SAN FRANCISCO: The tech industry’s newest billionaires are a pair of brothers who started a software company in their parents’ basement in Utah. Now Ryan and Jared Smith are selling Qualtrics International Inc to European giant SAP SE for US$8bil – and they’ll get to keep running the business.
Ryan, 40, is the chief executive and public face of a startup that – unusually – resisted taking venture money for over a decade before finally agreeing to deals with Accel and Sequoia Capital. Last valued at US$2.5bil, Qualtrics makes customer-survey software used by the likes of Microsoft Corp. to General Electric Co, helping boost its revenue more than eight-fold over the past seven years.
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