Which are your favorite Ryan Smith quotes?
Ryan Smith is an American businessman and entrepreneur. He is the owner of the NBA’s Utah Jazz. His company ‘Qualtrics’ was founded in 2002 and it remains powerful to this day.
Smith is a billionaire who has successfully built his own company from zero to one of the biggest companies on earth. In addition to his success, he was featured in the Fortune magazine ’40 Under 40′ list.
Here’s a collection of the most motivational Ryan Smith quotes:
50 Meaningful Ryan Smith Quotes
1. “You can be anything you want to be, but you’re going to have to go do it.” – Ryan Smith
2. “I read a lot. I read a lot about leaders, not only in tech but outside of tech.” – Ryan Smith
3. “We want to find individuals who align with that, who will add value to the company in whatever role they’re in. Part of that is the disposition to be willing to do whatever it’s going to take because we feel that if we win as a team, we’re going to win together.” – Ryan Smith
4. “I heard a recent estimate that there is more than a trillion dollars worth of market value trapped in old school software companies that are technically, culturally, and financially incapable of making the transition to the world of tomorrow.” – Ryan Smith
5. “It’s more around the fact that everyone needs to know where we are going and how we are going to get there.” – Ryan Smith
6. “Many people told us we wouldn’t be able to hire the right talent, as we aren’t headquartered in Silicon Valley.” – Ryan Smith
7. “I was dreaming every single day I sat in that basement for five years.” – Ryan Smith
8. “Try to have experiences together and learn together to avoid fighting for priorities and budget and all the ‘sh*t.’ If there is nothing but a virtual bond between people it will be easily disrupted.” – Ryan Smith
9. “The number one challenge for us is finding the right talent. The worst thing you can do is lower the bar because you think the local conditions don’t match. I learned this over and over when hiring at Google.” – Ryan Smith
10th of 50 Ryan Smith
10. “You can either write your own story or have someone write it for you. That’s the best piece of advice I’ve been given.” – Ryan Smith
11. “We had to make a decision: are we going to keep running this like a homegrown Utah company, or are we all in to build a multibillion-dollar company? And we just said, ‘Let’s go.’ I had been planning for months to take my software company, Qualtrics, public. Four days before the IPO, I sold it instead for eight billion.” – Ryan Smith
12. “We just said, ‘Hey, there’s no rules. There’s no playbook.” – Ryan Smith
13. “Don’t be impatient, and hard work will get you there. If you stay the course, then it’s amazing what execution can actually do.” – Ryan Smith
14. “It took about 10 years before the word ‘culture’ even came up but when it did we started to focus on it.” – Ryan Smith
15. “The most successful organizations will make decisions based on data.” – Ryan Smith
16. “We’re not perfect, and we make mistakes.” – Ryan Smith
17. “You don’t lower the bar; you just look harder. All countries have great people.” – Ryan Smith
18. “Working with customers excites me the most.” – Ryan Smith
19. “We have 8,000 brands all over the world, and it’s amazing to see the things people are doing. Companies used to use our platform to solve little problems, but now we’re mission-critical to their business. Whether it’s watching a multibillion-dollar apparel brand test all their products before they go live or helping a Fortune 50 company get groundbreaking insights into their customer base, or even seeing small startups doing super innovating things, it’s almost impossible not to be excited.” – Ryan Smith
20th of 50 Ryan Smith
20. “We want everyone to understand our objectives and make that available to everyone as we’re evolving, so people aren’t guessing and they’re not internally focused.” – Ryan Smith
21. “Qualtrics is a technology company. While we may be a threat to some suppliers, we are a great partner for those that are technology-driven.” – Ryan Smith
22. “We know we’ll make some mistakes, but we don’t want to make the same ones others have made.” – Ryan Smith
23. “We want to be transparent because we want to encourage our people to have all the information to keep them focused on what really matters: our objectives and how they’re going to contribute. When everyone’s rowing together toward the same objective, it’s extremely powerful.” – Ryan Smith
24. “People can deal with change better than uncertainty.” – Ryan Smith
25. “Suppliers had better be partnering with the right technology.” – Ryan Smith
26. “My dream pitch is to folks that can actually change the world.” – Ryan Smith
27. “There’s challenges and opportunities that are going to open up, where we want some of the brightest minds around us.” – Ryan Smith
28. “When you build a company to keep, or you build a company with a long-term vision, and you’re profitable, and you bootstrap, you’re going to get a lot of offers. Those are going to continue to come. I think that’s part of it.” – Ryan Smith
29. “I’m looking to see if someone’s a ‘gamer.’ That’s what I call it. I want to know the hardest thing they’ve ever done. I’m trying to figure out because when the ship’s going well, everyone’s good. But when obstacles come up, we’ve got to sit back and rethink, how are we going to navigate these? Will some people want to jump off the ship? Or are they going to be a gamer and want to come in, roll up their sleeves and say, ‘Hey, this is part of it.” – Ryan Smith
30th of 50 Ryan Smith
30. “On the venture side, I’ve been fortunate. I think I have pitched to everyone I ever dreamed of pitching to.” – Ryan Smith
31. “Companies should compete on the experiences they provide by balancing the act of wowing customers, yet not being afraid to mess up through experimentation and innovating.” – Ryan Smith
32. “Aside from the money, I think we’re doing something great. We’re changing the way people do research, and we’re changing the way that data’s being collected and digested and turned into insights within the organization.” – Ryan Smith
33. “At the core of scrappiness, there is an obligation to be creative, to do something no one else believes is possible.” – Ryan Smith
34. “If you think about moments where you feel a little proud, there is always a bit of adversity there. All of you are working on something… what story will you be able to tell after this?” – Ryan Smith
35. “We have built great partnerships with innovative firms who are betting on tech for the future.” – Ryan Smith
36. “My answer to customer satisfaction is speed and quality of response when things do go bad, and this comes down to the staff on the ground.” – Ryan Smith
37. “I believe most companies fail because they’re not focused. They either get focused on other things in the market that aren’t important, so they’re thrashing around without a clear objective, or they’re focused internally on things like politics and bureaucracy.” – Ryan Smith
38. “As an entrepreneur, your role is to figure things out and make them happen.” – Ryan Smith
39. “A lot of entrepreneurs I talk about are trying to scale before they have a clear idea of where they’re going.” – Ryan Smith
40th of 50 Ryan Smith
40. “Trust your gut, learn to be scrappy, tune out the noise, and play the long game.” – Ryan Smith
41. “I think that there’s a balance there that needs to be looked at because once you’ve got a better idea you’ll be able to scale very quickly.” – Ryan Smith
42. “We’ve been extremely transparent, but not so that we can be cool. And it’s not about an open environment, because that’s not what makes a company transparent.” – Ryan Smith
43. “Hard work is a competitive advantage. Hard work pays off.” – Ryan Smith
44. “If your customer base knows your style and the way you communicate, it’s amazing how if you don’t establish this, then someone else will establish it for you.” – Ryan Smith
45. “Having employee morale high is just as important. If they aren’t engaged or lined up, or empathetic it makes the whole experience worse, and that is where you get into real trouble.” – Ryan Smith
46. “There is no recipe. It’s part of everyone’s objectives to figure out how to improve hiring, diversity, growth and turn them on their head.” – Ryan Smith
47. “We want to learn from the experiences of others how we can best execute.” – Ryan Smith
48. “With every hire you make, culture changes incrementally. ” – Ryan Smith
49. “You need to be able to jump in the trenches to help your customers and make it amazing by exceeding their expectations.” – Ryan Smith
50. “The challenge is… we really believe in this ‘nail it before you scale it’ philosophy.” – Ryan Smith
Summary
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