Qualtrics, an online survey research platform, is listed as tops among likely candidates to go public this year. But is it really going to file and, if so, how close is it to doing that?
I’m betting yes and very soon based on some interesting answers in a recent interview with founder Ryan Smith (see video below).
For the last couple of years, reporters have been asking Smith if he’s about to IPO. Usually, Smith gives some sort of answer about how his company already runs like it’s public, brushing off any notion of such an event — I’ve personally had this conversation with Smith several times, including in this onstage interview from 2016.
But the Provo, Utah-based company seems more ready this year than it ever has, hiring key executives like Microsoft’s Zig Serafin as its COO and nearly doubling its employee base in the last two years, to more than 1,300 people. Qualtrics now serves 8,500 enterprise customers, including more than 65 percent of Fortune 500 companies. It has also expanded operations outside of Utah, to 10 different offices globally, including Seattle, Dallas, Washington, D.C. and even Dublin, Ireland and parts of Australia.
But no one in Silicon Valley was interested in Utah tech when Qualtrics launched in 2002. The company, like so many of the now unicorn-status startups in Utah, started out as a bootstrapped business and simply had to be a profitable operation from the beginning.
But nearly a decade later all that changed when the company hit $50 million a year in revenue, with…