Overcoming Success Disasters with Ryan Smith, Co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics

The Journey

A huge part of growing a business is understanding what can scale and what can’t.

What will HR, sales, marketing, customer experience, employee experience, or even the foundational business model all look like as the company grows?

The truth is that none of these systems will look exactly how they did when you started. It could be like comparing apples to oranges when you put Iteration 10 up against Iteration 1.

Scale requires doing things that don’t scale and then pivoting.

“Our journey is full of these experiences where we legitimately have survived off major pivots and doing things differently at every point of scale,” shares Ryan Smith.

Ryan is the co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics, a company that he started in his basement with his dad nearly 18 years ago.

During those years, Ryan has faced a number of what he calls ‘success disasters’ – moments when something so great happens that it breaks your current system.

And that’s the problem with scale – if you aren’t thoughtful, it’s the very things that are supposed to grow your business that may very well destroy it.

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