The tech industry’s newest billionaires are a pair of brothers who started a software company in their parents' basement in Utah. Now Ryan and Jared Smith are selling Qualtrics International Inc. to European giant SAP for $8 billion — and they’ll get to keep running the business.
Ryan, 40, is the chief executive and public face of a startup that — unusually — resisted taking venture money for over a decade before finally agreeing to deals with Accel and Sequoia Capital. Last valued at $2.5 billion, Qualtrics makes customer-survey software used by the likes of Microsoft and General Electric, helping boost its revenue more than eight-fold over the past seven years.