Happy Market Research Podcast

Ep. 210 – Kylan Lundeen – How Qualtrics Used Culture to Create an $8 Billion Outcome

Episode Summary

Episode Notes

My guest today is Kylan Lundeen, Head of Marketing at Qualtrics. Qualtrics was founded in 2002 and is a subscription software for collecting and analyzing data for market research, customer satisfaction and loyalty, product and concept testing, employee evaluations and website feedback.
On November 11, 2018 it was announced that Qualtrics would be acquired by SAP. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2019.
Prior to joining Qualtrics in 2013, Kylan worked in Turnaround & Restructuring Services at DVC while getting his MBA at Stanford.
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[00:00]

This is episode 201 of the Happy Market Research Podcast. I have the pleasure of chatting with Kylan Lundeen, Head of Marketing for Qualtrics. But first a word from our sponsor.

[00:13]

This episode is brought to you by G3 Translate. The G3 Translate team offers unparalleled expertise in foreign language translations for market researchers and insight professionals across the globe. Not only do they speak hundreds of languages, they are fluent in market research. For more information, please visit them at G3Translate.com.

[00:40]

Hi. I’m Jamin Brazil, and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast. My guest today is Kylan Lundeen, CMO at Qualtrics. Qualtrics was founded in 2002 and is a subscription software for collecting and analyzing consumer data. On November 11, 2018, it was announced that Qualtrics would be acquired by SAP; the acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2019. Prior to joining Qualtrics in 2013, Kylan worked in turnaround and restructuring services at DVC while getting his MBA at Stanford University. Kylan, thanks very much for joining me on the Happy Market Research Podcast. I’ve been watching you guys very closely, of course, given my background at Decipher. I remember actually in 2002 when I saw you guys pop, I was in a meeting at Intuit. Intuit brought up that they had heard about you guys, and you had reached out. And I’m like, “Oh, that really interesting.” So I started to do some digging. Based out of Utah, kind of an unusual location for a technology company in those days. Subsequently, the company just ramped. I felt like every single year, it was almost like a new phoenix.

[01:51]

Yeah, it was interesting because it’s funny as people look back now it’s seems real intuitive. You look at the path and it seems [Jamie laughs]... And they’re like, “Of course.” When I joined the company out of business school, it was still very much an academic research tool. And I say “tool” very sort of specifically. And the very soon thereafter, we kind of committed to an academic research platform. Then we went into a corporate research platform. Then we went into sort of like, generally speaking, insight platform because it was sort of beyond this kind of market research that people were doing. And then we moved into experience management. And again, looking back, all those steps see really logical, but they were terrifying at the time. Each of one those felt like we were really taking a risk. Where we had core audience that was really important to us and that we wanted to continue to sort of prioritize and put at the center of everything. But we needed to expand sort of the messaging and our product offering to include different people, which means the messaging gets a little bit diluted to that specific audience at first. So every time it felt really risky, and, I’ll be honest, when I first met Ryan... He and I had a chance encounter in Palo Alto. He was out there closing the first round of financing from Sequoia and Accel and we had breakfast together. And there were two things...

[03:10]

And what year is that?

[03:12]

This is 2012. So, in 2012, I had breakfast with Ryan Smith. Again,