Bulletin for August 3-9, 2012

Scott Smith (center) with sons Jared (left) and Ryan.

Upcoming Provo Rotary Luncheon Programs and Events

August 9: Jaron Hansen, BYU Professor of Chemistry, speaking about his project to clean Provo's waste water bio-gas into usable methane.

16 August: Major General Peter S. Cooke, former Utah Director of Economic Development, small business owner, candidate for Utah Governor. 

23 August: NO LUNCHEON MEETING

Annual summer barbecue at Jolley's Ranch in Hobblecreek Canyon

30 August: Annual visit from Utah Rotary District Governor Jerry Summerhays

6 September: Val Hale, new president of the Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce

12 September (WEDNESDAY): Annual club golf party at Wasatch Mountain State Park
13 September: NO luncheon meeting today at Riverside

27 September: Quent Bates, fellow Provo Rotarian and internationally celebrated elevator consultant

Report of Provo Rotary Luncheon Meeting August 2, 2012

Today's meeting was held at Riverside Country Club. Past-president Steve Densley conducted with Ron Roberts and Jill Moon providing the music. An invocation was offered by Scott Miller.

August birthdays were celebrated for Nathan Beesley, Rick Hood, Greg Hudnall, Jeff Mathews, Ruth Riley, David Rogers and Cecil Samuelson.

Remember the upcoming Rotary parties:

     August 23 annual summer adult party at Jolley's Ranch in Hobblecreek Canyon

     September 12 annual golf party at Wasatch Mountain State Park

Steve Sabins introduced his daughter Julie who attended with him today.

Steve Densley announced that a farewell reception will be held for him as he resigns after thirty years as President of the Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce on August 15 from 3-6 p.m. on the 8th floor of the Zions Bank building in downtown Provo. This event will also welcome the new chamber president, Val Hale.

Greg Hudnall served as sergeant asking trivia questions about the Olympics in London.

Don Jarvis introduced today's speaker, our own Provo Rotarian Scott Smith, founder and co-president of Qualtrics. Scott is a professor emeritus at BYU and was a Fulbright Scholar.

Qualtrics is one of Provo's all-time Cinderella stories. The business began in the attic and basement of Scott's home in Grandview with him, two sons and a former missionary companion of one son named Stuart Orgill.

The core product is to collect data from companies in the form of surveys then analyze that data to help the organization identify areas needed for change. This falls in the category of what the industry terms "Big Data" with billions of bits of data being stored and analyzed in proprietary server "clouds" around the world.

The original goal was to contract with 100 universities with the notion that university students would eventually introduce the Qualtrics product to their new employers after graduation. Now with more than a decade in business they sell to 480 universities and more than half of all Fortune 500 companies. There are more than 4,000 Qualtrics customers in seventy-five countries. Forbes magazine featured them in a June 2012 cover article with the headline: Tech's Best Kept Secret is in Utah.

After outgrowing the basement they moved in 2006 to offices in the building across from Riverside Country Club and are now at home in the former Dynix building in Riverwoods with more than 200 employees in what Scott terms a very social atmosphere with "radical transparency." Every employee can see on the computer what every other employee is doing.

The company is NOT FOR SALE. The intent is to keep ownership and control of  the company in the family with investments from two reputable venture capital firms ACCEL and Sequoia Capital. They recently turned down an offer of $500 million to sell the company.

From the Qualtrics website: It just happened. We’d been doing research for years when the Internet rolled around. We couldn’t find a decent online solution…so we just built one.

     It was the 1990s and the Internet was at the center of everything. We never intended for others to use our research tools – they were ugly and complicated and it took a Ph.D. in statistics to understand them. But Scott, our founder, knew their value and began sharing them with his friends. Before long the biggest names in market research were requesting access to the system to do their own studies.
    For a long time, the only people with access to Qualtrics were our closest friends and a bunch of Scott’s MBA students. It was our research clients who pushed us to open up the system…and gave us the feedback needed to make it both the easiest to use and most sophisticated research suite on the market.
    Over a hundred million surveys later it’s nice to look back and say…‘the rest is history.’