50 Meaningful Ryan Smith Quotes

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

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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

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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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