Qualtrics Seven Year Focus

Shaan shares a story about the founder of Qualtrics and his long-term focus strategy.

"We had the founder of Qualtrics on. He said he has a huge sign in his home office that just says 'Tune out the noise, play the long game.'

He told us, 'Dude, for seven years nobody cared about what we were doing. We were single-mindedly focused on getting 150 universities to use our thing because we knew that was super important. If we did that, we had a real business. And it took us time, but we just stayed scrappy, we stayed focused, and we just did that for years before we ever got any press, any social media, any anything.'

That's who you don't want to compete against - somebody who can do that. Because they're building this giant foundation of what they're trying to do. It doesn't mean go slow, it just means don't get fooled into thinking that you need to quickly sprint and just grab some revenue number out of thin air as what success looks like. Success is this sort of durability over time."