Taking Experience Management to the World
January 28, 2021 // 3min read
This is a special moment for Qualtrics, our employees, customers, and partners. Today, Qualtrics becomes a publicly traded company under the ticker symbol ‘XM.’ We’re grateful for everyone who has helped us reach this incredible milestone on our journey.
To our 3,500 employees, thank you for being customer obsessed and for being all in to get us to this milestone. We’re here because you show up and live our values every day: Transparent, All In, Customer Obsessed, One Team, and Scrappy (#TACOS).
To our more than 13,000 customers, thank you for putting your trust in Qualtrics to help you create breakthrough experiences, day in and day out. Our success is a testament of your success. And thank you to our partners, especially SAP, who are championing the role of experience in every business function and helping build the leading Experience Management ecosystem in the world.
In today’s hyper-connected world where all it takes to switch jobs or service providers is a few simple clicks, the experiences companies provide will determine whether they succeed or fail. That’s why we pioneered the Experience Management category to help companies design and continually improve the experiences they provide across four core experiences–customer, employee, product, and brand. Experience Management is the heartbeat of modern business and Qualtrics has never been more relevant.
We give companies a single platform where they can listen to their customers and take action on their feedback, drive employee engagement and productivity through better workplace experiences, build products people absolutely love, and create a bedrock of loyal followers at every touchpoint.
We couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to take Experience Management to the world.
We’ve had such an incredible journey since the company was started in a Utah basement nearly 20 years ago. While we celebrate today, we’re even more excited about our future. We’re just getting started, and we hope you’ll join us on the next phase of the Qualtrics journey!
Ryan Smith // Founder & Executive Chairman, Qualtrics
Ryan Smith is founder and executive chairman of Qualtrics, the leader in customer experience and creator of the experience management (XM) category. He has grown the company from a basement startup to one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the world, with 25 offices globally and more than 12,000 customers, including over 85 percent of the Fortune 100, and 99 of the top 100 business schools.
In the private market, Qualtrics raised $400M in funding from Accel, Sequoia, and Insight Venture Partners. Three days before the company was initially scheduled to go public, SAP announced its intent to acquire Qualtrics for $8B, which was the largest private enterprise software acquisition ever. In 2020, Qualtrics and SAP announced plans to take Qualtrics public as an independently operated company.
Ryan co-founded 5 For The Fight, the crowdfunding campaign to eradicate cancer by inviting everyone to give $5 for the fight against cancer by supporting groundbreaking cancer research. Ryan and his wife Ashley purchased the NBA’s Utah Jazz in 2020
Zig Serafin // Chief Executive Officer, Qualtrics
Zig Serafin is the Chief Executive Officer of Qualtrics. Zig joined Qualtrics as Chief Operating Officer in 2016 and was instrumental in the development and launch of the Qualtrics Experience Management Platform. Zig has led the rapid growth of Qualtrics to over 12,000 customers and was a leader in SAP’s 2019 acquisition of Qualtrics for $8B, the largest private enterprise software acquisition ever at the time.
Zig was previously Corporate Vice President at Microsoft and led its multi-billion dollar enterprise collaboration services business that became Microsoft Teams.
In his 17-year career at Microsoft, Zig served as Corporate Vice President of program management and design for Microsoft’s services in anticipatory computing, speech/audio/vision processing, location/language understanding, and geospatial data, leading the teams that developed Microsoft’s artificial intelligence platform, Cortana. Prior to that, Zig was President and General Manager of Microsoft’s Tellme Networks.