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Interviewing Ryan Smith was a major guilty pleasure for me. I first met Ryan at school in Provo Utah. We used to play massive networked Halo team games at least weekly and multiple times per week during finals (yeah grades were not so good). When I first met him he was already working on Qualtrics with his dad.
Provo, a town of just over 100,000 people is a buzz with talk about Qualtrics. They're sucking in talent and growing like crazy. Watch this edition of Startup Grind Utah when we talk through how they grew from doing $100K per month in the basement, to a company with 300 people and $70MM in funding.
For the past 15 years Derek has been building communities. He is the co-founder/CEO of Bevy, a SaaS product that helps companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Google, Snowflake, and Adobe build virtual and in-person communities. Bevy has raised $60M from Accel, Upfront Ventures, and others. He co-founded Startup Grind, a community of 600 Chapters in 125 countries educating, inspiring, and connecting startup people. Since 2012 Startup Grind has hosted 20,000 events. In 2010 he co-founded Commonred which was acquired by Income.com. Derek also previously worked as a product manager at Electronic Arts. He currently lives in Palo Alto CA with his wife and four children.
