Qualtrics

Ryan Smith and his co-founders built Qualtrics from 2002, creating the 'experience management' category. SAP acquired it in November 2018 for $8 billion—three days before Qualtrics' scheduled IPO. SAP took it public anyway in January 2021 at $41.85 per share, raising $1.2 billion and valuing the company at $12.6 billion fully diluted. Then, in March 2023, Silver Lake, CPP Investments, and Smith bought it back for $12.5 billion, taking Qualtrics private again. Three ownership transitions in five years.

This phase-shifting between public and private, integrated and independent, reveals how organizations adapt to changing resource environments. When SAP acquired Qualtrics in 2018, the logic was ecosystem expansion: SAP's operational data (what customers do) combined with Qualtrics' experience data (what customers feel) would create comprehensive insights. The 2021 IPO was meant to provide Qualtrics capital market access while maintaining SAP strategic alignment.

But by 2023, the calculus shifted. Taking Qualtrics private gave management flexibility to make long-term investments without quarterly earnings pressures. Silver Lake's $12.5 billion acquisition—the firm's largest investment in its 25-year history—bet that private ownership would unlock value that public markets weren't pricing in. Smith, as co-founder and co-investor, maintained continuity through the transitions.

The business fundamentals remained strong throughout the ownership changes. Qualtrics serves 18,750+ organizations as of 2025, positioning itself as the leader in experience management software. The platform captures feedback across customer, employee, product, and brand interactions, then uses AI to identify patterns and recommend actions. This is network effects at data scale: each additional customer improves the AI's pattern recognition, which improves recommendations for all customers.

What makes Qualtrics notable isn't just the rapid ownership transitions—it's that the product and customer base remained stable while the capital structure shifted. The company didn't fragment during the SAP spinoff or the Silver Lake take-private. The organizational membrane stayed intact even as the surrounding ownership environment changed dramatically. This is homeostasis: maintaining internal stability despite external volatility. Whether that stability persists depends on whether Silver Lake's thesis proves correct—that experience management represents a durable category with defensible economics, not just a 2010s-era SaaS story that inflated during the zero-interest-rate environment.