Explain how each venture capital investment was conducted, and what the revenue/return on the investment was.

Qualtrics explosive $8B exit was significant for the company, which remained free of venture funding for over a decade.

It is also one of the largest VC-backed enterprise software acquisitions in history (in terms of first-time exits), edging out Microsofts $7.5B acquisition of GitHub in October 2018.

The Utah-based customer survey software company was started by CEO and co-founder Ryan Smith and his father Dr. Scott Smith (a university professor) in 2002. The startup initially focused on selling to academics, beginning with business schools.

The father and son duo worked out of their family basement, running operations, prospecting, and building the company from the ground up. Nearly 2 years later, they sought the technical help of the eldest Smith son Jared, who initially described the code as unscalable junk. Despite his skepticism, Jared helped them rewrite the program before heading off to work on product at Google. He later returned to Qualtrics.

The company was known for rejecting investment offers, and remained bootstrapped for over a decade. In 2012, Ryan turned down a $500M offer for the business, which at the time was doing $50M in revenue.

But eventually, Ryan decided he wanted a board of people who had grown huge tech companies. In that same year, and after some disagreement with Jared, the company finally agreed to raise a $70M Series A from Sequoia Capital and Accel, each of which went on to participate in the next two and final funding rounds.

Qualtrics continued to grow, and prior to its acquisition by SAP, had filed its S-1 and planned to raise as much as $495M as part of its upcoming IPO. SAP CEO Bill McDermott stepped in with an $8B cash offer, and the deal is expected to close in early 2019.

SAPs acquisition of Qualtrics is the second-largest in the companys history, behind its $8.3B purchase of expense management platform Concur.

Notably, Qualtrics built itself from the ground up, decided against selling early, and took on capital later in its life and now the company is looking at huge returns.