah, I gotta find a gear that I've never used before.
And so what'd you do?
Ended up
Running into someone who needed an English teacher
The school was
A ways away.
I didn't have a place to
Stay.
So he said he paid me ten dollars an hour, which isn't a lot there.
Um so I teach the kids
From
You know, three hours a day in the mornings.
And
I had found out about a place where Koreans go to study called a Gochiwan, which is like
That locker room we just looked at. It's about that big, but a little bigger.
No one ever sleeps there.
And I'd convince the guy
That if I could teach him English one hour a day, he'd let me sleep there.
Because I had a shower.
I I found a little stove. I would cook ramen noodles on it.
'Cause that's all I can afford.
Obviously it's tough.
Obviously you're sort of
It's like character building moment.'Cause you're on your own for so for such an extended period of time.
Uh, but was there like a part of you?
That was in sort of enjoying MacGyvering it a little bit. Not at all. This was not No momentum.
No. Like at the time there was no like
There was no of like myself now looking back going, Okay, I'm gonna get crafty, this is an experience. I'm backpacking through Europe. This was not that
I mean this was like I gotta get home.
Right.
And so you uh you're teaching one guy. Did you
Eventually get more students and how'd you do that?
In Korea they were
You know
twenty big fifteen to twenty story.
High rises where everyone lived.
And I was like, Okay, I'm teaching English. I've got
twelve hours in the day.
The better
rather than teaching a school, it's way better to do these private lessons.
And
If I could get into one of the high rises
And get like
starting at four o'clock in the afternoon, teach every
Fifty five minutes. Right.
Like it's going to be great. Well, how do you do that?
And I got someone to write I had a pager at the time.
Ага, само до вайта меседж.
In Korean.
And I made like five thousand flyers.
And I would go in and they'd have these huge mailbox rows.
But there was a security guard there.
So I would go in and talk to the security guard and I was like, Hey man.
Like
In English or broken Korean. Whatever it took. I would just try to be their friend.
And I was like, let me put these here this is it. Let me put these in all of these.
They're like, Well and I was like, Come on.
And
I would normally be pretty successful at it. Right.
And then my beeper just started hammering and blowing up. And I was like, Whoa, like this was the first time in my life I was like
Actually there's something in there.
You have a good idea.
And you can execute on it.
And then
I started getting a schedule.
And like literally like a month later, I was making like eight thousand dollars a month.
Is a seventeen year old.
Teaching English and I was like, How in the world did I go from there to here?
That's amazing. Let's talk about the starter qualtrics. So
Um
You build this company.
You build it with Stuart, you build it with your brother, with your dad.
And you're building it.
From

All the way, you know.
To the you know, to the end zone, basically. Sell for eight billion dollars, you end up
Go in public, you have a pretty crazy story over like a twenty something year period.
Where you know what's the origin?
And uh you know, what were the early days like?
Yeah, so I think
I think the the origin and
If you talk to all of us, it's it's it's it's a little different. Like
So it was really my dad and I who started. I was doing an internship at Hewlett Packard in LA.
And I get a call that my father had cancer.
And it was terminal.
Like or pretty close. I mean it was like three years throat can't or th three years to live Max and
Probably a couple months and
He ended up.
Going through and
Recovering.
You know, and is alive today, which is an amazing story. But
I kinda
had a moment where I just
Left California.
I was working in LA and came back.
Deferred school.
And said, I'm spending this whole semester with my dad.
My dad was
always working on technology.
He come up with this idea of like collecting
research online and
Seems normal now, but at the time it wasn't
Trusted.
Right.
Yeah, they were
They were either
Doing customer satisfaction, paper, pencil.
Um
Or not doing it at all. Okay.
Like the thought of asking your employees feedback or your
Your customer feedback.
That seems normal now. Table stakes too. They wouldn't do it.

And so they'd have blind spots everywhere.
And he would get paid a lot of money to go in there and help companies do this. And it was like a novel thing.
We were gonna go put the customer at the table.
We were gonna have them part of the decision making process.
And this is what we were gonna come up with.
And so
He had this idea, but he was always messing around and he never really went
commercial with anything.
Well.
I was in
Hewlett Packard and
I gotten
Pretty I learned some tricks around
How to like go to market over the phone with technology.
And so I saw what he was working on and I was like, actually
I had just been doing that with like some software and support stuff.
What if
We applied it here.
And
So he would come home from his like radiation and chemo and you're just kinda sitting there and I'd be like
Let's do a business. Let's let me take this to the world. He's like, Well, I don't have any money. I can't pay you.
I said, Well let's just
Let's just go fifty fifty.
And
You know?
By the time he recovered and he couldn't speak, we had ten customers.
And
Like we we kept finding people that
would believe in what we were doing and it was a little Jerry McGuire moment where
I had to find like one person who was like then take it to the world and like
That's kinda how the business started in the basement and so he couldn't talk at the time. So yeah, even he's what? He's writing writing on a board.
And you're the guy. And if I'm on the phone and these people are asking like
About deep statistical stuff. I don't know. And I'm like going back and forth and
You know.
It was a pretty gnarly time. I wish I had more pictures in that moment.
But no one thought it was gonna be anything. Right. And everyone's like oh you started with your
With your dad and it was just great like no one, like my roommates didn't think it was gonna be something
Like
I I didn't even think it was g he didn't think it was gonna be something.
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There's a great story about the early days of Qual Trix and Focus. And I I love this when I was researching it.
I guess it was you and your brother.
Uh, who are talking about like, well, we have this market, we can sell it to these people, these people, and you guys at some point decided
No, no, no. We want to narrow down so only the universities and the part I love because focus is a word anybody can throw around.
Right. But like if you take focus as an action word, what does it mean? It means saying no to a bunch of otherwise
believable ideas.
And the thing I read in the research was um
Your brother was basically like
You know, if you're talking to him about some other type of customer
He would yeah, he's hanging up the phone. He's like unless you're talking about these two hundred and fifty universities
I don't wanna hear it. So can you tell me about like how that went down and what that was like? This is probably two thousand six, two thousand seven and
We had found some traction in universities.
We'd found people like my dad.
My first custom was Angela Lee at the Kellogg Business School.
She made all of her students
Use Qualters and then
It just kinda went from there and I can go through every professor and kinda how the whole thing worked. But my brother at the time was a Google.
He was an early g early Googler.
And
At this time, like
I didn't have very many people to call.
And
You know.
I didn't know how good he was.
But I knew he was like
Running.
A big piece of the internet. Okay. Right.
And Google was kinda having a moment.
And
He had been assigned to go run China for Google.
So he was living in Beijing, he was working with Kai Fu Li and like running Google China. Wow.
So for me I think
When I would call him and ask for advice and we started developing this dialogue and he was four years older than me, so we were close, but not that close.
I think for him it was like
Dude.
You're all over the place. I don't have time for this.
If you're gonna call me
Stay on script.
Stay focused.
And
Like actually finish something.
And it was a little bit more like get out of here. Right.
But he was religious about it.
And it was actually an incredible forcing function for me.
in the team to be like, okay.
We're gonna go get
the top one hundred universities and nothing else matters. Right.
These forcing functions are so powerful. Yeah. You know, it's like uh if we play basketball, like if if there's a shot blocker, it's like you can't bring that weak stuff in here.
You can't show up on the call
And be scatter brain because you know how the other person's gonna respond. It force you. I know what he's coming at me. Even when they're not in the room, you start editing. Oh yeah, yeah. What am I gonna tell him what's the story on our next call that we have, what progress am I gonna show him? Right. Am I am I am I actually telling him the same story I told him last week?
So what did we actually get done this week? Right. I've got to actually come up
With a new story.
And
You know, ultimately I was able to recruit him out of Google.
To move back to Utah.
And that that happened in two thousand nine.
So we were seven years in and
And then when we got together
Um
Magic started happening.
Mm.
Why is that? W w what what change?
Just'cause he's that good or wh what do you mean? Yeah, I mean I didn't I knew he was good. I didn't know he was a top
five or six whatever at the time product person in the world.
And
There was a dynamic between us.
And I'll just be super honest, we are brothers, we had to love each other and we were just able to push on each other harder than any executive or person I've ever
I've ever met.
Right.
You know, with executives I could probably go or teams, I could probably go three or four rounds.
on something really hard before
Someone said uncle
With my brother I could go fifteen.
Because we had to wake up.
And there was no drama, there was no nothing.
Like we spoke each other's language.
But we were so different.
You know, he was full engineer, I was full like
business and we met on the product side.
And we almost had to grow together.
Two
Like almost like a relationship, like where
Like my weaknesses, he had to go fill in those gaps.
My blind spot. And me too.
Yeah, I've read something where you were saying that that you know, it came to you at some point.
And he's like, Hey, here's my weaknesses.
What are yours? And you're like, uh I had never really thought about it to that level of detail. I'm great, right? No, he's like, Hey, I suck at these five things. What do you suck at? I was like, I don't suck at anything, bro.
And he was like, Oh boy.
And I've heard him say this like
My job is to develop my younger brother.
Who does that?
Yeah, that's great. And when we took money in two thousand eleven.
Sequoia I remember was like
We're only doing this if there's a CEO.
Which one of you is the CEO?
So it wasn't really even stated until there was. He said clearly we are co founders
I'm not working for my little brother. Right.
And
Like I remember sitting in the room, I'm looking across from Mike Moritz, who gave Steve Jobs his first dollar and
back Larry and Sergey and like they're like we need a CEO or we're not investing.
And like
Kicking each other under the table. Literally it was just crickets.'Cause I knew where this conversation was going.
The I I still remember the silence.
Because we're all just looking at each other.
And finally he just stands up and slaps the table and is like
It's a
And he points at me.
And he goes.
I won't do media.
And then sat down. And like if you find a Jared interview, it's rare. If you find a Jared Smith interview, it is super rare.
And
You know, that was a moment where I was like, All right.
Like
We'll still operate two in the box, we'll divide the world, but like
It's a cool moment. And
Then it was like your first time CEO, they're giving you or now in the big leagues like
We've taken this money from Excel.
This is the largest series A raised in two thousand.
In
And twelve?
since two thousand eight and all of tech
It's outside of the Bay Area.
Which I mean Sequoia at the time wasn't even investing there.
So we came out of nowhere. The Forbes article was like
The biggest company no one's ever heard of. Right.
And
You know, you look at that prior time, but now the pressure was on us.
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So wait, what year did you start the company?
Two thousand two.
Two thousand two. Now we're talking about two thousand twelve. Ten years. Ten years. You have a sign out there in your office that we walked by it says
Tune out the noise.
play the long game. And there's a picture of a guy just s you know, he's sitting there with his ears plugged.
And I've had a lot of people on spotcast, I remember when we had
Uh, Jimmy Mr. Beast. He's now the biggest YouTuber in the world, but back then
And I played him a clip of him like, you know, ten years prior.
And he just said it matter of fact that he goes
I started this when I was twelve years old.
When I was twelve, nobody watched.
Thirteen nobody watched.
Fourteen years old, nobody watch.
Fifteen, nobody watch. Sixteen. Is anybody ever gonna watch seventeen nobody watch.
He's like finally when I was nineteen
Some people started to watch. And even then it was nothing, you know, just relative to how it grew.
And so he was talking about, you know
there's this cliche around the other you know this sort of tenure overnight success.
But it's real different when you hear somebody just
year after year of just obscurity.
What was that like for you that period?
But you against the world and
And
You know, I'll I'll never forget once in I think it was like two thousand and four.
Um, we were in a basement. My father was operating he was in one room on his computer like
Deep into like stat stuff.
And
I was out there and
I was having these issues with our website.
I was like super frustrated.
Because our competition had just
raised a bunch of money. The product was cheaper than ours.
They raised forty million dollars.
And
Their product was better than ours.
Better, cheaper, more resources, more funding.
And I'm like that's
That's hard.
Like
I was I was frustrated. I was like pissed. And I was like, Are we gonna do this? What's going on?
And like I was almost like
argumentative with my father. My father's just sitting there and finally like it's the only time I ever saw him gu get mad.
He like slams the table, turns around and he's like
Who's stopping you?
Like who's stopping you from going to do everything you want to go do?
And like in that moment it was like a ton of bricks like
If we're gonna go do this
You're gonna have to do it.
Like you can't blame there's only two of you.
Right. Like you're actually gonna have to go do it.
There's not gonna be a shortcut. There's not gonna be an easy button.
Like
You're gonna have to go. And from that moment on, I stopped asking him.
And
You know, that was kinda that moment. Don't ask for permission. So I have this photo here. This is um
Describe the scene.
Oh wow.
So this is uh
This is me and Stuart.
Everything in this photo is
bought at a salvage cell.
From campus. So like the printers were five dollars.
On the board I'm making a list of
Customers.
And like setting goals like the twenty five K Club.
Yeah.
And seeing how many we can put. I was just dialing.
All day. All day. Like emailing, dialing, going to still remember your uh your script?
Ring ring. What happens? Oh yeah. I mean, I would ask people what they're using. Have they ever heard of us or have they ever done anything like this and
Uh telling them the top researchers in the world were using it.
If I was calling into Dallas, I would say I was part of the Dallas American Marketing Association. And we went to the conference.
I would
Say hey, can I just walk you through a demo?
And at the time there was no Zoom.
Right.
So like I would actually get on the phone.
Send them a link and then they would follow along with me. Right. And I could do the demo.
This is where I've always told our reps.
Like
Do you know your product?
I could do the demo on the phone.
In a car.
With a link.
Walking'em through.
Right.
Without me looking at the screen.

And explain to them every single thing that's going on.
What does it take to be great at sales?
You were great at sales.
I mean
So so I think I think sales gets a really bad name.
Um, because people like
Use it.
As
Okay, the salesperson we don't want to deal with, but
I remember a moment
A lot of authors would use our software.
To write books.
And
I remember once Daniel Pink called me.
He said, I'm writing a book and I want your help.
I said, Great.
And he's like I was like, What's the title of the book? And he said, To sell is human.
And he basically um it's a great book about how
Every single person is a salesperson.
They're actually trying to get a group of people
to go in one direction or another at some point.
in the day.
And
I think that when it comes to like software
Um
The first of all is you gotta believe in it. You've gotta actually believe that your product has value.
And
you know, the person on the other end's life's going to be better if they use it. And so in our case
We wanted them to run their businesses from the outside in.
Instead of from the inside out. We we believe that their employees or their cut or
were their biggest assets and
Like getting a pulse on them.
More than once a year was probably a good idea when then we said, Hey, actually if your business operated with a cadence
Of this data.
You're gonna win more.
And so part of it was educating these people.
That there was a new way.
And by the way, it was cheaper, faster, and better.
And if you as a user
Would embrace this your personal career.
inside your organization would skyrocket. Right.
Because
Everyone else is guessing.
And
You'll have this massive propensity.
Of being correct all the time. Wouldn't it be great to know.
Wouldn't it be great to know? You don't have to guess.
And so
That was the thought and I was like, Oh my word, like how do we get this to everyone?
Somebody had a great reframe. They were like
Sales is the generous act of letting the right person know that you might have a solution to their problem. If you think about it that way, like it's an act of service and you could you can approach it many maybe differently.
So y it it does start to work and you get it to work. You eventually hit a point where you do something
Pretty crazy. You start this business and you're
Basement.
And you're dialing for dollars.
And at some point you get offered five hundred million dollars to sell the company.
An absurd amount of money.
That sets up you, your your team, everybody for life.
And you turned it down.
What was that like?
So it was hard because no one had ever
No one had ever offered.
So
to buy our company and it was it's it's always a reality check where it's like, okay, it's kind of a recommitting point.
Yeah, the gent the gentleman who was doing it. Um
ran a company I'll I'll just be honest, it was called Survey Monkey at the time. Yeah. And you know, he was married to Cheryl Sandberg and
She was running Facebook and like
Th they were the power couple, love Dave. Dave was awesome.
And I was like, Whoa, do I want it
Do we want to go
My brother had known him'cause he worked for Cheryl at Google, like
It was just the synergy coming together.
And he's like, I'll take the business.
Like let's go, we can partner, you can leave.
And be done. Like it was like the cleanest moment of all time. And
Yeah, sitting around just
Like next door from here.
And and one of our our mentors, Duff Thompson's office and
You know, this is someone who
Yeah, as you talk about mentors who would
Who had been there at Word Perfect.
And um
You know, every other person I would talk to about this offer was like, Take it and run.
And Duff like
Like
We sold the word perfect too early.
You know, we had the market, Microsoft was coming, like
We sold too early.
And he was like I
He was the only person that said
Don't take the money.
He said
In my mind
You guys are cash flow positive, you're cranking, you're growing at a hundred percent.
If you and Jared can get along.
And do this.
It should be interesting.
And
Jared.
kinda turned to me and my dad turned to me and said, Well what do you want to do?
And I just said I
I'll come back to you. And I I literally I remember getting in the car with my wife and I was like, Hey
We gotta leave.
Like we just gotta drive south.
And we get in the car and we're like forty minutes in to a three and a half hour drive. She was from Vegas, so we were going down there.
And
She's like
Like if it's going good, just keep it rolling.
I was like, You don't worry about like
Passing that up? She's like, No, like
What are you gonna do at home? Like
I I I don't need you around the house more. And like this is the time. Like if we're gonna go for it, this is the time. And it was like
Was just one of those moments where
We knew we were gonna
We were gonna go for it.
Pulled out a lot of cash already secondary. Were you like where you basically already We were profitable, so we were paying ourselves. Yeah.
And
That was a unique thing, like profitability and tech.
As a young company. So we would distribute the money
But this was a whole new world. Right.
And
So we came back and I remember.
Sitting down. You know, it was funny.
Dave.
You know, rest in peace like eat.
Hm.
He was an amazing human. And he's like, I just want to do what's best for you. But I remember he flew into town and I was like, I knew that I think I was gonna tell him
That
We were gonna turn it down.
And I knew how crazy that was.
But
I also needed to hear him out a little.
So we met
At the office.
And I wanted to walk'em through our culture.
And our company.
Because
I wanted him to see.
And maybe things change, maybe comes back for more. I I don't know. Yeah.
So I was like, all right.
We can't be recognized. I guess like put on the hat, like let's go in and so like we did this whole tour, we come back, we go to a different office, we sit down.
And I was like
It just
I think we're gonna go for it.
And he's like
Huh.
What what makes you think you can do it?
And like I didn't know what to say.
Ha ha ha.
And I was like,
Well, I just got you to put on a Qualtrics hat and walk our building.
I didn't know what else to say and it was like
We're just gonna do it. And
He really respected that and we'd have lunch every week. I was out there and like
You know, we ultimately ended up talking about joining forces later on.
Um actually the week before he passed away and then that was kinda it.
It was cool. Like things happen for a reason and
You know, we went for it and then we decided like if we're gonna turn that down.
That means we gotta get serious. We can't be running this thing on our own personal credit cards and in the credit union bank and all this stuff. Like
We've gotta actually
Put all the money back into the business.
And then
You know, we decided to go
raise money from Sequoia and Excel. And at the time it was like taking money from the Red Sox and the Yankees. Excel are just on Facebook.
You know, obviously Sequoia done um Google and
You know, Apple and
They were the forefront of everything and the goal was, Hey, you guys like watch our back in the tech industry. We're gonna sit in Utah and we're gonna make money and put our heads down and go.
Right.
And like we got the world covered.
That's what we need you for.
It was it was a pretty cool partnership.
I wanna learn from you more on the business side, how you think, how you operate. One of the things I I liked is
You talked about like working backwards.
One is just to work forwards. You're just I don't know, we'll figure it out as we go. And of course there's there's that.
But a very useful exercise is to like, you know.
Start with the end in mind.
And then just reverse engineer. Well, if that's true, then what needs to be true underneath that you sort of go back, can you explain maybe
How you do that are an example.
Yeah, I mean I think it's different from
Where we are today to where we were then, but
I I learned something by accident once. Um
You know, when we did announce the fundraising.
I remember getting on the phone with a journalist from Business Insider, Julie Bort.
And I'll never forget this.
I had never really done an interview. I'd done one interview with Forbes.
And she comes up. I mean, we're ten years in and no one even knows who we are, and she goes
I heard you just turn down five hundred million dollars.
I was just flustering.
So she writes this headline.
kid who turned down five hundred million dollars with my picture is excited about it.
And I'm like, Oh my gosh, because it looked like
I went to the media.
with this flam the story back
Into Dave's face.
And I was so
I was so embarrassed.
But
I knew at that moment the Dave wasn't coming back. Right.
It was a burn the boat moment. She burned the boat.
for us on a possible acquisition.
The first one in ten years.
And I I was so mad.
And
I never forgot about that. And so
We operated for two more years.
And we went to raise money.

When are you gonna raise money again,'cause kinda when you start you're on that path.
And what's the dollar amount and everything and
You know, my entire thing was
Well
We're gonna raise it a billion dollars.
'Cause that'll show that we've doubled. That's a new mark. We're giving away stock to employees this is where it's gonna be at.
So when we got down to it
Excel and Sequoia and
We brought insight in they they agreed to that.
And they said, All right, we're gonna
How do you want to announce this? I was like, There's only one person I want to talk to.
So I called Julie Born. I was like, Hey, um
You might not remember me.
But
You wrote that article that said.
I turned down fifty m five hundred million dollars and I was happy about it and raised seventy million, da da da.
And
Just so you know, like
We're raising it a billion.
Do you want a story?
And she's like yes and so
She
Basically took the exact same article.
The exact same picture.
And put.
The folks that turn down
Five hundred million just raised it a billion. New headline. New headline.
You have they look the exact same. You have both of those framed. And then I remember sitting there one day
After we had done that and there was a lot of our employees that were like, Okay, wow, we're we made it, we're here and I was like, No, no, no, no, what's her next article?
Work backwards.
What's h what's her next article?
Like what is she putting up next?
And two years later it's like
The group that turned down.
five hundred million just raised it two point five billion.
And
You know, we knew that that wasn't the goal.
We knew we had our own mission and
the Qualtry story and everything, but
It was very clear from a directional standpoint.
We raise it two and a half. What's the next article?
A year later it says the group
You know, or two years later as a group that
Raise two and a half or turn down five hundred just sold for
And she she literally put
Four of those together with the same headline, the same page.
I'm grateful for it because it fired us up.
To go and say,
Well, that next one isn't interesting.
Like
We actually need to go bigger. We need to push harder.
Like we need to go more glob like every decision came to like
Okay, what's the story we're gonna be able to tell when we're done with all this? Right.
And
You know, it's kind of a weird thing because
At the end, like if you meet
sports stars.
At the end of the world.
Like where they're done playing.
You know what they do? They sit around and tell stories.
They tell stories about
What the world was like.
And you get them together and all they do is just sit and tell stories.
And you hear bird tell stories, you hear Aynes tell stories, you hear Dwayne Wade tell stories, like it's awesome.
And it's kinda like
All we have are gonna be these stories that we're gonna be able to tell and when
Qualter sold.
It was probably one of the most underwhelming days of my life.
So when the the money hits the bank. Yeah.
We were at uh
Kind of a president's club type deal.
With about a hundred of our people.
And the deal had closed but hadn't funded and I remember sitting there
by the pool with like our whole company who would leadership who would
Like
made presidents club.
And
I could tell when the money I knew when the money was gonna hit.
And it like lands and then just hits to everybody.
And I
I could see over the next two hours like this reaction.
And I remember turning to my wife, like handing my phone.
And she's like sitting there reading a book.
And
Yeah, there's a lot more zeros there.
And she's like
Uh scary.
And I was like
Okay.
We've been grinding for twenty years and you're upon so you're not the line in the movie. Scary scary like uh
And then and then I started watching our people.
Like
It's like we just paid off our home.
We just did that. Like
And then there was a little bit more joy.
But
It became clear to me that it is about the journey.
Because
Even after all that, it wasn't a Eureka moment.
Right.
And so knowing
That
I'm gonna work till I'm eighty.
I'm never gonna stop working. I already know that about myself.
And every young person should ask themselves that question right now.
I don't know that anyone knows exactly what they're gonna do.
No one has figured it out. Like I still don't know what I wanna be when I grow up, right?
But what I do know is I'm gonna work Telemate.

I'm not gonna
Check out. If I was gonna do that, I would have done it already.

All right, let's take a quick break because I gotta tell you a story. Let me tell you about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form, and it was open only during business hours. And I hit send.
And it froze. They flagged the transaction, they locked my account, they put me on hold for 45 minutes, and then they told me I gotta visit my local branch.
And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution.
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So we play basketball this morning and it's clear you've been playing basketball since you're a kid. And so
What's it like to now own an NBA team? That's insane.
So it's weird. When we're on the road show to go public, like you normally go like one day in San Francisco, two days in New York, one day in Boston, one day in Maryland, then back to New York.
And
I had organized our road show to go three days in New York.
One
And then to Boston.
And like no one had really done that the way they were doing it. And they're like, Why are you doing that? I was like,'Cause I'm going to the Celtics games, I'm gonna go sit with Ainge.
Yeah.
And like I'll never forget like sitting in the locker room with Ainge, like
It it's it's the only thing outside of qual I didn't do anything else when I was doing quality. I didn't invest, I didn't sit on boards.
I didn't.
By real estate, I was literally like Qualtrics for twenty years heads down. When I when we say
Like intense focus.
It was like everything else was No side hustles. No side hustles.
No angel investing. No. Yeah. Nothing. And like it probably twenty two years. Yeah. Like it was like nothing.
Except for hoops.
I would go down to Summer League and sit there with Ainge and he like he was cool enough to let me like I mean he's running the Celtics and it was like
I could see your thinking like I wanted to get into this. No, it just happened. I was like, I am so intrigued by this.
I love the NBA. I love hoops.
Like
I love the business side of it and
You know
When we did sell, like my brother was like, What what are you gonna do? And I was like, I'm gonna
I'm gonna go be part of the NBA.
You know, with SAP I
I'd gotten to know Adam.
I was working on a tech council for the NBA.
And through SAP and Bill McDermott it connected us and
You know, he was like, Hey and I I let him know. I was like I'm
I'm gonna be part of this one way or another.
Like
And he was like, Oh, we'd love it like
Too bad Utah's not for sale.
You know, he called me and was like, Hey, you know
And someone else. I got here Minnesota's for sale and so I went down that entire road and
That story's pretty famous where Ash was like
We're jazz fans.
W well do we have to give up our season tickets at the jazz? I'd say Yeah, that's probably part of it. Right
Yeah, it was like
No, we grew up jazz fans and I was like oh yeah, like
And you just thought the Jazz would not come up for sale. The Miller family wasn't and like I had approached try, yeah. Yeah, I had approached uh Gail Miller who it
Yeah, Larry and
And Gail had purchased it for years and
They owned it for thirty, thirty five years. It was in a legacy trust for the family that could never be sold and
Oh, like it literally could never be solved. It was the way it was. It was a pretty locked door.
At least that's what we thought.
Right. And
You got a jazz hat on, so something changed. What happened? Yeah, I think I think
You know, I had approached her and the answer was no and then. No, about six months later saying, Hey
After we turn down Minnesota saying, Are you still interested? I was like, Are you serious?
Um yes, we're in.
Right.
And how'd you negotiate the value or how'd you how'd you figure it out?
It was literally a meeting where
It was like well.
Are you serious make us an offer?
And
We pulled up the Forbes valuation on the phone and I said, Well, how's this?'Cause I didn't seem to know this team of science and economists. This was like a year before all this madness. And
I was like, does that work?
It seems fair.
Right.
Like to her credit, like
And it wasn't a big auction or anything in that case. It was a direct notes. Yeah.
I think she had sat across the court from Ashley and I.
She knew what we were about.
She.
She cared about it being in Utah.
And
That was important.
They had had thirty five years. I think they bought it for twenty two million dollars. Right.
And
Did you buy one point?
Six? Yeah, one point six.
And it was like okay.
I've got a
This looks like about as clean as it could get. Right. I mean it's not all gold when you're running an auction. So how does it work? You're not buying the whole thing. So that's the franchise value, you're buying a part like a majority stake. Yeah.
You just gotta send a wire one day? Like how does this actually go down? I mean pretty much I mean we did yeah, like
Yeah, that's pretty much how it works. Like a car. You gotta you gotta go figure it out,'cause you can't put a lot of debt on these and
You know, my philosophy was don't bling. These chants there's thirty of these things in the world.
Just go. Right.
And
You know, Ash and I had a lot of conversation about like why.
Life's pretty good at this point.
Why are we literally going, hey
We're on this twenty year journey of sacrifice and travel and all of this.
And literally grinding at a level that
Most people could never comprehend.
Founders all the time.
Like
When I when we're all in, it's it's like a different level and then
And then going and signing up for
a level where there's a lot of pressure, there's a lot of responsibility. Everything's public.
And
You're taking the hopes and dreams of a whole nation here.
And putting them on your shoulders to go do something. And
And you're also impacting the children, like
Yeah, kids
Our kids like Equal Trix was relatively
Normal life. Right.
On paper like a lot more than an NBA team. The NBA team is very different.
Right. And so you didn't take it lightly.
No.
And
You know, there was a lot of personal discussions about what's this for? Is this for ego, is this for us, is this for helping Utah and
It really came down to like Utah.
I want to finish with a couple of rapid fire almost like
Life isms. This idea of the nine most important minutes of the day.
What are the nine most important minutes of the day?
When your kids wake up.
When they get home from school and when they go
To bed.
Three three three.
You just show up for those.
You just try to hit one.
Right. I mean a lot of times like you're planning a trip, you're doing this, and like you have an option to like
B.
At one of those. Right.
And so
I think that as you schedule, as you plan, as you optimize
Those are important moments. Not all three, maybe, but
Like if I can schedule a call, I'm not doing it in one of those moments.
Right.
You know, if you don't know what to do, if you don't know what you want to do.
Go figure out what you don't want to do. Use the use the inversion, use the contrast. Yep.
Uh w w what's that? Unpack that a little bit.
I just
You know
We teach a class at
At BYU. We teach a business school class and
You know, it's every fall.
And it's uh it's around leadership and decision making and watching all these kids. It's like this is what I wanna go do.
I didn't know what I wanted to do.
And I think that's why Qualtrics worked.
Because if I had a picture in my head of what it's supposed to look like, I don't think I would have done Qualteric.
I would have been so focused on that.
the opportunity or Zuckerberg could have been sitting next to you starting a business and you're like you didn't even see it. And you're like kicking yourself. Right.
But what I did know is there was some attributes.
that I believed in.
I knew I wanted to be able to have a job where the sky was a limit. My age wasn't gonna limit me.
to what my potential could be.
I didn't want to be like, Well, when you're twenty two, you can make up to eighty thousand dollars a year and you're twenty four, you get to one twenty. I didn't want to be capped.
I wanna be like if I work harder than everyone else
I'm more creative. My ideas hit.
Like they can go somewhere.
Right.
I knew I wanted to be like in leadership and I could lead.
Right.
I knew I wanted to see a lot of businesses very quickly.
Lotta industries. I wanted to know the world and know every industry.
Okay.
I wanted something that
Was kind of
Not old school.
And so
Like when I started looking at opportunities, like
I never thought enterprise software, but I was like, okay.
I look at it and I kinda put the opportunity right here and I'm like, Wait.
Sky's the limit.
I can be a founder.
I can create
I'm not really capped.
It's a new school. It's a new part of technology. It can go for a long time.
Like
I'm not getting
Get the legs pulled out from under me if I start doing well.
And like
I think those attributes is where
I would advise kids.
And younger people or entrepreneurs to say, Okay
Don't be so caught up on what this looks like.
See if it fits and you'll be blown away that it's like
Oh.
The auto industry actually works really well for me. Right. Never would have thought about that.
And
That's all that really matters. And so
I think that's kinda how
We look
You know, and now I've got a lot more roles and things that I care about.
But
It has to fit into that. You ask like what do we do? Does it fit?
And
You know, you kinda go through that rubric.
It's great.
Well listen, man, thank you for doing this. I appreciate that. Thanks for coming out to Utah.
Oh I mean it's great out here. I love it. Let's go. All right, man. Thank you so much.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to
I'm putting my law in it like my days off On the roadless travel, never looking back
Hey, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about a podcast that you could check out. It is called The Science of Scaling by Mark Robers. He was the founding CRO of HubSpot, and he's a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School. The guy smart. And he sits down every week with
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